In an era of deep political divide, half of registered voters in the
U.S., said they expect to have difficulty casting their ballot in the
2020 election, according to a Pew Research Center poll.
With early voting already underway, President Donald Trump has made a
series of false statements claiming mail and voting is rife with
fraud and encouraging supporters to go into polls and watch very
carefully. As far as the ballots are concerned, it's a disaster.
This is going to be a fraud like you've never seen.
In October, 2020 mayoral candidate Zuhal Merza Muhammad was arrested
in Carlton, Texas, and charged with over 100 counts of voter fraud.
But according to some analysts, voter fraud on a national level in
the U.S., either with mail in ballots or at the polls is extremely
rare. The United States election system is actually very safe.
There are areas where we might want to do a little better, but the
general overall view of American elections is safe.
I think our system is really strong because of federalism.
Federalism makes it very difficult to do any sort of coordinated
hacking. Millions of people are voting before Election Day in 2020,
and turnout could surge to 160 million voters by November 3rd, over
60 percent more than in 2016.
Covid-19 and social distancing have only added to the complexities of
voting, with millions expected to vote by mail for the first time and
all but about a half a dozen states allowing some type of early
in-person voting. So with fears of voter intimidation, outdated
election machines and mail in ballot fraud, just how secure are
American elections and what safeguards are in place to protect the
results?
While most experts agree voter fraud on a national scale is unlikely.
A bigger concern for the 2020 elections, according to analysts, is
voter intimidation.
At the September 2020 presidential debate, President Donald Trump
urged his supporters to go to the polls and look out for potential
election issues.
I'm urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very
carefully because that's what has to happen.
I am urging them to do it.
Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring issued a statement calling
Trump's rhetoric dangerous, saying both state and federal protections
are in place to protect voters from being harassed.
Nevada Attorney General Erin Forde tweeted, Trump wasn't talking
about poll watching, he was talking about voter intimidation.
Poll watchers are appointed by a candidate or political party to
observe and monitor an election for potential issues.
Every state has its own laws regarding poll watchers, including the
number of people allowed into vote centers and what they can and
cannot do. Poll watchers are an important and legal part of the
democratic process, voter intimidation is not.
In January 2009, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the
New Black Panther Party for self-defense and three of its members
alleging that defendants intimidated voters in Philadelphia during
the November 4th, 2008 general election.
A few months later, most of the charges were dropped.
Poll watchers can themselves get a little rowdy, too,
and they can because they are representing a particular
political side, start calling out or questioning or
delaying or using various tactics that are scary
and essentially meant to intimidate and
can intimidate even poll workers, not let alone voters.
And following the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race, the Democratic
National Committee filed a 10 million dollar lawsuit against the
Republican National Committee, accusing it of sending off-duty police
officers to harass and intimidate black and Hispanic voters.
After the filing, a federal court issued a consent decree that
subjected the RNC to reviews of its poll monitoring activities.
That expired in 2017.
The RNC is recruiting about 50000 poll watchers to be on the lookout
for problems on Election Day in 2020.
Sometimes you see exaggerated claims and you'll see claims like just
the fact that there's a poll watcher in the precinct that somehow
intimidation, that is not true.
If the poll watcher is engaging in
intimidating behavior, you know, talking to voters, trying to coerce
voters, pressuring voters.
Yeah, that's voter intimidation.
But that rarely happens.
Election officials in every state have the ability to immediately
throw out of a polling place and a poll watcher that is doing
anything other than observing.
So I think a lot of those stories are, frankly, exaggerated.
There are safeguards built into the system to combat voter
intimidation. Poll workers who are there to help voters will make
sure that poll watchers follow the rules and local election
officials, voter protection hotlines and state officials are also
available. There is essentially a team of lawyers in every city and
town on the phone and ready to help and
do what needs to be done and go to court, if necessary, to make sure
that the voting happens in a smooth and orderly process.
It is also against the law to deploy federal troops at polling places
and state and local laws, place limits on police officers.
People tend to be concerned about voter intimidation, historically.
But there's often, at least in my data, I don't see a lot of
evidence that people actually, when they get there, that they
find that there's voter intimidation going on.
But, you know, every election is different and local conditions
vary a great deal.
With coronavirus casting a shadow over the 2020 elections.
Many states have made it easier than ever to vote by mail, but many
Americans remain deeply skeptical of mail in ballots.
According to a Pew Research Center poll taken ahead of the November
2020 election, 43 percent of Republicans thought voter fraud was a
major problem with mail in ballots in past presidential elections,
compared with 11 percent of Democrats.
The Heritage Foundation listed what it said were a sampling of voter
fraud instances between 1982 and 2020, including over a thousand
criminal convictions, some involving absentee ballots.
We need absentee ballots for people who can't make it to the polls
because they're sick or physically disabled or out of town.
But the problem with them is that they are the most
vulnerable to not only intentional wrongdoing, but also to
errors and mistakes.
And that's because they're the only kind of ballot that is voted
outside the supervision of election officials and outside the
observation of poll watchers.
They also make voters vulnerable to coercion and pressure in their
homes, the kind of thing that can't actually happen in polling places
because that kind of electioneering is prohibited there.
On several occasions, President Trump has also called into question
the validity of mail in ballots.
As far as the ballots are concerned, it's a disaster.
They're sending millions of ballots all over the country.
There's fraud. They found them in creeks.
They found some with the name Trump, just happen to have the name
Trump just the other day in a wastepaper basket.
They're being sent all over the place.
This is going to be a fraud like you've never seen.
But most experts say there are relatively few instances of voter
fraud in relation to mail in ballots.
In September 2020, FBI director, Christopher Wray, told Congress that
he has seen no sign of voter fraud on a national level.
Now, we have not seen historically any
kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election,
whether it's by mail or otherwise.
We have seen voter fraud at the local level from time to time.
And some experts say that when election fraud does occur, it is
usually easy to detect.
In 2018, a congressional house race in North Carolina was overturned
following allegations of absentee ballot fraud.
And in August 2020, a New Jersey judge ordered a new election be held
for a Patterson City Council seat after a city councilman was charged
with voter fraud. What is a far bigger problem, according to
analysts, is invalidated ballots.
It is far more likely that things go awry because of human error
rather than something nefarious and malicious.
So people, when they are filling these out, make mistakes.
It's their first time doing this, they don't know what they're doing
and they don't have the assistance necessarily of a poll worker there
to help them through the process.
Covid-19 has only added to those problems.
In the 2018 general election, a quarter of the roughly 120 million
Americans who voted did so by mail, with many people avoiding public
places and more than a dozen states relaxing mail in ballot
requirements due to the coronavirus pandemic, that number is expected
to surge. In general, mail in ballots are rejected for two reasons,
according to analysts. Election officials not being able to verify
voter signatures and ballot arriving by mail after the deadline.
So ballots are rejected because they don't meet some criteria.
Either they're late or they are not signed
or there's some sort of ID component missing.
It's certainly going to take a lot longer in places, places, you
know, don't have the experience sort of to process that many ballots.
And also voters are more confused when they do a new
experience. So the possibility of more rejected
ballots increases substantially.
During the June 23rd 2020 state primary in New York City, one in five
mail in ballots were rejected for a variety of reasons, including
missing signatures and ballots that arrived late.
In California,
More than 100000 ballots were rejected in its March 3rd 2020 primary,
nearly 48 percent more than 2016.
Of those ballots, 70000, arrived late and 27000 voters either forgot
to add their signature or the signature was declared a mismatch by
officials. One thing to know is that many states, at least five, have
been using vote by mail for a long time and they're really good at
it. So this is a policy that we have tried and used and succeeded
at. So that's the good news.
The next news is that we had to shift a lot of policies
this year in order to accommodate social distancing voters who are
sick and managing everything that we have to manage in the midst of a
global pandemic. So that makes things a little bit more complicated.
But remember, the vast majority of Americans these days are
going to their grocery stores.
They're going to their pharmacies.
They're going to retail establishments, all of whom have put in the
kind of health safety protocols recommended by the CDC and others,
line spacing, you know, wearing masks, sanitation stations.
There's no reason the same can't be done ㅑn polling
places. With an increased number of voting options and renewed
interest in the election, turnout in the 2020 election could surge to
an estimated 160 million voters, over 60 percent more than 2016.
But according to a Pew Research Center poll, there's a stark contrast
in how Democrats and Republicans plan to vote.
The survey found 80 percent of President Trump supporters plan to
vote at an in-person polling place versus 58 percent of Vice
President Biden supporters who plan to vote by mail.
If you vote by person, you go in, you fill out your ballot, you put it
through the machine. Now when you put it through the machine, the
machine has an automatic sensor that essentially can spit it
back out at you if you voted twice for the same office or
if you didn't vote for a particular office.
Now, it may be that you just want to put through that blank ballot
and you can force it through which the machine will allow you to do
on the second try.
But the machine gives you immediate feedback about voter error.
That doesn't happen under vote by mail.
In the U.S., more than 80 percent of voting machines are made by three
companies, election systems and software Dominion voting systems and
Hart InterCivic.
And while the companies are private, the mostly unregulated industry
has come under increased scrutiny from policymakers regarding how the
machines are made and their susceptibility to hacking.
In January 2020, the CEOs of the three companies went before Congress
to discuss supply chain issues, cybersecurity, employee background
checks and corporate ownership.
That hearing came on the heels of a July 20q19 warning by the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence describing the Russian government's
repeated attacks on America's election infrastructure.
The committee said attacks by the Russian government occurred from at
least 2014 through at least 2017, and there was an urgent need to
replace outdated voting systems in the U.S.
with voting machines that have a paper backup.
The report also said there was no evidence that any votes were changed
or voting machines were manipulated.
Since the 2016 election, the U.S.
has taken big steps to improve its voting systems.
According to experts, voting machines need to be replaced roughly
every 10 years for security and reliability issues.
In 2013, Congress and 380 million dollars to the states for
cybersecurity improvements, along with another 425 million in 2020.
During that time, the U.S.
has also continued its transition from paperless voting machines to
polling place scanners that read paper ballots, which are less
vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Just like everything in American elections, the state of machines
varies from state to state, and different states have different rules
about sort of reviews of the machines, whether they have audits,
whether they need to inspect the machines for for essentially aging
and getting old. There are funds that Congress put in place not only
after the Help America Vote Act for all of the states to update their
voting machines, but funds that were recently also sent out to update
voting machines. And it is not just voting machines that are under
attack. In September 2020, Microsoft said over the course of several
months it detected cyberattacks coming from groups inside Russia,
China and Iran, targeting both the Trump and Biden campaigns.
The company said that the majority of attacks were detected and
stopped by security tools built into its products, but indicated more
attacks are expected.
In October 2020, national security official said both Russia and Iran
have obtained voter registration information and are attempting to
influence the U.S. presidential election.
But despite these issues, analysts say that because the U.S.
election system is decentralized and mostly run at the local level,
it makes it very unlikely voter fraud will take place on a national
scale. So one of the real advantages of our election system is
that it's a federal system.
So you have like four thousand election districts and they're all
doing something different, you know, and they're all very localized,
they're not interconnected.
And this is what really makes our votes secure from hacking.
There's not one place to enter.
You can't grab a vote electronically and change it.
It's really not possible to get to the machines inside and hack
them. So we have safeguards in place along the way in
every step.
And it is a well run machine
overall that is happening across the place.
So these claims of massive numbers of
people doing things again, that requires a certain amount of
coordination that is just not happening.
Moreover, at every step along the way,
we have well thought through safeguards in place to
prevent just this kind of thing from happening.