Washington.- On Election Day in the United States there are likely to be long lines to vote and some precincts will run out of ballots. An election office’s website may temporarily stop working and vote-counting machines may jam. Or poll workers may behave like the humans they are and forget the key to a local polling place, so it has to open later than expected.
These types of rulings have occurred throughout the history of American elections. However, election workers across the country have run presidential elections smoothly and accurately tallied the results, and there is no reason to believe this year will be any different.
Elections are the basis of democracy. They are also human exercises that, despite all the laws and regulations that govern their development, can sometimes seem disordered. They are conducted by election officials and volunteers in thousands of jurisdictions across the United States, from small municipalities to large urban counties that have more voters than the residents of some states.
It is a quintessentially American system that, despite its imperfections, delivers reliable certified results that stand up to scrutiny. This is true even in a time of misinformation and partisan bigotry.
“There are things that are going to go wrong,” said Jen Easterly, director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
None of this means that the elections are flawed, rigged or stolen. But Easterly said election offices need to be transparent about setbacks so they can stay ahead of misinformation and attempts to take advantage of routine problems to undermine confidence in election results.
“At the end of the day, we have to recognize that things are going to go wrong. It always happens,” Easterly acknowledged. “It will all depend on how state and local election officials communicate when those things go wrong.”
An electoral failure? This is probably human error
Until not long ago, American voters accepted the results even if their preferred presidential candidate lost.
Even in 2000, when 104 million votes were subject to the decision of Supreme Court justices who ruled 5-4 in favor of conceding victory to Republican George W. Bush as president, his opponent, Democrat Al Gore It didn’t take him long to recognize it. The country turned the page peacefully.
Times have changed radically since then.
With the Internet, false statements and an electorate susceptible to conspiracy theories about widespread electoral fraud, the situation has changed. There is little trust in the system, especially among Republican voters, whose perception has been influenced by the constant bombardment of lies about the 2020 elections from former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate in the November 5 presidential election.
At his campaign rallies, Trump continues to claim that the only way he will lose is for his rivals to rig the election. In reality, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to rig a presidential election in the United States, given its decentralized nature across the country, with thousands of municipal or county electoral jurisdictions in charge.
What is more likely to happen is that there will be simple errors and technical setbacks as happens in all elections.
“When elections approach and you have to review how the system worked, sometimes some problems are detected. They are almost always the result of human error, of incompetence, not of illegal conduct,” said Rick Hasen, an expert in electoral law and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Both voter fraud and election administrator fraud are very rare in the United States. And if it happens, it is not that difficult to discover thanks to the system’s security measures.”
Why is it important to address this topic?
Distrust in elections is real and has serious consequences. Lies that the 2020 election was rigged were a catalyst for the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
And this happened despite the fact that Trump and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits intended to reverse his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden. Not even the commission Trump created while president to investigate the 2016 election in hopes of detecting widespread voter fraud concluded there was one. Police task forces created by a few Republican governors also found nothing during the 2022 midterm elections.
Aside from the trials, Trump’s own attorney general and judicial reviews, recounts and audits conducted in battleground presidential states also found no evidence of widespread fraud. And, in the end, they ratified Biden’s victory.
But it wasn’t enough.
Even in 2023, a sizable portion of Republicans believed that Biden had not been legitimately elected, and conspiracy theories about the election have taken root in Republican-leaning communities.
It would be incorrect to say that there cannot be fraud associated with elections. But compared to 2020, an investigation by The Associated Press in the battleground states where Trump challenged his defeat found only a very small amount of fraudulent elements to alter the elections. In most cases, they were individuals acting alone, not as part of a grand conspiracy aimed at disrupting the election.
“The history of recent decades reflects that voting systems in the United States are very secure,” said Robert Lieberman, professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.
If it’s not fraud, what could happen?
Basic errors, whether human or technical.
In Jackson, Mississippi, a problem with ballots was attributed to inexperience and lack of training. In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, lack of experience was again to blame for voting centers running out of ballots.
Sometimes envelopes used to return mail-in ballots can cause problems. Pennsylvania’s secretary of government recently announced in In this situation, he advised voters to contact their local elections office to find out what to do.
Paper was behind problems with ballot printers in Maricopa County, Arizona, in 2022, which caused significant backups in voter lines.
Possible problems in what is to come
One of the main concerns heading into the 2024 presidential election is the high turnover of personnel in election offices across the country, particularly in some of the battleground states in the presidential race, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor. who directs the Election Law program at Ohio State University.
Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, for example, 10 of Nevada’s 17 counties made changes to the positions of election clerk or recorder, the officials who oversee voting.
Threats and harassment from those who believe in electoral conspiracy theories have fueled the attrition. Despite all the training that election workers receive, there is nothing that can replace the experience of participating in a great election day.
Many of those who have left had years or even decades of experience. In some cases, they have been replaced by people with little or none, and who have sometimes even spread conspiracy theories.
“If there’s one thing to watch out for and worry about,” Foley said, “it’s just that.”
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