Leading Off
● Election Security: Last week's bombshell indictments of 12 Russian nationals by special counsel Robert Mueller laid bare the threat to American election security: Russia did indeed hack various Democratic Party organizations and state election systems in an attempt to swing the 2016 elections to both Trump and the congressional GOP. Not only did Trump stand by Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin's side on Monday and categorically deny this truth despite all evidence, three days later, congressional Republicans banded together to block Democratic efforts to bolster election security.
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Mueller’s recent indictments revealed that Russian intelligence officers hacked into at least one state's election database and stole information on 500,000 registered voters. That unnamed state was likely Illinois, where election officials had previously said at least 200,000 voters had their information exposed in 2016.
There's still no evidence that Russian hackers were able to alter election results outright in 2016, and voting methods such as paper ballots would make such an attempt very difficult. However, this interference with voter registration systems suggests that Russia could try to swing elections by removing voters from the rolls or altering their registration data, such as their addresses. That could produce Election Day chaos that deters voters as election officials scramble to correct registration rolls that have been tampered with, or even disenfranchise them altogether.
Following the indictments, news separately broke that one of the country's top voting machine manufacturers admitted to Congress that it had installed "remote-access" software on some of that hardware that election administrators use to program voting machines and tabulate their results, exacerbating the risk of hacking. And in yet another incident, the FBI notified Maryland officials that the state's voter registration and online systems were built on software from a firm financed by Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin, who is tied to Putin. (There's no indication that these systems have been compromised—at least, not yet.)
Responding to this cavalcade of disturbing news, congressional Democrats sought to strengthen the integrity of U.S. elections by amending an existing government funding bill that would have given states hundreds of millions of additional dollars to make their election systems more secure, but House Republicans voted as a bloc to reject the amendment. Congress had previously authorized $380 million in funding this year for the federal Election Assistance Commission to provide grants to the states, but officials have been slow to put that money to use by upgrading their election systems.
Beyond the hacking of state election systems, Russia's hacking of Democratic campaign groups also poses a grave risk to the ability to conduct free and fair elections. Most damningly, the indictments add significant evidence to the charge that Trump himself colluded with Russia to undermine the integrity of the 2016 presidential election. According to the indictments, Russian hackers tried to break into Hillary Clinton's computer servers for the first time on the very day that Trump publicly implored Russia to hack her emails.
But that attitude of encouraging Russian interference doesn't just stop with Trump. Republican leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan refused to rule out using hacked information for their political advantage in 2016, and the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC with close ties to Ryan, ran ads that year that explicitly relied on stolen documents.
Just last month, NRCC chair Steve Stivers likewise refused to pledge not to use hacked materials in this year’s campaign, and at least one member of his party has gone even further. In one incredible revelation, the indictments say that an unidentified Republican congressional candidate in 2016 actually asked for and received hacked materials to benefit their campaign.
While it's impossible to say whether or not the hacking of Democratic campaigns damaged them badly enough to swing the 2016 elections, the very possibility of that notion represents a grave threat to democracy that shows no sign of abating. Indeed, a senior Microsoft executive revealed on Thursday that Russia has tried to hack at least three candidates so far this year, contrary to Trump's baseless assertion that Russia wasn't trying to interfere with the 2018 elections.
Democrats at the state and federal level could try to implement measures like ballots with paper trails to bolster election security. But the fact that Republicans appear to welcome hacking by a hostile foreign power when it benefits their campaigns is an ominous sign for the future of American democracy.
Voter Registration and Voting Access
● California: On Wednesday, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a new measure to have the state pre-pay the cost of postage on all mail-in ballots starting in 2019. More than two-thirds of voters cast ballots by mail in this year's June primary, so this move will making voting by mail much more convenient and could thus increase turnout.
● New Jersey: Late last month, New Jersey's Democratic-run state Senate passed a bill over GOP opposition to allow voters to register online. The bill still needs to pass the state Assembly before Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy can sign it, but Democrats hold a comfortable majority in that chamber as well, and the bill's prospects of becoming law appear strong.
Voter Suppression
● Illinois: On Tuesday, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoed a Democratic-backed bill that would have pulled Illinois out of the "Crosscheck" system championed by infamous voter suppression zealot Kris Kobach and instead had the state rely solely on the far more accurate and bipartisan Electronic Registration Information Center system to keep its voter rolls up to date. As we have previously explained, Crosscheck is comically unreliable by design in order to let Republicans like Kobach claim that voter registration fraud is widespread as a pretext for purging voter rolls and passing restrictive voting laws.
Unfortunately, not a single Republican legislator voted for this bill, meaning Democrats lack the votes to override Rauner's veto in the state House, where they are just shy of a supermajority.
● Voter Registration Purges: New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice has released a new report on voter registration purges that shows a sharp uptick in the number of purged registrations in states with a history of racial discrimination since 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted a key part of the Voting Rights Act. That provision of the VRA had required such states to obtain Justice Department approval whenever they enacted changes to voting practices, including purges, in order to ensure they would not harm the rights of minorities. Its removal has allowed these jurisdictions, which are mostly Republican-run, to more aggressively purge their voter rolls.
Overall, the Brennan report finds that 33 percent more voters were purged between 2014 and 2016 than were purged between 2006 and 2008, and in some states, the rate of increase was dramatically higher. For instance, once freed from Justice Department scrutiny, Georgia Republicans purged twice as many voters between the 2012 and 2016 elections as they did between 2008 and 2012. The report estimates that, nationwide, 2 million fewer voters would have been purged between 2012 and 2016 if states previously subject to federal oversight had pruned their voter rolls at the same rate as the other states.
Election officials of course need to take steps to maintain accurate voter registration rolls and remove people who have moved away or died, but some of these hyper-aggressive purges have taken people off the rolls simply for not voting, and the Brennan report cites numerous examples where purges have incorrectly removed eligible voters. Wrongful purges like these can leave voters with no recourse if they show up on Election Day and aren't on the voter rolls, and that’s exactly the idea for Republicans, since infrequent voters—that is, the type most likely to be vulnerable to improper purges—tend to lean toward Democrats.
Last month, the Supreme Court further exacerbated the problem when it upheld Ohio Republicans' aggressive purging of their state’s voter rolls, giving the green light to further such efforts. But voting rights advocates can fight back by enacting policies like automatic voter registration that both expand the franchise and help keep voter registries accurate and up-to-date.
