12 Cyber Threats That Could Wreak Havoc on the Election

Wednesday night, at a brief, hastily arranged press conference at FBI headquarters, four top US national security officials announced solemnly that they had evidence that two foreign adversaries, Iran and Russia, had obtained US voter data and appeared to be trying to spread disinformation about the election.

It was the latest—and most troubling—episode in a week that has seen near-daily events set off potential alarms about how the US will hold up on and approaching Election Day. In the final hours last Tuesday before the voter registration deadline in Virginia, an accidentally cut fiber-optic cable knocked out access to the state registration portal. The next morning, the New York Post published an odd, inconsistent, and poorly sourced story about Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that reeked of a ham-handed information operation. A day later came an extended outage of Twitter. Neither the Virginia cable cutting nor the Twitter outage was nefarious, though US officials continue to argue over the origins of the Burisma leaks

.This week, voters in states like Alaska and Florida began reporting threatening emails, purportedly from the white supremacist group Proud Boys, saying that the targeted Democratic voters should support Donald Trump—or else. National security officials soon confirmed that the emails appeared to originate with Iran—a revelation that led to Wednesday’s press conference.

FBI director Christopher Wray used the event to highlight how united and focused the nation’s security leadership is on protecting the election. “We are not going to let our guard down,” Wray said. Yet the emails and other episodes suggest that the presidential election is sure to be filled with more unexpected surprises and tense moments—and served as reminders of the myriad ways that the election could go wrong in the remaining weeks, days, and hours of the campaign.

Interviews and conversations with numerous election, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel over the last year have highlighted a dozen specific scenarios that particularly worry them as Election Day nears. The concerns roughly break down into two categories: technical attacks on data or access and online information operations.

Voting by mail in New York? Avoid these mistakes to ensure your vote counts

LOHUD: "Your absentee ballot will come with a return envelope, a security envelope and the ballot itself.

The instructions with your ballot will tell you to do the following, according to the state Board of Elections:

  • Complete your ballot by filling in the bubble of your candidate of choice in each election. Make sure to pay attention to the instructions for each individual race on your ballot.

  • Fold the completed ballot and put it in the security envelope. (The security envelope is the one with a place for your signature.)

  • Sign and date the security envelope in the space designated for the voter's signature. (If you didn't require assistance to complete your ballot, you can ignore the other signature slot.)

  • Seal the security envelope. (This is important!)

  • Put the security envelope in the return envelope, which is the one that is addressed to your local board of elections. The return envelope should also be marked "Official Election Mail."

  • Seal the return envelope.

  • Return your ballot in the envelopes by mailing it in — make sure you apply a stamp! — or bringing it in person to your county board of elections office, an early voting site or an Election Day poll site.

Meet the deadlines”

Amid fears of Election Day chaos, one county prepares for anxious days after the vote

Washington Post: "the anxiety level is through the roof…..There’s fear of neighbors: On Election Day, self-appointed guardians armed with assault weapons plan to take up positions outside local polling places. There’s fear of outsiders: A Ku Klux Klan group from out of state recently dropped racist fliers on the driveways of some homes with Biden signs on the lawns. And there’s fear of what’s coming Nov. 3: The county sheriff doesn’t have nearly enough deputies to keep eyes on all 149 polls....election officials in 3,141 counties must tally local ballots, a process that could be unusually lengthy this year, creating an opportunity for those who want to question or alter the outcome.”

The Election That Could Break America

The Atlantic: The Election That Could Break America

If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?

Key Points:

"Legal teams on both sides are planning for simultaneous litigation, on the scale of Florida during the 2000 election, in multiple battleground states...Rival slates of electors could hold mirror-image meetings in Harris­burg, Lansing, Tallahassee, or Phoenix, casting the same electoral votes on opposite sides. ...This would be a genuine constitutional crisis, the first but not the last of the Interregnum. “Then we get thrown into a world where anything could happen,” Norm Ornstein says.

...Sixty-four days have passed since the election. Stalemate reigns. Two weeks remain until Inauguration Day...foley, who foresaw this impasse, knows of no solution. He cannot tell you how we avoid it under current law, or how it ends. It is not so much, at this point, a question of law. It is a question of power. Trump has possession of the White House. How far will he push boundaries to keep it, and who will push back? It is the same question the president has posed since the day he took office….

"The worst case for an orderly count is also considered by some election modelers the likeliest: that Trump will jump ahead on Election Night, based on in-person returns, but his lead will slowly give way to a Biden victory as mail-in votes are tabulated. ...The turbulence of that interval, fed by street protests, social media, and Trump’s desperate struggles to lock in his lead, can only be imagined. “Any scenario that you come up with will not be as weird as the reality of it,” the Trump legal adviser said….
"Suppose that caravans of Trump supporters, adorned in Second Amendment accessories, converge on big-city polling places on Election Day. They have come, they say, to investigate reports on social media of voter fraud. Counter­protesters arrive, fistfights break out, shots are fired, and voters flee or cannot reach the polls….

"Right now, the best we can do is an ad hoc defense of democracy. Begin by rejecting the temptation to think that this election will carry on as elections usually do. Something far out of the norm is likely to happen. Probably more than one thing. Expecting other­wise will dull our reflexes. It will lull us into spurious hope that Trump is tractable to forces that constrain normal incumbents.

If you are a voter, think about voting in person after all.

How safe are your election ballots? Here's what you need to know

"In New York, a legal settlement this year between the state Board of Elections and the League of Women Voters requires counties to allow voters to fix certain mistakes before ballots are counted. "If there's an issue with your signature or you didn't seal your inner envelope or if you forgot to sign, those are all now curable issues in New York state," said Jennifer Wilson, deputy director of the League of Women Voters' New York chapter....In New York, each county handles the counting of absentees on their own, but days after Election Day."

Consider this fun scenario…

"Consider this fun scenario……PA's GOP legislature will agree with Trump, of course, and because we can't know if the Philly vote count is any way accurate, they move to award PA's electoral votes to Trump.”

[ “BMD”s" discussed here are ballot marking devices like the Dominion ICE that Westchester just purchased and the Expressvote XL that the NYS Board of Elections is in the process of certifying. NYS’s own expert reported that the ICE was “low probability, high impact” but they certified itn anyway. And Westchester bought it anyway. It’s only “low probablitly", what could go wrong? Do we all just cross our fingers? Allegra Dengler]

From NYDLC: How to save democracy? A task for every comfort zone...

This advice from the New York Democratic Lawyers Council:

We are really in the thick of it now, right?

It's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work to do, and this year adds another layer to the complex question of, "How best to help?," in the form of, adhering to the health, safety, and social distancing regimen that is best for each of us.

If it all has you stressed out - this is the email you've been waiting for!

This is my top-line report about THE most important thing you can be doing to protect voters, save democracy, and elect democrats up-and-down the ballot - from any level of social distance!

What to do...

Demand Respect for Results

Albany Times Union
October 5, 2020

By Jerry H. Goldfeder and Lincoln A. Mitchell

…"Despite increasingly provocative rhetoric from the president, we hope our historical traditions will carry the day. Unfortunately, we may have to guarantee their continuation through action beyond voting - to peaceably assemble throughout the country, in all state capitals and major cities, with a simple, yet profound, message: support democracy, count the votes, respect the outcome.“

Read the article here.

America May Need International Intervention

New York Times: "Democrats must now win the popular vote by three, four or even five percentage points to be assured of winning the Electoral College. They must achieve that margin in the face of a strenuous Republican effort to ensure that many Democratic ballots are not counted. And even if they overcome both of those obstacles, Mr. Trump may still not concede….After observing America’s 2018 midterm elections, a team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe....concluded that, in critical ways, American elections “contravene ...international standards with regard to universal and equal suffrage.”

Voting lawsuits pile up across US as election approaches

AP "Measuring the anxiety over the November election is as simple as tallying the hundreds of voting-related lawsuits filed across the country in recent months. The cases concern the fundamentals of the American voting process, including how ballots are cast and counted, during an election made unique by the coronavirus pandemic and by a president who refuses to commit to accepting the results.”

[New York may not be a swing state, but NY election laws make NY ripe for election challenges and chaos due to lack of any automatic path to a 100% hand count. Legislators at the state and county level have done little to prepare for the chaos if this November election is close. This includes local races, such as Harckham-Astorino. Needed-automatic 100% handcount if an election is close. Without it, we are in the courts for weeks or months if the vote is close. Allegra Dengler]

Brooklyn Voters Receive Absentee Ballot Envelopes with Wrong Voter Names and Addresses

Gothamitst "The New York City Board of Elections has mailed out nearly half a million absentee ballots ahead of Election Day this November, as many New Yorkers are opting to vote by mail during the pandemic. Yet some voters are already reporting problems with their ballots that could invalidate someone’s vote if they aren’t caught in time.

"If you have received an absentee ballot with errors on it, the city Board of Elections says you should reach out to them via email at Apply4Absentee@boe.nyc or call 1-866-VOTE-NYC….When Gothamist / WNYC called the 1-866-VOTE-NYC hotline on Monday afternoon, there were 79 callers ahead of us."…

Ransomware Attacks Take On New Urgency Ahead of Vote

Key Points:

A Texas company that sells software that cities and states use to display results on election night was hit by ransomware last week, the latest of nearly a thousand such attacks over the past year against small towns, big cities and the contractors who run their voting systems.

“The chance of a local government not being hit while attempting to manage the upcoming and already ridiculously messy election would seem to be very slim,” Department of Homeland Security, noted that the agency was trying to make sure local election officials printed out their electronic poll books, which are used to check in voters, so that they had a backup.

The F.B.I. warned last week that the days after the election could result in “disinformation that includes reports of voter suppression, cyberattacks targeting election infrastructure, voter or ballot fraud, and other problems intended to convince the public of the elections’ illegitimacy.”

Over the past 18 months, cybercriminals — primarily based in Russia and Eastern Europe — have hit the American public sector with more ransomware attacks than in any other period on record, according to Emsisoft, which tracks the incursions. A record 966 ransomware attacks hit the American public sector last year — two-thirds of them targeting state or local governments.

The F.B.I. concluded that ransomware “will likely threaten the availability of data on interconnected election servers” in November, ...The agency cited two recent examples: a ransomware attack in Oregon that locked up county computers and crippled backup data, and another in Louisiana in which cybercriminals hacked the secretary of state’s offices, then waited three months to detonate their ransomware the week of Louisiana’s statewide elections for governor and legislative seats last November.

...security researchers have noted with growing alarm that the ransomware attacks hitting American systems are evolving in disturbing ways. Attackers are not just locking up data, they are stealing it, dumping it online in some cases, and selling access to victims’ data on the dark web and privately to nation-state groups. Researchers at Intel471, a threat intelligence firm, recently discovered that Russian cybercriminals had been selling access to victims’ data to North Korean hackers, and Russian cybercriminals have a long track record of working hand in hand with the Kremlin.

Donald Trump’s Favorite Voting Machines

NYS Board of Elections is about to certify the ESS Expressvote XL voting machines warned about in this article. NYC is poised to buy them as soon as they are approved. Westchester County bought a similar BMD (Ballot Marking Device) , the Dominion ICE, in time for 2020 elections. The ICE were used with disasterous results in the June primary. Call your New York State legislators today to pass S6733/A8597 to ban these hybrid voting machines in New York.

Donald in Blunderland: Trump won't commit to peaceful power transfer at surreal press briefing

If this disturbs you, take the pledge to defend democracy at https://choosedemocracy.us

Allegra“

[senior White House reporter] Karem “... Do you commit to make sure that there’s a peaceful transferal of power?”…….Still Trump refused to commit. “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”….."Later, Karem remarked on Twitter: “This is the most frightening answer I have ever received to any question I have ever asked. I’ve interviewed convicted killers with more empathy."

Donald Trump Wants A New Supreme Court Justice To Help Hand Him A Second Term

Blumenthal "“Now we’re counting on the federal court system to make it so that we can actually have an evening where we know who wins. Not where the votes are going to be counted a week later or two weeks later,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Saturday, one day after Ginsburg’s death.

"The substance of Trump’s statements is clear. He wants to stop states from counting legitimate votes on Nov. 3, and he intends to file a challenge in the courts to do this. He is now saying that his nominee needs to be seated on the court in order to rule in his favor, stop the counting of legitimately cast ballots and hand him a second term. “