Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

New election equipment standards could pose serious cybersecurity threats

Voting machines

Election security experts are concerned over proposed guidelines that would allow disabled wireless devices in voting systems.

Al Seib/Getty Images

The Election Assistance Commission is poised to approve new voting security standards this week, but election security experts are ringing alarm bells over a last-minute change they call "profoundly ill-advised and unacceptably insecure."

Ahead of Wednesday's vote, the federal agency tweaked a section of the proposal to allow for disabled wireless technology to be included in voting equipment — a move election security experts say would pose a serious cybersecurity threat to the United States.

Experts fear this change could also undermine efforts to build back trust in the nation's election systems after a divisive 2020 contest that millions of Americans still erroneously believe was stolen from former President Donald Trump.


The so-called Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0 is the first set of new voting security standards put forth by the EAC in 15 years. The draft clarifies that wireless hardware within a voting system is permitted, as long as the wireless connection is disabled. The agency said an outright ban on wireless technology would make obtaining voting equipment more difficult and costly for states.

But nearly two dozen computer science, security and election integrity experts wrote to the EAC last week warning that wireless devices, even if disabled, would "profoundly weaken" voting system security and significantly increase the chances of remote cyberattacks.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

"If wireless networking capability is there, it is inevitable that it will get turned on and used," the letter says. "It would be a recklessly naïve mistake to expect that procedures and processes could ensure that the wireless capability could or would not be activated, intentionally or unintentionally."

Wireless voting technology is already banned in California, Colorado, New York and Texas. The guidelines being considered by the EAC will serve as a benchmark for 38 states when determining what voting equipment to use. The other 12 states will more strictly follow the standards.

Election security experts are not only concerned with the changes in the proposal, but also how the alterations were made. The good-government group Free Speech For People alleges the EAC violated the Help America Vote Act because commissioners met with voting system vendors in non-public meetings before releasing the amended draft. Passed in 2002 to reform the country's voting systems, HAVA established the EAC and requires the agency's work to be public-facing.

"The EAC's attempted end-run around the Help America Vote Act and avoidance of public scrutiny endanger the security of America's elections and violate federal law," Ron Fein and Susan Greenhalgh of Free Speech For People wrote in a separate letter sent to the EAC last week.

But the EAC maintains it followed the appropriate procedures required by HAVA and the clarification was made in accordance with feedback received during the public comment period. Five days before the scheduled vote on the proposed guidelines, the agency published a six-page document to "dispel misinformation" about it.

The document notes that the EAC worked closely and held frequent meetings with experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology to clean up the voting guidelines' language to remove redundancies and improve clarity.

Read More

Joe Biden being interviewed by Lester Holt

The day after calling on people to “lower the temperature in our politics,” President Biden resort to traditionally divisive language in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt.

YouTube screenshot

One day and 28 minutes

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”

This is the latest in “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”

One day.

One single day. That’s how long it took for President Joe Biden to abandon his call to “lower the temperature in our politics” following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. “I believe politics ought to be an arena for peaceful debate,” he implored. Not messages tinged with violent language and caustic oratory. Peaceful, dignified, respectful language.

Keep ReadingShow less

Project 2025: The Department of Labor

Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is an ambitious manifesto to redesign the federal government and its many administrative agencies to support and sustain neo-conservative dominance for the next decade. One of the agencies in its crosshairs is the Department of Labor, as well as its affiliated agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Project 2025 proposes a remake of the Department of Labor in order to roll back decades of labor laws and rights amidst a nostalgic “back to the future” framing based on race, gender, religion and anti-abortion sentiment. But oddly, tucked into the corners of the document are some real nuggets of innovative and progressive thinking that propose certain labor rights which even many liberals have never dared to propose.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Keep ReadingShow less
Donald Trump on stage at the Republican National Convention

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the 2024 Republican National Convention on July 18.

J. Conrad Williams Jr.

Why Trump assassination attempt theories show lies never end

By: Michele Weldon: Weldon is an author, journalist, emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University and senior leader with The OpEd Project. Her latest book is “The Time We Have: Essays on Pandemic Living.”

Diamonds are forever, or at least that was the title of the 1971 James Bond movie and an even earlier 1947 advertising campaign for DeBeers jewelry. Tattoos, belief systems, truth and relationships are also supposed to last forever — that is, until they are removed, disproven, ended or disintegrate.

Lately we have questioned whether Covid really will last forever and, with it, the parallel pandemic of misinformation it spawned. The new rash of conspiracy theories and unproven proclamations about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump signals that the plague of lies may last forever, too.

Keep ReadingShow less
Painting of people voting

"The County Election" by George Caleb Bingham

Sister democracies share an inherited flaw

Myers is executive director of the ProRep Coalition. Nickerson is executive director of Fair Vote Canada, a campaign for proportional representations (not affiliated with the U.S. reform organization FairVote.)

Among all advanced democracies, perhaps no two countries have a closer relationship — or more in common — than the United States and Canada. Our strong connection is partly due to geography: we share the longest border between any two countries and have a free trade agreement that’s made our economies reliant on one another. But our ties run much deeper than just that of friendly neighbors. As former British colonies, we’re siblings sharing a parent. And like actual siblings, whether we like it or not, we’ve inherited some of our parent’s flaws.

Keep ReadingShow less
Constitutional Convention

It's up to us to improve on what the framers gave us at the Constitutional Convention.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

It’s our turn to form a more perfect union

Sturner is the author of “Fairness Matters,” and managing partner of Entourage Effect Capital.

This is the third entry in the “Fairness Matters” series, examining structural problems with the current political systems, critical policies issues that are going unaddressed and the state of the 2024 election.

The Preamble to the Constitution reads:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

What troubles me deeply about the politics industry today is that it feels like we have lost our grasp on those immortal words.

Keep ReadingShow less