Archive for August 2019

My friend and colleague Mindy Moretti has been collecting election news stories for electionline.org for a long time – and over the years, she’s noticed one kind of story that seems to pop up almost every Election Day: a car crashing into a polling place.

Today, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission will host a forum on election security focusing on the role of software updates in protecting the nation’s election systems.

Thanks to a law enacted earlier this year, starting in October Montana UOCAVA voters with a federal Common Access Card (CAC) will be able to use it to digitally sign registration and voting transactions.

The State of Wisconsin is considering using some of its federal cybersecurity funds to loan updated computers to municipalities after an expert warned that the state could be vulnerable because many localities are facing issues with outdated Windows boxes.

The Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) recently released its 2018 Report to Congress, and as part of that release has produced a short piece entitled “The State of the Military Voter” using data from the report to demonstrate the gains that have been made for servicemembers and their families in years since the passage of the MOVE Act of 2009.

Michigan’s Secretary of State and several local clerks are seeking new legislation to permit an earlier start on absentee ballot tabulation in in order to have more time to manage what’s expected to be a significant increase in the number of voters casting such ballots.

A regular theme of this blog is that “there is no small stuff in elections” – and the latest example comes from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, where a missing thumb drive has turned a close state Senate race upside down. It’s the kind of issues election officials can (and should) worry about on Election Night and afterwards.

VoteWA, Washington State’s new statewide voter registration system, which had been the source of concern by local election officials, had a smooth rollout yesterday as the state held its 2019 primary election.

After years of an adversarial relationship between election officials and information security experts, the two sides are seeing the value in working together in the face of outside threats and internal challenges – including a growing number of election officials who are traveling to this week’s DEFCON hacking conference in Las Vegas.

Last Thursday, Democracy Fund senior advisor and “postal whisperer” Tammy Patrick had a crucially important piece in electionlineWeekly about an issue many in the election community may have missed – but should be watching closely: a potential U.S. withdrawal from the Universal Postal Union.