How We’ll Know the Election Wasn’t Rigged

Late last October—before health officials in central China began racing to contain a mysterious outbreak of viral pneumonia, before DIY hand sanitizer tutorials flooded YouTube, before nearly 200,000 people in the US had died of Covid-19—legislators in Pennsylvania came together for a rare moment of bipartisan collaboration. For the first time since 1937, Republicans and Democrats passed a series of broad electoral reforms. Their constituents, long bound by some of the most restrictive voting rules in the nation, would now enjoy some of the most flexible. Like millions of other Americans, Pennsylvanians would be able to vote by mail without providing a reason for doing so.

“We were certainly preparing for a surge in mail-in ballots, just because people could do it now,” says Kenneth Lawrence Jr., who oversees elections in Montgomery County, a suburban and rural area just northwest of Philadelphia. With the primary scheduled for April 28, he and his colleagues had about six months to launch the expanded system. They began scaling up their mail-in operations and sending out ballot applications, helped by a new state-run online portal. Then, on March 18, Pennsylvania recorded its first Covid-19 death. A week later, lawmakers voted to delay the primary to early June. Now it wasn't just the mail-in system that needed an overhaul; traditional polling places, ill-equipped for social distancing, would too.

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Lawrence has lived in Montgomery County—Montco, as it's often known—for more than three decades. A lifelong Democrat, he spent most of his career running public affairs for nonpartisan clients, including Merck and Temple University. In 2017, at the age of 45, he became Montco's first Black county commissioner, initially appointed to fill a vacancy and then elected to a full term. Though he is undoubtedly losing sleep over what's coming in November, he remains affable and efficient. Like most of his counterparts across the country, he's focused on ensuring a fair and smooth voting process.

With a major public health crisis looming, that will be harder than ever. Montco has a population close to 831,000. In the 2016 presidential election, only 10,000 voters mailed in their ballots. In this year's delayed primary, that number catapulted to 126,000. Lawrence found himself in a bind. The new law required that all mail-in ballots be tabulated within eight days after the election, but an older law specified that the process couldn't begin until 7 am on Election Day. He didn't have enough staff or equipment to make the deadline. “It took us over two weeks to count them, which is too long,” he says.

As a profession, election administration is all about risk minimization, contingency planning, and thinking on your feet. A general election in a pandemic is the equivalent of the Iditarod. Across the country, officials have suddenly had to become procurement experts. Lawrence rattles off a list: hand sanitizer, face masks, face shields, sanitizing spray, disinfecting wipes, rolls of tape to mark out 6-foot increments on the floor, envelope sealers for provisional ballots. (“People don't want to lick the envelopes, and poll workers don't want to open them up,” he explains.) He expects more than 200,000 applications for mail-in ballots, and he'll at least triple the size of his staff to handle the extra workload.

The United States has suffered through other difficult votes, of course, from the fraud-ridden election of 1876, in which 101 percent of South Carolina voters turned out, to the hanging chads of 2000. Covid-19 presents a historic challenge, and snafus are inevitable—but the goal, as always, is to win voters' trust. “There's a famous saying that the point of an election is to convince the loser that they lost,” says Ben Adida, the executive director of VotingWorks, a nonprofit maker of open source voting equipment. “If you've convinced the loser, you've also convinced the public.”

This past July, at the National Association of Secretaries of State virtual summer conference, some of the country's top election officials traded war stories from a rocky primary season. “We all knew that we were headed into what would be a contentious election year,” Arizona's Katie Hobbs said in her remarks. But the pandemic had thrown everyone for a loop. Georgia had been plagued by interminably long lines as all 159 counties voted on new machines for the first time. “The transition would have been a challenge in the best set of circumstances,” said Chris Harvey, the state's elections director. Throughout the US, officials were deep in negotiations to secure polling places for November, after established sites like schools, community centers, and churches had declined to open their doors. The secretaries also commiserated about the challenges of recruiting and training poll workers. Many of the usual volunteers had dropped out or simply no-showed at the primaries, owing to fears of contracting the coronavirus.

Farther down the ladder, the local officials who actually carry out the secretaries' policies and make do with the funding they receive from the state have struggled too. “It's absolutely very stressful,” says Gina Kozlik, clerk-treasurer for the city of Waukesha, Wisconsin. “It's a lot of weight on our shoulders and a lot of responsibility trying to keep everyone safe.”

Besides staffing and social-distancing concerns, the thing that worries many election officials most about November is the extra time it will take some precincts to tally votes and announce results. Americans expect to know who is president by the morning after Election Day. But that almost certainly won't be possible this year. In the 2016 race, 33 million people voted by mail; in 2020, the figure could reach 80 million or more. Depending on the state, some mail-in ballots won't be counted until a week or more after Election Day.

The longer the tabulating takes, the antsier voters are likely to get—particularly if in-person ballots tend to favor one candidate and mail-in ballots the other. “The primaries were a lesson in that,” says Larry Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center's Democracy Program at New York University School of Law. “You had election results that were very different after you counted the mail ballots.” Norden fears that people will use the mismatch “to delegitimize legitimate election results.” It's a concern Lawrence shares. “We don't want conspiracy theories about who got into the warehouse,” he says.

That's an uphill battle, though, when one of the candidates on the ballot is the nation's conspiracist-in-chief. Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested—without evidence and over the objections of experts across the political spectrum—that the vote-by-mail system is rife with fraud, that it favors Democrats, and that efforts to expand it will make this “the most rigged election in history.” Over the summer, he tried to engineer a slowdown at the US Postal Service, prompting a flurry of state lawsuits. For Trump, a delayed result seems to be synonymous with fraud. “I don't want to be waiting around for weeks and months,” he said at a White House press conference in July. “I don't want to see a crooked election.”

Lawrence is doing his best to take it all in stride, but some hurdles can seem gratuitous. In June, the president's reelection campaign, along with the Republican Party, sued all 67 counties in Pennsylvania, including Montco, to prevent the use of secure drop boxes to collect ballots. They argued that the boxes “have increased the potential” for fraud, but were unable to muster any evidence of actual tampering. If the suit bothers Lawrence, he doesn't let on. “We had security guards at all of our drop boxes,” he says, recalling the June primary. “They were all on county property, all on camera.” And besides, he adds, “people liked them.”

A mail-in ballot's journey to the voter and back is tightly choreographed and controlled. Most states use special US Postal Inspection Service barcodes to monitor ballots in transit. Once they're returned and opened—sometimes by hand, sometimes by machine—they're validated with personal information like Social Security numbers and signature checks. If a vote seems accidental (submitted in the wrong precinct, say) or suspicious (maybe the signature doesn't match the one on file), officials will pull it for detailed human review. Most states offer a digital portal that voters can use to check the status of their ballot and confirm that it has been received. If something goes wrong, or you're worried that it has, every state allows you to cast a provisional ballot in person.

In practice, then, the risk of anything truly nefarious happening in November is far lower than Trump has suggested. To actually steal a presidential election, “the size of the conspiracy would have to be enormous,” says Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes election system integrity. Without a mole in the election precinct or the Postal Service, such a conspiracy would require a coordinated, mailbox-to-mailbox operation, one with access to a huge stolen database of voter signatures and Social Security numbers. “Every study we have had about that kind of election fraud shows that it's exceedingly rare,” Schneider says.

Even smaller efforts are likely to raise alarm bells before they can affect the outcome of an election. This past May, the Postal Inspection Service reported that a mailbox in Paterson, New Jersey—a city voting entirely by mail for the first time—was stuffed with hundreds of ballots, a potential sign that they had been illegally collected from voters. The ballots were disqualified, as were more than 2,300 others whose signatures did not match those on record. In total, about one in five of all votes cast in the election had to be thrown out. Four men were charged with voter fraud, including one winning candidate who was barred from taking office. A state judge has ordered a redo of the election for November 3.

Election officials can also ferret out irregularities by spot-checking the results before they're officially certified. Sometimes this amounts to simply recounting a fixed percentage of ballots by hand to ensure the voting equipment didn't make any mistakes. But recently another, more sophisticated method has gained traction.

Devised in the late 2000s, so-called risk-limiting audits use statistics to minimize the chance of the loser being declared the winner. Officials pull a random, representative sample of ballots from across a county or state, checking only as many as are needed to satisfy the “risk limit,” a kind of numerical comfort threshold. If the risk limit is set at, say, 8 percent, then the audit is designed to catch an incorrect result 92 percent of the time. This means that the scale of the audit is directly tied to the victory margin: If a candidate won in a landslide, a small sample is enough to confirm the results. If the election was a nail-biter, the sample is bigger and the audit takes longer.

Colorado was the first to implement mandatory risk-limiting audits statewide. This year, several states—including Michigan, which President Trump carried in 2016 by a margin of 0.23 percent—plan to use them. Many others have set up pilot programs or will allow individual counties to run their own. While these states are still in the minority, it's a huge leap from 2016, when exactly zero conducted risk-limiting audits.

Fraud protections will be an especially crucial backstop this year as election officials push to get votes in and tallied. In Waukesha, Kozlik has bought four extra optical scanners to relieve congestion at the busiest polling locations and speed the tabulation of mail-in ballots. Each polling place will receive and count the ballots of the people in its district. “We usually do a central count of absentee ballots in one location here at City Hall, but the increase in volume is definitely something that has caused me to look to make changes,” Kozlik says.

Not all areas have the money for more equipment, though, or else they're so underfunded that any money they do get goes to making up existing deficits rather than expanding capacity. In states like Arizona, Alabama, and Louisiana, local election officials can't even afford to replace old voting machines or strengthen cybersecurity defenses for election-related systems.

But in Montco, at least, funding is less of an issue. County commissioners allocated $1.7 million for new equipment after the struggles and delays of the primary. “We purchased machines for opening up the ballots, sorting the ballots, and counting the ballots,” Lawrence says. “We'll have shifts in place to count 24/7, as long as it takes.” That's the mentality of officials around the US heading into this presidential election: Expect a challenge, come prepared, and don't stop until there's an accurate result—one that will convince the loser he lost.

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