Election security in the US is improving (a lot), but it’s not yet where it needs to be. Improving the security and robustness of our elections is important whether your preferred candidate won the last election or not.
And let me repeat again: there are indeed serious weaknesses and flaws in the tech and processes used in US elections, and there will always be. But that does not in and of itself mean that any particular election has been stolen or outcome tampered with. Maintain perspective.
One of the things about working in this area is no matter what you do, no matter how truthful, someone wants to either exaggerate or dismiss it.
This is the impedance mismatch between politics and science. One rewards saying “look, it’s simple...” and the other, “no, it’s not quite that simple...”.
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Don’t make the mistake of treating the delay in getting results this year as evidence of some kind of systemic problem that we urgently need to solve. This was a tight election held under extraordinary conditions, and yet we learned the outcome within a few days. That’s not bad.
The big lesson learned this year on election processes is that state legislatures need to provide more clarity (in advance) on how to flexibly handle voting in emergencies, in ways that better resist political gamesmanship during the emergency itself.
This was not the first election disrupted by a crisis. Sandy, for example, wiped out polling places and displaced voters. We generally handle emergency voting poorly, in a way that often needlessly confuses and disenfranchises voters. We can and should do better.
Yes, it will make little difference to a base that would cheer him for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, but still, wow.
One group this story has potential to influence (and it’s unclear how many voters are actually in it) would be people who were taken in specifically by the “he’s a brilliant businessman” mythology.
For the record, I led the team that discovered and published the first trove of exploitable vulnerabilities in an ES&S voting system, and am well aware of their danger. Many of them haven't been fixed, and that's horrifying. But there's been scant evidence of their exploitation.
It would be both personally satisfying and career enhancing to learn that these vulnerabilities were being exploited to rig elections. But the evidence of this just isn't there. And fortunately, election security is improving, albeit more slowly than it needs to.
Yes, these are serious problems. And it's maddening that many haven't been fixed. But the existence of a vulnerability does not mean that it has been exploited. Don't spread exaggerated BS.
There are real vulnerabilities in voting and election systems; bad actors could possibly exploit them to disrupt elections. But my bigger concern is technical risks being EXAGGERATED (deliberately or unwittingly) to cast unwarranted doubt on the integrity of our elections.
The President is making wild, unsupported claims that the November election will be rigged. Don’t feed this false narrative with exaggerated stories about security vulnerabilities. Election tech is far from perfect, but it’s also significantly improved, along with safeguards.
There are well-meaning people, particularly on social media, who hear that there’s some vulnerability or weakness in some voting machine and jump to the conclusion that that means elections are being actively stolen. And that exaggerated, distorted message is what gets amplified.
If Trump loses, how would his refusing to acknowledge defeat play out? On January 20th does he try to convince the Secret Service to barricade the White House? Does he lock the guy with the football in a closet? Or does he just try to knock Biden off the inaugural podium?
None of those things seem very likely to work.
Yes, I understand possible shenanigans that might be played out to try to win the electoral college despite not actually winning electors. I’m talking about if that fails. I don’t think there’s any way he can hold on after that, short of instigating a violent insurrection.
This is the best summary I've seen so far of the PA "discarded ballots" story. Appears plausibly at least partly a consequence of PA's strict court-imposed rules requiring "naked ballots" to be discarded. washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/…
Whatever happened, an important lesson of this story for voters is to read and follow the instructions for returning ballots very carefully. There's more to it than just sticking the ballot in an envelope and mailing it!
Also, it appears that the ballots in question were all from military voters, in which case they might have been on a national "generic" all-write-in ballot called the FWAB. FWAB ballots are a different format from county-printed mail-in ballots, increasing chances for confusion.