Election expert Rick Hasen has a new book out called “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy.” The Wall St Journal provides an essay based on his thesis. It’s pretty chilling:
As the Iowa fiasco suggests, the most likely reason that your 2020 vote may not be counted isn’t fraud, suppression or hacking—it’s incompetence
Over the past decade, a familiar frame has developed in the contentious debate over voting rules: Republicans express concern about voter fraud and enact laws supposedly intended to combat it; Democrats see these laws as an attempt to suppress Democratic votes, press for measures to expand voting access and rights, and worry about cyberattacks intended to help the GOP at the polls. It is an important debate, in which I have taken part, but it misses a deeper, more urgent reality: Most American voters in 2020 are much more likely to be disenfranchised by an incompetent election administrator than by fraud, suppression or Russian hacking.
While most election officials who set the rules and count the votes do a good job, often under serious budget constraints, we cannot ignore the weakest links in the chain: those bureaucrats who increase the chances of a protracted and divisive 2020 election meltdown. Fortunately, it is not too late to take steps to try to fix the problems.
He goes on to recount the stories of two of the most notorious examples of incompetence, malfeasance and suppression in both the Democratic and Republican parties, Brenda Snipes in Florida and Brian Kemp in Georgia. This is a bipartisan problem, although the Republican administrators tend to be consciously fraudulent while the Democrats are lazy and incompetent.
Here are some of his recommendations:
If we were thinking about long-term solutions, we might take several steps—most important, following other advanced democracies such as Australia, Canada and the U.K. in having elections administered nationally by a nonpartisan agency, with universal voter registration and a national voter-identification number. Many see the highly decentralized nature of our election system as a strength against attacks (which would be isolated in one place), but it is much more of a weakness. Having different voting machines, different rules and people with widely varying levels of training conducting the same election increases the chances of a problem somewhere.
Unfortunately, our deeply divided country has no appetite right now for redesigning our electoral system or debating the proper mix of federal, state and local control over elections. Regardless of what we might do in the future, the urgency of 2020 demands that we take some steps now to remove as many weak links as possible.
It is not too late for governors or secretaries of state in some places to suspend or replace election administrators with records of incompetence. It took years of Ms. Snipes’s foul-ups before the Florida governor used his powers to attempt to remove her. (Mr. Scott tried to remove Ms. Snipes when he was governor; she resisted but ultimately made a deal with Florida’s new governor, Ron DeSantis, to resign from office in January 2019 with her “dignity and name restored.”) Governors and secretaries of state aware of election-administration problems should not wait too long next time.
Those who approve new voting equipment need to ensure that it can be operated competently by poll workers and isn’t vulnerable to hacking. Systems using hand-marked paper ballots (such as ballots filled out with pencils and put through optical scanning machines) should be considered the gold standard. Newfangled ballot-marking devices that use a bar code for tabulating votes should be studied further to make sure they are secure and reliable. At the very least, states using such machines should pass laws requiring that the human-readable names printed on the ballot, and not a bar code readable only by machine, should be dispositive in the event of a recount. This is currently up for debate in Georgia, but it shouldn’t be; No one should have to trust a computer to tell them what a ballot actually says. There must be some way to audit results to ensure that the vote totals announced by election officials match voter intent.
State officials also need to push local administrators to better train poll workers. In 2016, the vote counting in Detroit was so bad because of poll-worker error that the city couldn’t even conduct a recount of the ballots when it was requested by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. The snafus led to cries of fraud by Republicans, even though a later investigation by the Republican Michigan secretary of state’s office found only incompetence, not intentional misconduct.
State and local election administrators must act now to assure the security of voter-registration and voting systems. Some state and localities resisted federal help in 2016, and we will see what kind of cooperation occurs in 2020. Still, given the much more substantial resources and intelligence assets of DHS and other federal agencies, now is not the time for states and localities to go it alone.
Finally, each state should have a contingency plan in place if election day is met with a cyberattack or natural disaster. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the possibility of an attack on the electrical grid in a Democratic city in a swing state—Detroit in Michigan, Milwaukee in Wisconsin—on election day. A recent article in The Journal described Russian hacks into systems that control American infrastructure, such as power grids and dams. These followed successful attacks begun in 2015 by the Russian government on Ukraine’s electrical grid, which led to a series of electrical outages.
Here in LA, we are facing a big problem in the upcoming elections. Anyone who lives here needs to pay close attention if they plan to vote in the primary.
I appear on Brad Friedman’s radio show/podcast frequently to talk about politics in general. (Tom Sullivan and I both came on this week to talk about all of it.) But Brad is an especially important voice on this issue, having sounded the alarm about election irregularities for many years. Here he is on KCBS this week talking about our potential local disaster:
There is always an impulse to run with conspiracies in situations like this. And it’s always possible that there is one. After all, look what we saw happen in 2016. But this is the biggest threat we have — along with the lack of trust in the system that inevitably follows.
I would have thought after 2000 that we’d deal with it. But there are people who believe they benefit from this problem who are not going to allow us to do the things we need to do to fix it.
We need to put this at the top of the reform checklist. It couldn’t be more important.