News Clips

“Cabinet-level positions reflect priorities,” says John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, which is focused on election security. “Eliminating this independent office has lowered the priority of cybersecurity in Rhode Island state government.”

“2016 proved that foreign governments have much to gain from meddling in our elections,” said Liza McClenaghan, chairwoman of the Florida board of voting advocacy group Common Cause. “More attacks are on the way.”

Something similar happened last fall in Delaware, where the Voting Equipment Selection Task Force also voted to replace its aging touch-screen machines with a variant of the ExpressVote system. When Jennifer Hill, at Common Cause Delaware, a government-accountability group, obtained all the bids from a public-records request, she found that “the Department of Elections had pretty much tailored the request for proposal in a way that eliminated venders whose primary business was to sell paper-ballot systems.” Hill also noted that a lobbyist for E.S. & S., who was “well-connected in the state,” helped “to shepherd this whole thing through.” 

House watchers suggest that the 116th Congress might also have a chance at denting public corruption. House Resolution 1, the first bill introduced this year, is a sweeping proposal aimed at money in politics, voting reforms and ethics. Those issues have broad bipartisan support in many states and localities, according to Aaron Scherb, legislative affairs director at government watchdog Common Cause. “I think a lot of the reforms at the national level will help advance the ball for when there is a more favorable political climate after 2020,” he says. 

“There are two concerns with email voting," in which ballots and voter identification information are typically attached as a PDF or JPEG. "One—the ballots can be intercepted and undetectably altered or deleted. This hack was performed at DEF CON in August. And it’s something academics have long known," Susannah Goodman of Common Cause an one of the authors of the report, told Newsweek. "Second—emailed ballots can be easily spoofed in a spear phishing attack designed to put malware on a county election official’s computer.”

"Over a hundred thousand ballots were returned via the internet in the 2016 election," said Susannah Goodman, director of Common Cause's election security program. "For years, we have known that ballots sent over the internet can be intercepted and changed or deleted, and that is a major concern."