Voting has never been as safe as it is now

This is the best time in US history to vote. Yes, American elections are flawed. They are marred by disenfranchisement, gerrymanderingthe inherent strangeness of the Electoral College and recent cases of ballot box arson. But voting itself has been unfairly tainted, most notably by former President Donald Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was fraudulent. That claim is especially ridiculous because modern voting procedures are only on the rise more robust – and those voting by mail or machine in this year’s presidential election can in fact be more confident than ever that their votes will be counted accurately.

One reason for that confidence is the adoption of voting technology that combines machine efficiency with the verifiability of a paper trail. This is the result of a shift that began two decades ago, after system glitches and punch card fragments — Florida’s infamous “hanging chads” — led to a fiasco that left the 2000 election results unclear for five weeks. Congress’ response, the Help America Vote Act of 2002, phased out the use of punch card ballots and jack-up machines in federal elections. Most Americans now vote with optical scanners, which process marked selections on sheets of paper. In the 2020 presidential election, polling places in Georgia used hand-powered optical scanners; an audit of the nearly five million votes cast in the state, the largest number of manually cast ballots in recent U.S. history, confirmed that President Joe Biden won. The counties’ error rates were 0.73 percent or less, and most had no change in their grades at all.

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While American voting machines are not completely tamper-proof (no machine is invulnerable), the vast majority do not connect to the Internet as a precaution against remote hacking (potentially problematic exceptions aside). In a recent election security update, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said the intelligence community has no evidence that adversaries are attempting to compromise U.S. physical election infrastructure. It would be essentially impossible to meaningfully intervene in the country’s diverse, decentralized systems, the ODNI update said. Instead, foreign actors prefer the easier route of psychological influence, in an attempt to sway voters or undermine electoral confidence propaganda and disinformation.

“For a variety of reasons, the potential vulnerability of individual voting machines does not translate into systemic vulnerability,” says political scientist Mark Lindemanpolicy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonprofit that tracks election systems across the country. “Hackers cannot work with voting machines one-on-one. There is a whole range of procedural safeguards in place to protect them.” Physical ballots also add reliability to the system because they are verifiable, auditable, and recountable. Scientific American spoke with Lindeman about why, despite so much voting agita, Americans are actually living in a golden age when it comes to casting ballots.

(An edited transcript of the interview follows.)

Verified Voting estimates that nearly 98.6 percent of registered voters live in voting jurisdictions have a paper trail of some form. Why is that important?

It’s twofold. A paper trail provides a fail-safe. When something goes wrong with the systems – and what we’ve seen in certain elections is that machines count votes incorrectly, never because of hacking, always because of an error in the way they’re configured – the paper ballots have been available to correct those errors. correct.

Perhaps an even greater value of paper ballots that voters have verified and that election officials use in audits and recounts is to provide certainty. Instead of arguing about whether the machines accurately counted the votes, we can look at the evidence of the paper ballot and find out. We can move away from abstract speculation about technology to observable reality.

Voting machines in the US are generally not connected to the internet. In fact, Verified Voting has opposed internet voting proposals. Why is that?

It all involves paper ballots that voters can verify and that election officials can then use to verify counts. We view electronic voting, Internet voting in any form, as a step away from what has made elections more secure in recent years than they were twenty years ago, when Verified Voting was founded. The country is just getting to the point where almost everyone is voting on paper ballots that they can verify. Internet voting is the antithesis of that.

If someone claims that an Internet election (or one in which many votes are transmitted electronically) was hacked, I don’t know how anyone can convince people otherwise.

If you vote in this election, how confident are you that your ballot will be counted?

I voted early here in New York State with a hand-marked ballot and a scanner. New York State has a 3 percent audit and I am confident that my vote will be counted accurately.

What is a 3 percent audit?

New York randomly selects 3 percent of the scanners used in the election and counts the ballots by hand to ensure they have been counted accurately. Most states conduct some sort of post-election audit. The details vary, but a percentage-based audit in some form, as New York does, is the most common model.

Was there ever a voting period prior to this? (A recent Pew Research Center survey of registered U.S. voters found that approximately one in four believes the presidential election will be at least somewhat poorly executed.)

I don’t think there has ever been a better time to vote in the US. There was also a time when everyone voted on paper ballots, but the election administration was, quite frankly, steeped in corruption. No one is really calling for a return to the days of Tammany Hall (laughs).

It is not necessary for paper ballots to be inherently secure in and of themselves. Paper is fragile. But the checks and balances put in place around paper ballots have never functioned as effectively in the US as they do today. Election administration is much more professional than it was twenty years ago. Election officials are better trained. They are more aware. It feels a little strange to talk about this golden age of elections amid all the turmoil, but I see no other way to interpret the facts.

What can we do to restore confidence in American voting rights?

(Let out a weary sigh.)

I felt that in my bones.

I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think reflecting on reality is the beginning. Part of that reality is the existing basic technology: the fact that our votes are recorded on paper ballots; procedurally, given that those paper ballots are protected – that in most states they are used in audits to verify counts.

Beyond that, actually a large majority of Americans Doing rely on their local election officials. My experience is that that confidence is justified. The election officials I have worked with across the country are very focused on the mission of making elections work for their voters. So I don’t really know what it takes to convince people to appreciate the good around them instead of spiraling into fear or morbid speculation about terrible things that could happen. That might be above my pay grade.

If you could improve one thing about how American voting works, what would it be?

We can do better in truly accessible voting than we are doing now. I think accessibility is common to most voting systems on the market. If we focus more on accessibility from the ground up, we can do better for a broader range of voters.

Can you give me an example of accessible voting?

Many states offer some type of touch screen interface that can also be equipped with (“rocker pedals”, large buttons that can be operated with the feet, hands or other body parts) and with so-called sip-and-puff interfaces (devices controlled by of breathing). These all provide ways for voters with different abilities and disabilities to interact with a voting machine. They can adjust the contrast; they can adjust the font size. And with audio interfaces, you can have the ballot read aloud if you can’t see the ballot.

These are all interfaces that offer a larger number of voters the opportunity to cast their votes independently. And they are a big improvement over nothing. But I also think that in many cases, voters with disabilities can testify that those interfaces don’t work as well in practice as they were built to do in theory.

We are still in the early days of accessibility and I would like to see us reach the next level.