In Virginia, Bloomberg blasts Trump for Navy leader’s ouster

NORFOLK, Va. -New presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg traveled to the city that hosts the world’s largest Navy base on Monday and blasted President Donald Trump over the recent ouster of the nation’s Navy secretary.

For the first stop of his Democratic campaign, Bloomberg went to Norfolk, where he criticized Trump over the firing of Richard Spencer. The civilian leader of the Navy said he could not in good conscience follow an order by the president to allow a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes to retire without losing his SEAL status.

“The fact remains: We have a president, a commander in chief, who has no respect for the rule of law, and no concern whatsoever for ethics or honor, or for the values that truly make America great,” Bloomberg told a group of reporters at a downtown hotel.

Virginia is a critical Super Tuesday state that is key to Bloomberg’s campaign strategy of bypassing early states to focus on the crush of states that vote later in the cycle. And the locale offered the billionaire and former mayor of New York City more than just the latest controversy in Washington to promote his platform.

The neighboring city of Virginia Beach suffered a mass shooting on May 31 that killed 12 people at a municipal complex. Bloomberg, 77, said that such shootings have become “almost routine” and that “we have to put an end to this madness.”

Gun control is a hallmark of Bloomberg’s political identity. His group, Everytown for Gun Safety, has pumped more than $6 million into Virginia campaigns alone in recent years to support like-minded Democrats, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.

Democrats retook both chambers in Virginia’s Legislature earlier this month. Bloomberg said it was proof that “with the right candidate, we can turn areas from red to blue.”

Bloomberg, a centrist who became a Democrat last year, joined the presidential race Sunday, just 10 weeks before primary voting begins. His Democratic rivals have already pounced on his plans to rely on his personal fortunes to fund his campaign, accusing him of trying to buy an election.

Bloomberg said Trump was a “threat to our country, to our values and our national security.” But he also cast doubt on the crowded field of Democrats whose performance, he insinuated, forced him into the race.

“I think that there is a greater risk of having Donald Trump reelected than there was before,” Bloomberg told reporters. “And in the end, I looked in the mirror and said that I just cannot let this happen.”

The former Republican touted a platform that also focused on combating sea-level rise, economic inequality and health care.
He said he’s already beaten Trump in other arenas, at least symbolically, devoting tens of millions of dollars to pursue policy priorities that are in sharp contrast to the president’s.


For instance, Bloomberg has helped shutter 282 coal plants in the United States and organized a coalition of American cities on track to cut 75 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2025.

“I know what it takes to beat Trump because we already have, and I will do it again,” Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg also chatted with people at a diner in downtown Norfolk that was mobbed with reporters and at least some people who were eager to support him.

Among them was Craig Schranz, 43, an emergency medicine physician who said he’s fiscally conservative and socially liberal like Bloomberg is. He praised Bloomberg for not “vilifying” capitalism and for supporting a health care plan that doesn’t eliminate private-payer health insurance.

“I think he’s someone who knows how to govern,” said Schranz, who said he had supported former Vice President Joe Biden before Bloomberg joined the race. “I think he’s going to implement sound policy that we need.”

Bloomberg plans to go to Phoenix, Arizona, on Tuesday.

GSG
source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Microsoft offers software tools to secure elections

Microsoft has announced an ambitious effort to make voting secure, verifiable and subject to reliable audits by registering ballots in encrypted form so they can be accurately and independently tracked long after they are cast.

Two of the three top US elections vendors have expressed interest in potentially incorporating the open-source software into their voting systems.


The software is being developed with Galois, an Oregon-based company separately creating a secure voting system prototype under contract with the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, DARPA. Dubbed “ElectionGuard,” it will be available this summer, Microsoft says, with early prototypes ready to pilot for next year’s U.S. general elections.

CEO Satya Nadella announced the initiative Monday at a developer’s conference in Seattle, saying the software development kit would help “modernize all of the election infrastructure everywhere in the world.”

We are partnering with Microsoft to develop #ElectionGuard, a software development kit for secure, end-to-end verifiable elections. Overview by @n1nj4 here https://t.co/cfIlQIzERR @free_and_fair

— Galois (@galois) May 6, 2019

Three little-known U.S. companies control about 90 percent of the market for election equipment, but have long faced criticism for poor security, antiquated technology and insufficient transparency around their proprietary, black-box voting systems.

Open-source software is inherently more secure because the underlying code is easily scrutinized by outside experts but has been shunned by the dominant vendors whose customers — the nation’s 10,000 election jurisdictions — are mostly strapped for cash.

None offered bids when Travis County, Texas, home to Austin, sought to build a system with the “end-to-end” verification attributes that ElectionGuard promises to deliver.

Two of the leading vendors, Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Nebraska, and Hart InterCivic of Austin, Texas, both expressed interest in partnering with Microsoft for ElectionGuard. A spokeswoman for a third vendor, Dominion Voting Systems of Denver, said the company looks forward to “learning more” about the initiative.

Anyone with an existing voting system or developing a new one will be able to incorporate ElectionGuard — at the state or local level in the U.S. or national level for jurisdictions abroad.

“Once the barrier to entry is low enough, hopefully one of the vendors will go for it, and that will bring the rest of them in quickly enough,” said Dan Wallach, a Rice University computer scientist who assisted Travis County.

“It can be used with a ballot-marking device. It can be used with an optical scanner, on hand-marked paper ballots,” said Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer at Microsoft Research and key contributor to the ElectionGuard project.

Benaloh helped produce a National Academies of Science report last year that called for an urgent overhaul of the rickety U.S. election system, which Russian hackers infiltrated in 2016 in several states.

That report called for all U.S. elections to be held on human-readable paper ballots by 2020. It also advocated a specific form of routine postelection audits to ensure accurate vote counts — a requirement that “end-to-end’ voting verification satisfies.

Election integrity activist Susan Greenhalgh of the National Election Defense Coalition said she hoped it would encourage innovative thinking at the level elections are actually managed.

“We can’t have faith-based voting anymore,” she said. “This is a great step forward in verifying election results.”

ElectionGuard will let voters confirm that their votes are accurately recorded. Beyond that, the unique coded tracker it produces registers an encrypted version of the vote that keeps the ballot choice itself secret while ensuring votes are accurately counted.

That enables reliable postelection audits and recounts.

It also lets outsiders such as election watchdog groups, political parties, journalists — and voters themselves — verify online that votes are properly counted without being altered.

Microsoft executives say they also plan to build a prototype voting system for reference.

One election official who has been in informal conversations with the ElectionGuard project leaders is Dean Logan, who runs elections for Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, and is building an open-source voting system for it.

A spinoff of Galois called Free & Fair developed the sophisticated postelection audits , known as “risk-limiting,” for Colorado, which was the first U.S. state to require the audits recommended in the National Academies of Sciences report.

ElectionGuard is not designed to work with internet voting schemes — which experts consider too easily hackable — and does not currently work with vote-by-mail systems.

ES&S told The Associated Press via email that it was excited to partner with Microsoft and “still exploring the potentials” for incorporated the software kit its voting systems.

Hart InterCivic, the No. 3 vendor, said it planned a pilot project with Microsoft to “incorporate ElectionGuard functionality as an additional feature” layered over its core platform.

A spokeswoman for Dominion, the No. 2 vendor, said “We are very interested in learning more about the initiative and being able to review the various prototypes that are being planned, along with hearing more about other federally-supported efforts in the elections space.”

Edgardo Cortés, a former Virginia elections commissioner now with New York University’s Brennan Center, welcomed additional private sector support for election systems.


“I think it’ll take a while to catch on and see how beneficial (ElectionGuard) ends up being,” he said. “But I think it certainly does have a great deal of potential.”

Columbia University will be partnering with Microsoft to audit the pilots.


source: technology.inquirer.net

Trump economic agenda likely checked by Democratic election gains

WASHINGTON, United States – Against the backdrop of a strong economy, Republicans avoided blowout losses in the key US midterm vote but President Trump’s economic agenda will be sharply curtailed by Democratic gains.

With a divided Congress starting next year, and the 2020 race for the White House now underway, the polarization in Washington means major economic legislation is highly unlikely, analysts said following Tuesday’s nationwide elections.

However, Republicans almost certainly would have faced steeper losses if not for the low unemployment, rising wages and strong economic growth now prevailing, boosted by recent Republican-driven tax cuts as well as a bipartisan stimulus package in this year’s budget.

Despite the prospect of partisan deadlock in the new Congress, Wall Street rallied Wednesday as investors put the elections’ uncertainty behind them.

Analysts said the divided Congress meant there were few threats to profits from new legislation.

“I think the Democrats would certainly be a line of defense against any further tax cuts,” said Nancy Vanden Houten, senior economist at Oxford Economics.

“I think we may see gridlock on major things but some chance for agreement on a modest infrastructure package,” she told AFP.

Republican leaders had been bracing for a backlash against Trump, with the potential losses in the House of Representatives well beyond the 23 seats Democrats needed to seize control.

Some races were still too close to call early Wednesday but even with Democrats winning nearly 30 seats, the result clearly fell far short of Republicans’ worst fears of losing 40 or more.


Avoiding talk of the economy
The solid US economy likely stemmed the Republican losses.

“The economy is what’s keeping Republicans competitive despite Trump. It’s a very weird situation,” Gary Jacobson, emeritus professor of political science at the University of California San Diego, told AFP late Tuesday.


Republicans were caught in the crossfire between Trump’s unpopularity and the economy’s strength, he said.

“Normally a president with an economy like the one we have now would be 10, maybe even 20 points higher,” Jacobson said. “It’s clear that if the economy hadn’t been that good there would have been a real blow out.”

Republicans largely avoided campaigning on the 2017 tax cuts, which were passed without a single Democratic vote and which many voters saw as a giveaway to the wealthy and major corporations.

Even Trump focused on other issues, including stoking immigration fears to motivate his base in the campaign’s dying days.

“We can talk about the economy but the fact is we know how well we’re doing with the economy,” Trump said over the weekend at a Florida rally. “I want to solve problems.”

Midterm elections typically do not hinge on economic concerns and a CNN exit poll showed the economy ranked third among the most important issues for voters nationwide, behind health care and immigration but ahead of gun policy.

Democratic candidates highlighted on health care, seeking to capitalize on the many unpopular and unsuccessful Republican efforts to repeal the 2010 legislation providing access to affordable health care and protecting those with pre-existing medical conditions.

“The economy is too good to have to say anything about it in defense. That’s why it was health care, health care, health care,” John Aldrich, professor of political science at Duke University, told AFP.

But as the impact of last year’s tax cuts fade and Trump’s aggressive tariff policies bite harder, while the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates, the US economy is expected to slow next year.

And Trump — who said Democrats would “take a wrecking ball to our economy” — now has two ready-made scapegoats to blame for any slowdown: the Democratic-controlled House, and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, who he has repeatedly attacked for raising rates.

Vanden Houten of Oxford Economics said she was not forecasting a recession by the time Trump faces reelection in 2020 but the odds were rising.

“The economy is definitely going to be more vulnerable about a year from now,” she said.

“I think by the time the presidential campaign is in full swing, it’s certainly going to be a fading expansion.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s newly renegotiated North American free trade deal — the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement — is likely to come up for a vote in 2019 but Democrats are unlikely to block it. /cbb

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net