Mike Kiniry

New York Times | The story started, as many do, with our own confusion. The most unusual of presidential elections — one marred by Russian trolls, a digital Watergate-style break-in and the winning candidate’s dire warnings of a “rigged election” — was followed by the most unusual period of acceptance. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, government officials, the Clinton campaign, intelligence analysts, and civic and legal groups all appeared to calmly accept claims that votes had not been hacked.

New York Times | After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

TechTarget | Colorado will implement a new system for auditing electronic voting systems. Post-election audits have been proven to help, but are they enough to boost public trust in the systems?

The Spokesman-Review | They knew Russian operatives might try to tamper with the nation’s electronic voting systems. Many people inside the U.S. government and the Obama White House also knew. In the summer of 2016, a cluster of volunteers on a federally supervised cybersecurity team crafting 2018 election guidelines felt compelled to do something sooner. Chatting online, they scrambled to draw up ways for state and local officials to patch the most obvious cyber vulnerabilities before Election Day 2016.

Lawfare | The technology behind elections is hard to get right. Elections require security. They also require transparency: anyone should be able to observe enough of the election process, from distribution of ballots, to the counting and canvassing of votes, to verify that the reported winners really won. But if people vote on computers or votes are tallied by computers, key steps of the election are not transparent and additional measures are needed to confirm the results.

Archer News | You did your civic duty. You voted. You may even get a red, white and blue sticker to wear proudly on your T-shirt. But are you sure your vote will be counted — and counted properly? If your state uses computers for voting or counting results, there’s a chance it may not, experts say. 

WhoWhatWhy | Over the past two days, all major US news outlets breathlessly reported that hackers in Las Vegas needed little time to expose the security flaws of several types of voting machines this weekend. While it is certainly nice to see the mainstream media cover election integrity issues more than once every four years, anybody following the topic, as WhoWhatWhy routinely does, was hardly surprised that the hackers were so successful.

Politico | Colorado on Monday said it will become the first state to regularly conduct a sophisticated post-election audit that cybersecurity experts have long called necessary for ensuring hackers aren't meddling with vote tallies. The procedure — known as a “risk-limiting” audit — allows officials to double-check a sample of paper ballots against digital tallies to determine whether results were tabulated correctly. The election security firm Free & Fair will design the auditing software for Colorado, and the state will make the technology available for other states to modify for their own use.

The Hill | The state of Colorado is moving to audit future digital election results, hiring a Portland-based startup to develop software to help ensure that electronic vote tallies are accurate. The startup Free & Fair announced on Monday that it had been selected by the state to develop a software system for state and local election officials to conduct what are called “risk-limiting audits.”

Colorado has chosen Free & Fair to build a risk-limiting audit (RLA) system to be used statewide beginning with the November 2017 general election.