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Election Security

The practices, technologies and policies that protect voting systems, election offices and voter data from tampering, breaches and disinformation.

Current stories

securityOne report1 publisher

Check Point finds real campaign outreach and voter-verification scams hard to tell apart

Check Point says voters struggle to tell real campaign outreach from fraud, citing election-office warnings between July and September. Its researchers saw no activity aimed at voting systems or vote counting; the exposure they describe is in messages sent to voters.

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives55
Confidence50
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Princeton researcher rebuilt the order of 1.52m Georgia ballots with a $20 AI subscription

Max Springer of Princeton used a $20 AI subscription and a Georgia public-records request to recover the voting order of 1.52m ballots. A flaw found years ago now takes hours to exploit, and Georgia's answer is an order to redact ballot IDs from public files.

Publishers:theguardian.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives40
Confidence50
securityOne report1 publisher

Three election postmortems in a row put the foreign effort into influence campaigns

A classified assessment completed last year found that no foreign adversary successfully interfered in 2024, and that Russia, Iran and China each ran influence campaigns anyway. Congressional sources say the probing of election systems has not stopped.

Publishers:therecord.media

Reality

Evidence48
Adoption35
Hype gap−5
Incentives62
Confidence55
leadershipOne report1 publisher

California turns ballot seizure into a felony after a sheriff took 650,000 ballots

The package Gavin Newsom signed also extends mail-ballot drop-off hours and creates penalties for undisclosed paid political posts. The provision that reaches private parties in California is the disclosure one.

Publishers:theguardian.com

Reality

Evidence56
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+22
Incentives72
Confidence50
securityOne report1 publisher

CikLeak hands Vybory developer chats to Important Stories days before Russia's Duma vote

The group says it took documents, server configurations, passwords and staff communications from Russia's Central Election Commission and the contractors building Vybory, and Important Stories says it authenticated the files.

Publishers:therecord.media

Reality

Evidence32
Adoption27
Hype gap+24
Incentives78
Confidence36
securityOne report1 publisher

Supreme Court's 7-2 order keeps the USPS citizenship-verification rule out of the 2026 midterms

Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence faults the implementation calendar and allows that the final USPS regulation may be lawful. The rule the Postal Service already finalized stays available for a cycle with more lead time.

Publishers:cyberscoop.com

Reality

Evidence42
Adoption25
Hype gap+10
Incentives55
Confidence45
investOne report1 publisher

An AI assistant reversed Georgia's ballot shuffling four years after researchers flagged the flaw

Princeton's Max Springer says a publicly available AI assistant unshuffled Georgia's May primary ballot records and then told him which public files it needed to attach names to them. The flaw was documented in 2022.

Publishers:fortune.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption28
Hype gap+12
Incentives48
Confidence55
securityOne report1 publisher

Shasta County's Peters hire is an access-control failure, not a voting-machine one

A registrar who was censured this month for threatening staff says he will make a convicted election-systems thief his deputy. The controls that would stop it are personnel controls.

Publishers:cyberscoop.com

Reality

Evidence61
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+12
Incentives74
Confidence58