ELECTION INTEGRITYPublic Trust in U.S. Elections Is Decreasing. But Should It Be?
Recent polls show public trust in the integrity of U.S. elections is decreasing, largely among Republicans. But this doesn’t signal that our elections are getting less reliable, scholars said.
Recent polls show public trust in the integrity of U.S. elections is decreasing, largely among Republicans. But this doesn’t signal that our elections are getting less reliable, UC Berkeley scholars said.
In fact, elections in the U.S. are more secure and the results are more accurate than 20 years ago, said David Wagner, a Berkeley professor of computer science. While experts agree there are significant ways to improve our technical voting systems, Wagner said the largest vulnerabilities to election results have nothing to do with how the public’s votes are counted.
“Today, I think the biggest risk is the human element – disinformation, propaganda, the manipulation through the media, targeted efforts to try to get particular populations to vote or not vote and attempts by other countries to breed chaos or interfere in our election,” said Wagner, who serves on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s Technical Guidelines Development Committee that helps set certification requirements for voting machines.
Public trust in elections is an important pillar of a functioning democracy. Levels of trust can impact everything from levels of voter engagement to the likelihood of insurrection.
Through a technical lens, U.S. elections are very secure, Wagner said. In the early 2000s, the technical risks of voting equipment getting hacked was high. Now, many risks have been partly or wholly resolved, he said.
Voting machines must meet protective specifications, and a subset of the votes are audited manually in many states to ensure these systems tallied them accurately, Wagner said.
Still, election processes also have problems, many of which vary by the state or local government that runs them, said Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at Berkeley.
People disagree about whether ballot-marking devices are trustworthy enough to use to reliably and accurately record an individual’s votes, Stark said. There are also issues confirming all votes have been counted, auditing votes after they’re cast and grappling with insider threats, he said. These kinds of challenges were on display in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
“We currently have what I would call ‘faith-based’ elections, where people are saying, ‘Trust me that I did it right,’” said Stark, who invented risk-limiting audits, a method several states have codified into law for assessing whether the reported electoral outcomes are correct.
