The Defending Digital Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center has released three new guides to help election administrators defend elections against cyber attacks and information operations. 

They are as follows:

• The State and Local Election Cybersecurity Playbook
• The Election Cyber Incident Communications Coordination Guide
• The Election Incident Communications Plan Template

These releases come at a time when the CIA director and two other top U.S. intelligence officials informed the U.S. Senate on February 13th, that they have already seen indications that Russian agents are preparing a new round of election subterfuge. For more on this story, check out the Associated Press article here.

In a new Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) report titled, "California's Future: Political Landscape," researchers examined the state's political landscape.

The report finds that Californians support state action on climate change, immigration, and health care, that only in the Bay Area are Californians strongly liberal on both social and fiscal issues, and that California voter turnout during presidential and gubernatorial elections has dropped over the past 15 years.  In addition, the study found that California has one of the most polarized legislatures in the country.

To read the Political Landscape report, check out the PPIC page here.

A new study produced by researchers from Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, and Pew Research Center, found that probability forecasts in U.S. elections can give potential voters the impression that one candidate will win more decisively, and that this could even lower the chance that they vote.

The study presented participants with hypothetical election projections in three different forms: vote share, probability forecast, and both. Participants were asked to determine the share of votes they expected the candidate to win, how likely it was that they would win, and how certain they were the candidate would win or lose. 

Participants who received the probability forecast were more certain in their judgement of which candidate would win. These findings indicate that media coverage featuring probabilistic forecasting could cause viewers to hold stronger expectations that the leading candidate will win.

For more on this coverage, visit the Pew Research Center article here.

To read the study, visit the report here.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) has released a new report titled, "Election Security in All 50 States," that builds on their August 2017 report, "9 Solutions for Securing America's Elections." However, in this new report, the CAP examines each state to provide an overview of their election security, preparedness, and compliance with the baseline, minimum, election protection standards.

For instance, the report finds that California's post-election audits are lacking important criteria. One example given was of Assembly Bill 840 passed in 2017, which the report says will weaken California's post-election audit procedures due to provisional ballots being excluded from post-election audits.

To read this new study, check out the Center for American Progress report here.

The Council of State Governments examined the obstacles that U.S. military and overseas citizens face when participating in the election process, and have released a report titled, "Overseas Voting Initiative's Report on 2016 Military Ballot Tracking Pilot," which outlines their recommendations to improve the election process.

The Military Ballot Tracking Project worked with the U.S. Department of Defense's Federal Voting Assistance Program, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), and the U.S. Military Postal Service Agency (MPS) in order to track military ballots during the 2016 election. 

The report found that approximately 80 to 90 percent of all ballots were successfully delivered to their Military Post Offices. In addition, the report called for more business processing improvement due to variability in the application of parcel scans within the USPS and MPS.

Check out the press release here for more on this story.

To read the report, check out the document here.