Elections

How ten-sided dice play into Pennsylvania’s post-election audit

Department of State officials rolled ten-sided dice to generate a seed number needed for a post-election audit.

  • By Justin Sweitzer

Local election officials brace for possible violence and threats

With worries over armed poll “monitors,” voter intimidation and risks to staff, some are coordinating with law enforcement or conducting special training ahead of Election Day.

  • By Kery Murakami

States take new steps to stop election mistruths from going viral

To combat the rising misinformation threat, some states are bringing on cybersecurity specialists to comb social media and flag posts that spread falsehoods about the voting process.

  • By Daniela Altimari

New data tracks polling place locations for 37 states

The dataset can be used to study changes made by state and local election officials in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and new laws overhauling ballot access.

  • By Matt Vasilogambros and Carrie Levine

Election officials have another year to fight disinformation

Before the midterms, local officials must upgrade their technology, expand efforts to secure the voting process and educate the public on the processes that protect election integrity.

  • By Matt Vasilogambros

Cybersecurity war room kept election secure

In Arizona, the Maricopa County Office of Enterprise Technology set up an election war room to coordinate response to both cyber and physical threats targeting county information systems.

  • By GCN Staff

Disinformation may be the new normal, election officials fear

While most misconceptions about election fraud can be countered by officials being transparent about how vote tabulation works and what security measures are in place, it’s a lot of work.

  • By Matt Vasilogambros

Looking for election threats in all the wrong places

Jurisdictions applying cybersecurity approaches learned from past elections may be vulnerable to new attacks, one expert says.

  • By Stephanie Kanowitz

Redistricting battles kick off in state courts

Between delayed census redistricting data, increased public interest and access to online redistricting tools, states could see a record number of challenges to maps being drawn with the new data.

  • By Kristian Hernández

DIY redistricting allows public to draw maps in more states

At least a dozen states are giving residents access to the software and web tools needed to map out how their government should represent them.

  • By Kristian Hernández

Facing foreign election foes, states hire ‘cyber navigators’

Cyber navigators train local officials how to prevent and respond to cybersecurity breaches and keep an eye on big security compromises and phishing threats.

  • By Matt Vasilogambros

Tabletop exercise tests election security

At Tabletop the Vote, federal, state and local officials worked through scenarios that might impact future election operations and shared best practices.

  • By GCN Staff

Open-source tool helps spot gerrymandered districts

GerryChain uses mathematical and computational models to generate a representative collection of maps that would meet legal voting rules and priorities for new districts.

  • By Susan Miller

Kentucky county clerks to authenticate via Yubikey

Kentucky is planning to equip all the commonwealth’s 120 county clerks with Yubikey devices to enable two-factor authentication that will better protect the state’s voter registration system from unauthorized access.

  • By GCN Staff
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Nation has Georgia on its mind, but many states are making voting easier

Lawmakers in 47 states have introduced nearly 850 bills to expand early voting, restore voting rights for people with felony convictions and set up automatic voter registration, among other measures.

  • By Matt Vasilogambros

Census delay spells election chaos for states

With the census data needed to draw new legislative districts delayed until fall, some states are using alternative data, such as Census Bureau estimates of population and race, or approximations based on births and residential construction to estimate population down to the block level.

  • By Tim Henderson

NIST issues draft election security framework

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a draft framework that takes NIST's pre-existing cybersecurity best practices and applies them to the voting equipment and information systems supporting elections.

  • By Justin Katz

Despite security concerns, online voting advances

Security experts understand the desire of entrepreneurs and election officials to use new voting methods to reach voters who may be disenfranchised by in-person or mail-in voting, but the security risk might be too great, they say.

  • By Matt Vasilogambros and Lindsey Van Ness

States prep census, GIS data for redistricting

Now that the election is over, state and local governments are turning their attention to ways that data and geographic information systems can aid in redistricting efforts.

  • By Stephanie Kanowitz

Lawmakers push to preserve pandemic voting access

State election officials are working to codify many of the pandemic-specific changes that broadened ballot access over the past year, but some face an uphill battle.

  • By Matt Vasilogambros

Election disinformation fears came true for state officials

The disinformation scenario that local election officials feared months ago has come true: President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud have been picked up by many state and local Republican officials across the country, and polls now show that more than two-thirds of GOP voters believe the 2020 election was neither free nor fair.

  • By Matt Vasilogambros