Despite lies and rumors, US elections could be safest ever: here’s why

America’s top right-wingers are calling for the use of paper ballots in the presidential election. Computers are never completely safe, so they’re right – but paper will be used virtually everywhere anyway.

Voting in the United States is too complicated – just like the country itself. Having 50 different states is essentially having 50 different electoral processes at once during a presidential election.

In most other democracies, voting is a fairly simple process. If you’re a citizen, you bring your ID to a polling station, get a ballot, and cast your vote in private. That’s it.

These paper ballots are then counted manually, and if enough election workers are toiling, results are usually announced quite quickly – even in India, where citizens can vote for six weeks but their ballots are counted in a single day.

Well, at first glance, America’s different. One can feel dizzy when one sees the types of voting equipment used – optical scan ballot tabulators, direct recording electronic (DRE) systems, ballot marking devices, hybrid voting systems, punch cards, and, of course, hand-counted paper ballots.

In short, it’s a mess. And there’s the constant conspiratorial buzz about the Big Steal via the allegedly rigged voting machines, mainly coming from the Right eager to reinstate Donald Trump as US president almost at all costs.

But the truth is that paper ballots – held by most experts to be the most important security measures states can adopt – will be used in almost all US states on November 5th. It makes you wonder, then, whether the point of all the false claims isn’t just to generally undermine trust in the process.

Musk has the loudest microphone

The current kerfuffle over alleged fraud isn’t new – in 2020, phony conspiracy theories spread at lightning speed after Trump narrowly lost the election to Joe Biden. It all culminated in a violent and deadly attack on the US Capitol in January 2021.

Numerous lawsuits alleging that Biden’s victory was rigged were thrown out, and the MAGA crowd calmed down a bit after Fox News agreed to pay Dominion, a voting machine company, nearly $800 million to avoid a trial about the network’s lies about the election.

Besides, already in 2021, an Associated Press investigation found fewer than 475 cases of voter fraud in six battleground states during the 2020 presidential election – a number far too little to have made any difference in the outcome of that election.

Alas, they’re at it again. This year, Trump, his buddy Robert Kennedy Jr., and – of course – billionaire Elon Musk are not only demanding the use of paper ballots (something that’s already in place) but also claiming that voting machines are used to rig elections digitally.

“I’m a technologist, I know a lot about computers,” Musk told the crowd at a town hall in the swing state of Pennsylvania in mid-October. “And I’m like, the last thing I would do is trust a computer program, because it’s just too easy to hack.”

Once again, this particular assertion – that voting machines rig elections – has been repeatedly debunked. Still, Musk keeps talking about it and usually doesn’t forget to involve Dominion in the conversation (the company is closely monitoring what’s going on).

Oh, and just in case, Musk says that the Democrats and their supporters “have made it impossible to actually prove that there’s cheating.” That’s a conspiracy theory on steroids – and there’s more on X, the social media playground the billionaire owns.

Fraud https://t.co/bm2u2r7OTv

undefined Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2024

Corrections that desperate election officials are posting under Musk’s barrage of false claims aren’t working – his microphone is significantly louder than anyone else’s.

Dressing their misleading complaints as calls for “election integrity,” Republicans are preparing to contest the results of the presidential election if Kamala Harris wins but Trump is close behind, critics say.

Tech is extremely conservative

Rumors keep surfacing. For instance, as early voting opened in Texas on October 21st, claims spread online alleging that ballot machines in Tarrant Country were “switching” votes, even though officials soon said that only one out of 58,000 ballots cast on the first day of early voting was misprinted due to voter error.

** PRESS RELEASE ** pic.twitter.com/YC5Gazwnet

undefined Tarrant County Elections (@tarrantelection) October 22, 2024

Perhaps more importantly, only Texas and Louisiana – two staunchly conservative US states – contain counties with completely paperless voting systems.

Crucially, according to Verified Voting, a nonprofit focused on responsible voting tech and paper ballot advocacy, all swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – maintain paper records.

The Brennan Center for Justice points out that they’re used in post-election audits and include actual paper ballots filled out by hand and printed paper ballots for voters to review after they place their vote on a machine.

The organization has calculated that around 98% of all votes will be cast on paper in the presidential election, an increase from 93% four years ago.

“With these multiple processes, the public gets the best of both worlds – election officials use voting machines to count all ballots initially because they are more accurate, faster, and cheaper than counting all ballots by hand, while human checks verify that these machines are counting ballots correctly,” the Brennan Center said.

Indeed, most states are using optical scanning machines that record hand-penned ballots. But the technology is extremely conservative and has been certified multiple times.

The chances of these tabulators being remotely tampered with are non-existent because they’re not connected to the web, Bluetooth, or Ethernet, a story from Bloomberg perfectly illustrated this week.

The swings of 2000 and 2016

Already after the 2020 election, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said it had determined that the election was "the most secure in American history,” and CISA’s “Rumor Control” site has debunked everything from software glitches in voting software to votes being cast by dead people.

Still, hand-marked paper ballots are the “gold standard protection” for American votes, J. Alex Halderman, an election security expert and professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, recently told CBS News.

Why is the country again loving paper ballots? After all, things seemed different after the infamous – and still contested – 2000 US presidential election when George W. Bush beat Al Gore.

Back then, Florida decided the race, and it came down to just 537 votes in the Sunshine State. When Republicans blocked an attempt to recount the votes through the Supreme Court, Bush was declared the winner.

The vote in Florida, we now know, was truly a fiasco. There were punch-card ballots where voters somehow detached a portion of the perforated paper (“hanging chads”) or dented – rather than removed – the punch-out (“dimpled chads”).

There were also “pregnant chads” and “pimpled chads,” and there were also antique lever machines at play. There’s enough circumstantial evidence that after a recount, Gore would have prevailed in Florida and won the general election.

The move back to physical voting was essentially clinched when the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said Russian cyber actors affiliated with the Kremlin targeted election systems in at least 18 states.

Unsurprisingly, the debacle pushed the Congress to pass the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which helped many states to adopt DRE voting systems. As aforementioned, these touchscreen machines store votes directly into computer memory.

But the tide soon changed. The virtual approach didn’t allow for manual recounts, and the DRE’s were hard to check for inaccuracies or meddling – a shift back to paper began even before Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016.

The move back to physical voting was essentially clinched when the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said Russian cyber actors affiliated with the Kremlin targeted election systems in at least 18 states.

After receiving aid of over $800 million in federal funding, most US states rapidly moved away from paperless voting systems.

And the new machines are safe, experts and election officials say. Much greater threats stem from disinformation, voter-registration manipulation, and targeting of tired poll-site staffers.

Of course, with Trump and Musk, you get disinformation about voting machines. But as long as tinfoil-hat people don’t take over, the US elections are safe.