If Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar is successful in winning the Democratic Party nomination to stand for governor of Illinois and then wins the election, he will: 1) commute all low-level drug offenders' sentences and free them from jail; 2) take educational oversight power from Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel and give it to the Chicago School Board; 3) fund schools out of a fairly distributed state pools, ending the system of funding based on local taxes, which disadvantages schools in poor neighborhoods; and 4) make access to paid sick leave and child care universal in the state of Illinois. Read the rest

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey and legendary free software creator Brian "bash" Fox took to the New York Times's op-ed page to explain that proprietary software and voting machines don't mix, because unless anyone who wants to can audit the software that powers the nation's elections, exploitable bugs will lurk in them, ready to be used by bad guys to screw up the vote-count. Read the rest

The establishment wing of the Democratic Party has spent decades receiving dump-trucks full of money from the insurance industry and then, totally coincidentally, explaining that the time isn't right for single-payer for completely unrelated reasons. Read the rest

The campaign ad for Retired Marine Lt. Col. Amy McGrath's run for Congress in Kentucky is inspiring: a woman who beat all the odds and covered herself in glory, standing against the cowardly Mitch McConnell's hand-picked wormtongue in a state where the GOP stands ready to snatch away health-care from thousands of voters. Read the rest

Chris Msando is the Kenyan electoral commission IT manager who oversaw the country's computerized voting systems; now, just days before a hotly contested election, his body has been found in the Kikuyu area in Nairobi's outskirts, and the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission says he was tortured and murdered. Read the rest

Since the 2000 Bush-Gore election crisis and the hanging-chad controversy, voting machine vendors have been offering touchscreen voting machines as a solution to America's voting woes -- and security researchers have been pointing out that the products on offer were seriously, gravely defective. Read the rest

Joe Menn at Reuters reports that Facebook is pitching in an initial $500,000 in seed funding to launch a nonprofit that will work to protect American political parties, voting systems and information providers from malicious attacks by hackers and foreign nation-states.

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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's merciless mashup of the UK's bumbling pound-shop Thatcher with Monty Python's classic work of historical documentary is bound to infuriate the reactionary wing of the Pythons, but it brought a lasting smile to my face. (Thanks, Robbo!) Read the rest

The eminently electable Jeremy Corbyn, whose exemplary, inclusive election manifesto rescued the Labour Party (including its traitorous establishment Blairite wing) from history's dustbin and delivered a brutal blow to the nasty Tory party, the man who is arguably the UK's Prime Minister in waiting, addressed a roaring crowd at the Glastonbury Festival, damning war, Trump, austerity and the pitting of one generation against another. It's a hell of a speech. Read the rest

Nearly two weeks after the Tories lost their majority in an own-goal election lost despite the use of allegedly unassailable media-manipulation techniques, Prime Minister Theresa May has been edged out in the polls by Jeremy Corbyn, who is now the person the largest proportion of Britons would like to see in Number 10. Read the rest

Randy Bryce wants to challenge Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan for the First District of Wisconsin, where Ryan beat his most recent Democratic challenger by 35 points. Read the rest

Princeton computer scientist and former White House Deputy CTO Ed Felten (previously) writes about the security lessons of the 2016 election: first, that other nation-states are more aggressive than generally supposed, and second, that you don't need to hack the vote-totals to effect devastation on an adversary -- it's sufficient to undermine the election's legitimacy by messing with voter rolls, "so there is uncertainty about whether the correct people were allowed to vote." Read the rest

The UK election didn't deliver the increased majority that PM Theresa May was seeking, but it wasn't for lack of trying: the UK Conservative party spent £1.2m on social media smear ads that painted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a terrorist sympathiser, a useful idiot for Scottish separatism, and an incompetent.

Newspeak House (AKA NWSPK) is a co-working space (with a few bedrooms!) in East London that houses an eclectic mix of civic hackers: people working to make British (and global) democracy more responsive, more representative, and more transparent. Read the rest

An anonymously leaked Top Secret NSA report on Russian state hackers interfering with the US elections has been published by The Intercept, which had the documents independently analyzed by a who's-who of America's leading security experts. Read the rest

...and they're likely to vote for the "unelectable" Jeremy Corbyn, a guy significantly to the left of, say, Bernie Sanders, who has survived multiple attempts by the finance-capital wing of his own party to unseat him, and who is riding on a national wave of disillusionment with Thatherism, Neo-Thatcherism, and May-Thatcherism. Read the rest

Greg Gianforte is a short-tempered, hyper-conservative Montana political hopeful who is standing for the GOP in a special election for a Congressional seat; he is also invested in Russian firms that are under US sanction. Read the rest