Thread by @mattblaze

People who study election technology have been warning for years that there are security weaknesses in voting systems, but have taken pains to point out that this is not the same as rigged elections.

Unfortunately, sloppiness about this distinction on the part of over-eager advocates helped set the stage for the misinformation currently being used to sow doubt about the current election.

Facts and nuance matter a lot here. Please be careful not to exaggerate.

There are silly people asserting that the fact that some election tech has bugs means that elections are rigged. That makes no sense. They are, in effect, claiming that every election in the last 20 years reported the opposite of the true outcome, which is obviously nonsensical.

While there are indeed vulnerabilities in some election tech, that's long way from actually rigging an election. Asserting that an election was actually rigged via a software flaw is an EXTRAORDINARY claim, something experts have been looking hard for for years and not found.

n fact, advances in election security over the last decade, such as risk limiting audits, have made it harder than ever to actually exploit software flaws. We still have much work to do, but claiming an election was rigged through software flaws requires very compelling evidence.

To my knowledge (and this is my field of expertise), no serious evidence has yet been found or presented that suggests that the 2020 election outcome in any state has been altered through technical exploitation. Period.

We should, of course, perform post-election audits (such as RLAs) of every contest outcome, as a routine part of elections in the US. Fortunately, there's been substantial progress toward this. Unfortunately, Congress has failed to enact legislation to mandate or fund them.

I've posted this before, but if you're interested in learning about election security and the many complex problems it encompasses, easily the best current overview is this NRC study: nap.edu/catalog/25120/…

I've also written a bit myself on this subject: georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/upl…

In short, while the security of US election infrastructure isn’t where it should be, it is vastly improved over where it was 15 years ago. And while there are indeed security weaknesses, merely pointing out their existence is not evidence that any given election was rigged.

In others words, to credibly cast doubt on an election outcome, you need more than evidence that fraud was hypothetically *possible*. You need evidence that fraud *actually happened* to an extent that altered the outcome. So far, people have merely been asserting the former.