Voting has never been more secure than it is now.

This is the best time in US history to vote. Yes, American elections are flawed. They are marred by disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, the inherent strangeness of the Electoral College and recent cases of ballot box arson. But the act of voting itself has been unfairly tainted, most notably by former President Donald Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was fraudulent. This claim is especially preposterous since modern voting procedures are just becoming more reliable—and those voting by mail or by machine in this year’s presidential election can be more confident than ever that their votes will be counted accurately.

One reason for this confidence is the introduction of voting technology that combines the efficiency of machines with the verifiability of paper records. It’s the result of changes that began two decades ago, after system glitches and punch card fragments—Florida’s infamous “frozen children”—led to a fiasco that left the 2000 election results unclear for five weeks. Congress’s response, the Help America Vote Act of 2002, phased out the use of punched card ballots and lever machines in federal elections. Most Americans now vote using optical scanners that process marked results onto paper sheets. In the 2020 presidential election, hand-fed optical scanners were used at polling places in Georgia; An audit of nearly five million votes cast in the state – the largest hand count of ballots in recent U.S. history – confirmed President Joe Biden’s victory. Districts’ error rates were 0.73 percent or less, and most had no change in results at all.

---

About supporting science journalism

If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism. subscription. By purchasing a subscription, you help ensure a future of influential stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

---

While US voting machines are not completely tamper-proof (no machine is impenetrable), as a precaution against remote hacking, the vast majority of them do not connect to the Internet (barring potentially problematic exceptions). In a recent election security update, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said the intelligence community has no evidence that adversaries are attempting to compromise U.S. physical election infrastructure. The ODNI update notes that meaningful intervention in the country’s diverse decentralized systems will be virtually impossible. Instead, foreign actors prefer the easier route of psychological influence, attempting to influence voters or undermine confidence in elections through propaganda and disinformation.

“For a variety of reasons, the potential vulnerability of individual voting machines does not translate into systemic vulnerability,” says political scientist Mark Lindeman, director of policy and strategy for Verified Voting, a nonprofit group that monitors election systems across the country. “Hackers can’t go one-on-one with voting machines. There is a whole set of procedural guarantees to protect them.” Physical ballots also increase the reliability of the system because they can be verified, verified, and recounted. Scientific American spoke with Lindeman about why Americans, despite being so excited about voting, are actually living in a golden age of voting.

(An edited transcript of the interview appears below..)

Verified Voting estimates that nearly 98.6 percent of registered voters live in voting jurisdictions have a paper trail some form. Why is this important?

This is twofold. The paper trail provides reliability. If something goes wrong with the systems (and in some elections we have seen machines count votes incorrectly, never due to hacking, but always due to an error in their configuration), then paper ballots could be used to correct these errors.

Perhaps the even greater value of paper ballots that voters have verified and that election officials use in audits and recounts is to provide assurance. Instead of arguing about whether the machines accurately counted the votes, we can look at the paper voting record and find out. We can move from abstract discussions about technology to observable reality.

Voting machines in the United States are not typically connected to the Internet. In fact, Verified Voting has opposed online voting proposals. Why is this?

We’re all talking about paper ballots that voters can check and election officials can then use to verify vote counts. We view the transmission of electronic ballots, Internet voting in any form, as a step away from what has made elections in recent years more secure than they were 20 years ago when Verified Vote was founded. The country is just now getting to the point where virtually everyone votes with paper ballots that can be verified. Online voting is the exact opposite of this.

If someone claims that an online election (or an election in which a large number of votes were cast electronically) was hacked, I don’t know how anyone can convince people otherwise.

If you vote in this election, how confident are you that your ballot will be counted?

I voted early here in New York State using a handwritten paper ballot and a scanner. New York State has a 3 percent audit rate and I have great confidence that my vote will be counted accurately.

What is a 3% audit?

New York randomly selects 3 percent of the scanners used in elections and manually counts those ballots to ensure they are counted accurately. Most states conduct some sort of post-election audit. The details vary, but the most common model is to conduct some type of percentage test, as is the case in New York.

Has there ever been a heyday for voting before this? (A recent Pew Research Center survey of registered US voters found that approximately every fourth person believes in presidential elections will work at least somewhat poorly.)

I don’t think there has ever been a better time to vote in the US. There was also a time when everyone voted using paper ballots, but to be honest, the election commission was riddled with corruption. No one is really calling for a return to the days of Tammany Hall (laughs).

Paper ballots themselves are not necessarily secure. The paper is fragile. But the system of checks and balances built around paper ballots has never functioned more effectively in the United States than it does now. Election management has become much more professional than even 20 years ago. Election officials are better trained. They are more knowledgeable. It seems strange to me to talk about this as a golden age of elections amidst all this anxiety, but I don’t see any other way to interpret the facts.

What can we do to restore confidence in the American vote?

(Sighs wearily.)

I felt it in all my bones.

I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think it’s worth starting by thinking about reality. Part of this reality is due to existing underlying technology: the fact that our votes are recorded on paper ballots; From a procedural standpoint, the fact that these paper ballots are secure – that most states use them in audits to verify vote counts.

Moreover, the vast majority of Americans actually do trust your local election officials. In my experience, this trust is justified. The election officials I’ve worked with around the country are very focused on making elections work for their constituents. So I really don’t know what it will take to convince people to appreciate all the good things around them, rather than being afraid of increasing fear or morbid assumptions about terrible things that might happen. This may be higher than my salary.

If you could improve one thing about the mechanics of American voting, what would it be?

We can do better at making voting truly accessible than we currently are. I think accessibility is instilled in most voting systems on the market. If we focus more on accessibility from the start, we can achieve more for a wider range of voters.

Can you give an example of accessible voting?

Many states provide some form of touchscreen interface, which may also be equipped with (“rocker pedals,” large buttons that can be controlled by the feet, hands, or other parts of the body), as well as so-called sip and puff interfaces (devices ) which are controlled by breathing). All of this provides voters with different abilities and disabilities the opportunity to interact with the voting machine. They can adjust the contrast; they can adjust the font size. And with audio interfaces, if you can’t see the newsletter, it can be read to you.

All of these interfaces provide a broader range of voters with the ability to mark and vote themselves. And that’s a big improvement over nothing. But I also think that voters with disabilities can attest in many cases that these interfaces don’t work as well in practice as they are designed in theory.

We’re in the early stages of accessibility, and I’d like to see us take it to the next level.