How secure and reliable are US elections? You’d be surprised

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — With election season underway, you’re bound to hear from former President Donald Trump that an army of undocumented immigrants is trying to vote in the presidential election. You may hear from Democrats that GOP efforts to pass new voting laws is a form of voter suppression.

Despite that rhetoric, you might be surprised to hear the argument that voting in the US — the act of casting a ballot and the guarantee it will be counted — is better now than at any time in the country’s history.

That’s what you’ll get from David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan and nonprofit group that gets most of its funding from charitable foundations and aims to improve and build confidence in US elections.

I had a long phone conversation with Becker, a former senior attorney in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division who has been working for decades to improve US elections. Our conversation, edited for length, is below:

Actually, voting in the US is better than ever

WOLF: Your first point in talking about US elections is that the system we have is really good and has never been better. Explain that.

BECKER: The fact is, our elections right now — as voters are thinking about whether it’s worthwhile to cast a ballot in this election — our elections right now are as secure, transparent and verifiable as they’ve ever been.

From the security perspective, we have more paper ballots than ever before. Paper ballots are a best practice. They’re auditable, they’re recountable, they’re verifiable by voters, and well over 95% of all voters will be voting on paper in 2024.

We have more audits of those ballots, which confirm the machines work. Those audits are hand counts of ballots to make sure that those counts match what the machine said.

We have more preelection litigation that confirms the rules of the election than ever before. We have better voter lists than ever before, thanks to states having better technology and better data and sharing that data with each other. And then finally, we have more post-election litigation that confirms the results.

We saw that in 2020 where, despite dozens of cases and with additional cases that have been brought in the years afterwards regarding defamation and otherwise, there’s still not been a shred of evidence brought to any court in the country that would indicate that there was a problem with the 2020 election.

So we know the results are accurate.

The other half of that is from the voters’ perspective, it’s easier to participate than ever before. More voters have access to early voting than ever before: 97% of all voters will have the ability to cast an early ballot — everyone except those living in the states of Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire.

Voters in 36 states plus DC will have the ability to vote by mail without any excuse if they want to.

Voters will find, if they want to participate, regardless of who they’re voting for, that it’s going to be an easy process, that they’re going to find it rewarding, that the results will be verifiable. In fact, despite some rhetoric about long lines, evidence suggests almost every voter waits less than 30 minutes in line.

If voters out there are wondering whether to participate, what I’d say is try it, and you’ll see it’s a very easy, convenient, rewarding process.

So why is faith in US elections down?

WOLF: At the same time, polling has shown — and not just in the Trump era, but going back to 2000 — that confidence has fallen, accelerated by Trump, but people have less confidence. If the system is getting better, but people have less faith in it, how can that dynamic be changed?

BECKER: First of all, the data I’ve seen — and I’ve been looking at this since at least 1998 — suggests that there actually has been a radical transformation in voter confidence during the Trump era; that if you looked prior to Trump, what we often saw was that overall voter confidence would remain fairly high, but oftentimes the losing sides’ voters would have less confidence than the winning side.

So in 2004, Republicans were more confident than Democrats. In 2008, it was reversed, but overall it was about the same.

What we’ve seen in the intervening years since Trump has come on the scene is that the constant lies about our election system have had an effect, but only with his hardcore supporters. So a significant percentage of the Republican Party, likely a majority of the Republican Party currently, has serious doubts about the outcomes of elections.

The problem with addressing that, and it’s important to try to address that, is you can’t address it by succumbing to the lies. You have to address the reality of election security and work from there, rather than the fantasy that has been created by losing candidates.

And so we’ve seen places, states actually harm their election integrity by succumbing to lies, doing things like leaving the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which helps them keep their voter lists up to date.

Several states led by Republicans left that consortium in the last couple of years, and their voter lists are going to be less accurate, which means they’re going to have more problems at the polling place during election season.

Are voters needlessly being culled from voter rolls?

WOLF: We have reported at CNN on efforts to purge or clean voter rolls. There’s been a fair amount of concern raised that people who are legitimately registered will be purged. Are you worried about that?

BECKER: What we call voter list maintenance is a normal aspect of election administration.

Most of the states are required to conduct regular list maintenance under federal law. All states do list maintenance in some ways, and that’s because we as a society are highly mobile. About a third of all American voters will move in a given four-year period of time.

If someone moves out of the state, it’s proper that that voter registration be flagged and ultimately removed because they’re no longer an eligible voter in that state. That’s a normal process that happens in every single state, blue and red.

In general, states do their best to get that right.

I think one of the troubling trends I’m seeing is that hyper-partisans in some states are announcing their normal voter list maintenance … very close to an election, as if it’s something unusual, as if it’s some vast anti-fraud effort to try to take credit for that on a partisan basis and perhaps influence the upcoming election.

A good example of this is in Texas recently … they had undergone three years of list maintenance, removed about a million voters. That’s a very normal number for Texas. There are no red flags that I’ve seen, but that took place over a three-year period, and they just recently announced it as if it was a recent development — and it gives voters the false impression that it’s designed to influence the upcoming election, rather than it was just part of their normal activity.

Is an army of poll watchers coming to disrupt voting?

WOLF: Something else we expect is that Republicans, in particular, are organizing poll watchers in a way that we haven’t seen recently. What are poll watchers, and how do we expect them to be deployed differently this year by the parties?

BECKER: First of all, poll watchers are a normal, constructive aspect of our election system. In every jurisdiction, poll watchers from both parties, from the candidates, from the campaigns, are allowed to watch various parts of the process. Could be voting, could be vote-counting, but they also have to adhere to rules so they don’t interfere with that process.

But when poll watchers might, in this divisive environment, think that they have somehow been deputized as vigilantes in polling places or vote-counting centers, we could have problems.

With regard to this upcoming election, I would say it’s actually not a new thing, that we’ve heard the Republican Party say that they’re going to recruit an army of poll watchers. They have literally said this in almost every presidential election since I’ve been doing this work, and it’s never materialized.

It could be that claims of recruiting an army of poll watchers is an attempt to intimidate some voters. And yet it’s hard to organize watchers at the national level and deploy them all over the country.

I’m skeptical that they will actually be successful in doing so, and even if they are, I am confident that election officials and law enforcement will enforce the laws of the state to make sure that they perform their function, which is to be eyes and ears … but definitely not to interfere with voters.

Americans already prove citizenship in order to vote

WOLF: There are efforts in some states and at the national level to change the way in which people would prove their citizenship in order to register to vote. Why not just do that?

BECKER: We have to understand all of the protections in place to make sure that noncitizens don’t vote in this country.

First, it’s against the law. It has been against the law for decades.

Second, and most people aren’t aware of this, under federal law, every single voter who registers to vote has to provide ID when they register … a driver’s license number or a motor vehicles number. Think about what every person has to provide when they go there for the first time. They have to show proof of legal presence and proof of residence. For most people, that is a US birth certificate or US passport. The state has that information.

Lastly, think about the deterrence effect for noncitizens, whether they’re documented or undocumented, against illegal voting. If they’re undocumented, they might have come here under great risk and great stress for whatever reasons they thought were important. … If they registered to vote or cast a ballot, they would be risking deportation for the right to cast one additional ballot in an election in which 160 million ballots are going to be cast. It would be painting a big bull’s-eye on themselves.

We know that this system that we have in place is effective. States have routinely done checks for noncitizens in just the last couple of years. They found literally zero noncitizens to cast a vote. Even Texas had found only 0.03% possible noncitizens. And based on previous activity in the last few years, it’s likely that every single one of those had been recently naturalized.

So why would we enact a law that’s effectively a “show me your papers” act that basically says to every citizen in the United States, we know you’ve already shown your papers to the DMV. We know you’ve already shown your papers to state agencies, but we’re going to require you to go back out and get your papers again, keep showing them to us.

Another question that I think is legitimately raised about some of the recent claims is the timing. The recent bill that was brought in the House was introduced in the summer of this year, just months before a major presidential election, when, even if it was a good idea, would have been impossible to implement in time for the presidential election.

If this was a serious problem for which there was evidence … why didn’t those who claim that noncitizen voting is a problem bring this up in 2020 or 2021, or even better in 2017, when they had a president in power who is apparently very sympathetic to their views? And the reason is because this is about politics, not policy. … It’s an attempt to set the stage for claims after the election that the election was stolen if their preferred candidate loses.

The argument against making every state vote in the same way

WOLF: This year, it’s Republicans pushing for a national voting law. A couple of years ago, Democrats had a proposal to more normalize the process across the country. I’ve also heard it argued by people like Sen. Mitch McConnell that a very diverse set of voting laws administered at the state level is a feature of the system because it makes it impossible to hack. Do we need to have a better or a more streamlined system? Or do you agree with McConnell that it is not such a bad thing to have 50 different voting systems?

BECKER: Decentralization is a security feature of our system. It is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to steal a national election because we don’t have a national election. We have 10,000 local elections going on at the same time, run by different people of different parties, with redundancies and transparency on different machines that are not connected to the internet.

It is impossible to rig a national election, largely due to the decentralization. It is truly a feature.

It is a feature in another way as well. … We’ve seen great innovations come about, not because Washington decided it was a good idea, but because states wanted to try something new. Online voter registration was started by Arizona in 2002. Widespread mail voting was largely started by Republicans in a lot of the Western states. A lot of really good innovations come out of the states, and some of those innovations ultimately become federal policy later on down the road.

Motor voter — the opportunity, when a citizen is engaged with motor vehicles agencies, to also offer them the opportunity to register to vote.

Statewide voter databases — where instead of having a separate file cabinet in each county or city, each state had a voter registration database, ideally with one record for each voter in the state that followed them as they move.

In some ways, we’ve already achieved standardization — just by best practice, as I mentioned, 47 states have early voting. Only three states are outliers on that. We have 40-plus states that have online voter registration, and we have a few states that are outliers on that. We’re getting there naturally without federal government legislation.

If you ask the election officials out there, the people who actually run elections … almost everyone agrees, for instance, that there should be widespread early voting and no-excuse mail voting. It’s wonderful for voter convenience, but it’s also really important for election security.

Places that seek to concentrate all of their voting activity within a 12- to 14-hour period on a single Tuesday are incredibly vulnerable … to events like traffic or weather or power outages. But if you offer widespread, early in-person and mail voting, if any of those occur during that early period, and even if there’s some kind of cyber event or cyberattack, election officials can be resilient against that, and voters can still come back another day.

Election workers feel like they’re under siege

WOLF: We’ve done stories on those professionals and more importantly, maybe, the volunteers who make elections happen and that these people are being targeted for abuse. How big is that problem?

BECKER: It’s a very big problem. It’s something I’ve seen continue now for well over four years.

I work extensively with election officials — both parties, all over the country — and they are exhausted. They are isolated. They are constantly under threat, not just to themselves, but also their families. They have difficulty going out in public sometimes in some of their counties. They will get accosted while they’re shopping for groceries or even while they’re at their places of worship.

And this is happening at least as much in deeply red counties as anywhere else. It is often the Republican election officials who are getting it the worst in counties that have voted heavily Republican in the past.

It’s something that I find deeply offensive. The election officials of our country, these public servants — who are largely anonymous, who don’t get rich, who don’t get famous — somehow managed the highest turnout in American history with inadequate resources in the middle of a global pandemic, and their work withstood more scrutiny than any election in world history. And instead of throwing them a parade like we should have, they have been pounded and harassed constantly.

In 2021, my nonprofit at the Center for Election Innovation & Research started the Election Official Legal Defense Network in response to this, chaired by former (George W.) Bush and (Mitt) Romney counsel Ben Ginsberg and former (Barack) Obama counsel Bob Bauer.

We have recruited a network of attorneys that we pair with election officials who need legal assistance when they have a problem — and the problems most often look like they’re getting harassed by their own county boards or their own county council or their own county law enforcement, and they need some kind of representation and advice, someone who will actually represent their best interests.

We find them a lawyer and pair them, and those lawyers work for them pro bono to help them through that. I’m very proud that my nonprofit can offer that service. But I’m also saddened by the fact that we live in a country where a nonprofit needs to provide basic legal services to these somewhat anonymous public servants because of the harassment they’re experiencing. I can’t wait for the day when we can sunset this effort and no longer need this kind of assistance to election officials.

I’ll also add that as we sit here today, almost exactly three years since we founded EOLDN, the requests for legal services have been steady and are currently increasing after four years.

WOLF: Related to the last election?

BECKER: The harassment might relate to the last election, might be fueled by false claims about the last election, but the harassment is happening now. It affects them now as they’re preparing for the next major election.

Is the US system still stronger than a sore loser contesting the outcome?

WOLF: We can assume that Trump is going to say there’s fraud in the election, because he did it when he won in 2016 and he did it when he lost in 2020. The electoral count system was changed after the last presidential election. Is there any concern about contesting an election, or is the system just simply strong enough to withstand challenges?

BECKER: So we have to define what we’re worried about here. If we’re worried about whether the system is strong enough to prevent a losing candidate from somehow seizing power against the will of the voters, I am 100% confident that our system is strong enough.

I am 100% confident that the winner of the election, the actual winner, will have their hand on the Bible on January 20.

However, I’m very concerned that in the period of time between November 5 and January 20, a losing candidate and his supporters might very well incite anger and division and violence in a desperate and pathetic attempt to seize power. It’s not going to work. It’s a bad strategy, but we’ve already seen with Donald Trump that he has no qualms about making false claims about elections he’s lost.

It is a near-certainty that regardless of what happens in the 2024 election, he will claim victory on election night. It is a virtual certainty that if he loses the election, or if he perceives he’s losing the election, he will continue to spread lies that we’ve already heard about noncitizens voting or voting machines being rigged — and probably a lot of stuff that’s new and irrational, like we heard in 2020 about Italian satellites and German servers and bamboo ballots and dead Venezuelan dictators.

That will not succeed in court. As before, they will have no evidence, because our system is secure, it’s transparent.

But they will spread lies on social media, and there are activists who have been recruited over the course of the past four years in hundreds of counties all over the country, many of them deeply red counties, who are ready to interfere with the process, to protest at vote-counting centers, to harass and photograph and dox election workers, to threaten election workers, to interfere with facilities and potentially with ballots, to potentially get violent.

Even though these efforts will fail, it could create a lot of volatility and danger for these public servants who are performing an essential duty in our democracy. And I do worry about that quite a bit.

It will be incumbent upon members of the losing party’s political leadership to speak very clearly about this.

While we know what Donald Trump, as the candidate himself, will do, because he’s shown it time and time again, and while I don’t expect, if Trump wins, that Vice President (Kamala) Harris will do the same — I think it is likely that, given there are Republican election officials in some states like Georgia trying to … make it easier to challenge the ministerial certification of results. They’re literally handing weapons to rogue members of the Democratic Party who may seek to delay or stop certification, and how that could fuel anger amongst opponents of Donald Trump.

This doesn’t benefit anybody, and so it’s really important that while the primary threat comes from Donald Trump and from his supporters like Elon Musk, who are spreading disinformation constantly and don’t seem to care what the truth is about our elections, there is a possibility Donald Trump could legitimately win. And if he legitimately wins, the antidemocratic forces on the right have opened the door for at least some activity by antidemocratic forces on the left.

On billionaires and elections

WOLF: You talked about Elon Musk getting involved by spreading misinformation. One other tech billionaire is getting out of the election business. Your group distributed money from Mark Zuckerberg for election integrity in 2020. He recently said that he’s not giving any money this year. What are your thoughts on his decision?

BECKER: First of all, going back to 2020, I don’t know Mark Zuckerberg personally. I’ve never spoken to him. But he and his staff waited through 2020 for government to do what it should have done, for government to come in and say, “We have a global pandemic and a presidential election happening the same year, and election officials are facing an unprecedented situation for which they need additional resources.”

Congress and state legislatures were begged for more resources by election officials and they failed. They did not provide close to adequate resources. And by the end of August of 2020, Zuckerberg’s people came to me and asked me what could they do.

I suggested, well, voters are having a hard time understanding how to navigate the pandemic. Let’s give money to the states that want it to help them educate and inform voters how they can navigate it, as long as it’s done on a bipartisan basis.

I can only speak to the funding they gave my organization. That’s what happened. I contacted literally every single election official in those states, almost all of whom I knew personally. And we offered grants.

The conditions were they be used for voter education relating to the pandemic, and that all of the efforts be nonpartisan. Twenty-three states accepted grants. Some of them were deeply red states won by Trump, some of them were deeply blue states won by (Joe) Biden, and every single state got exactly the amount of money they requested.

We used no discretion. We put out a transparent report on that in March of 2021, and I’m very proud of our work doing that.

What I heard from the people with Zuckerberg’s team that I was working with, and what I personally believe, was this was never an ongoing effort to have philanthropy step up and replace the work that government should do. That was never Plan A.

Government should be funding elections. Government should be providing adequate resources, and it’s still failing to do that. But this is specifically with regard to the pandemic, and so from my perspective, I always knew this is a one-time effort.

I will also say that it’s unfortunate to see very partisan attacks on a philanthropist — who has sought to fill in the gaps that government didn’t fill during a crisis — get attacked as he was, while at the same time, there are extremists on the right-wing side who are attempting to do something similar on a smaller scale, with the tools that supposedly will result in more voters being purged and things along those lines.

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