The US voting system merits both trust and vigilance

For some time, U.S. voters’ confidence in the electoral system’s integrity has trended downward – but perhaps less dramatically than is widely assumed.American adults who say they are “very confident” or “confident” that elections will be fair declined from 74% to 66% between 2022 and March of this year, according to one poll. While that 8-point dip merits attention, the data still shows that 2 out of 3 voters believe not only that their vote counts, but also that it will be counted accurately.And in the face of ongoing and unproven claims about massively inflated voter rolls, highly unreliable voting machines, and foreign interference in U.S. elections results, that’s good news.Americans still have a good deal of trust in key pillars of the country’s democracy: their local and state governments, which are constitutionally mandated to oversee national and local elections. Immediately after Election Day in 2024, according to Pew Research Center, 69% of registered voters said elections in their communities were administered very well. And, more broadly, a January poll showed that 64% of Americans trust their state lawmakers.“Elections are really more robust and more secure than they’ve ever been,” Georgetown University law and computer science professor Matt Blaze told the Monitor last week, as the White House declassified information it said would suggest the opposite. The highly redacted 269 pages of information released on July 16, President Donald Trump indicated, would show that the U.S. elections system is severely compromised and that the 2020 presidential vote results were interfered with.Numerous analysts, conservative and liberal, have contradicted these assertions. The documents confirm that a foreign government (China) accessed some 204 million voter-registration records. But this information, analysts say, is already publicly available on the internet. And, they add, the documents show that China did not use that information to tamper with votes or, ultimately, to actively influence recent elections.Rather, as The Wall Street Journal noted, the files pointed to consistent and good-faith efforts “spanning multiple administrations – to uncover security shortcomings and work with state and local governments to fix them.”Such preventive measures recognize the need for continuing vigilance and an upgrade of system safeguards. According to a recent report from cybersecurity firm Check Point, Russia, Iran, and China are the principal state actors to monitor. Artificial intelligence is likely to make any planned influence operations easier to scale, through more convincing phishing lures, cloned audio, and deepfake videos.However, as Check Point representative Aaron Rose told NPR in June, “We haven’t seen hard evidence or anything that shows that the back-end systems” – voting machines and ballot counts, for example – have been “breached or manipulated in any way.”When viewing information on social media, Mr. Rose counseled individual voters, “Stop for just a moment and really analyze it.” Before reposting, he urged, “make sure that it’s coming from a reputable source,” by checking the URL.This counsel recalls the approach of former President Ronald Reagan, when negotiating nuclear weapons treaties with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Co-opting a Russian proverb, Mr. Reagan often cautioned, “Trust but verify.”As U.S. government agencies and tech firms engage in boosting trust in, verifying, and protecting the electoral system, the American public can do the same on an individual level.