Believe evidence, not rhetoric: US elections are safe and trustworthy
Whoever wins the presidential contest today, Americans — Republicans, Democrats and independents — should accept the results of the election, which will be safe, secure, transparent and trustworthy.
Former President Trump, the only president in U.S. history who has refused to acknowledge the results of a presidential election, claims that Democrats can only win if they cheat, and has even insisted he would have carried California in past elections if not for fraud. As in 2020, Trump continues to disparage mail-in voting, falsely suggesting one-fifth of mail-in votes in Pennsylvania are fraudulent and insinuating the U.S. Postal Service loses ballots.
We don’t need a repeat of this horror film, nor of the violence that followed on Jan. 6, 2021. As President Obama said at the Democratic National Convention, “We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse."
According to multiple reports, Trump intends to declare the race “stolen” from him before the vote counting is complete — just as he did on Election Night 2020, when he falsely announced, “Frankly, we did win this election.”
The 2024 Trump campaign playbook is also revealed in the record number of pre-election lawsuits. While lawsuits from both parties are typical in every cycle, GOP efforts, led by the Republican National Committee’s eerily entitled “Election Integrity Unit,” focus heavily on cases lacking legal merit, seemingly intended to erode public confidence in election integrity.
Democrats cannot entirely absolve themselves from contributing to the diminishing distrust in our elections. Congressional Democrats raised objections to certifying the Electoral College in 2000, 2004 and 2016, not due to serious concerns with election administration, but solely as a political stunt at the expense of sewing doubt for political gain. While these examples are de minimis compared to the scale of Donald Trump’s election conspiracy in 2020, the seeds of uncertainty were thus sown in the political soil.
The truth remains: Our elections are safe, secure, transparent and trustworthy. In fact, Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security declared the 2020 election to be “the most secure in American history.” The 2024 election will likely be even more secure, with paper ballots used in 98 percent of voting jurisdictions and with every vote in battleground states.
Are you listening, Elon Musk? We are already using paper ballots almost universally.
Beyond high-profile lies about our elections, why is it so hard for Americans to believe our elections are secure and trustworthy? Part of the challenge lies in the complexity of our decentralized system. We don’t have a single national election for president but rather 50 state elections for electors, spanning 10,000 jurisdictions across the country.
In 2020, states adapted hastily to the COVID-19 pandemic, implementing expanded vote-by-mail options. This shift led to counting delays and a “red mirage” effect, whereby Election Day votes counted first temporarily showed Trump in the lead.
Some states with close results in 2020 improved their election processes — much like Florida did after the 2000 Bush v. Gore debacle. Florida set the “gold standard” with bipartisan changes that included ballot standards, expanded early voting, increased access to absentee ballots and faster vote counts through “pre-processing” — meaning that mail-in ballots are verified and prepped for tabulation before Election Day and even counted before the polls close.
Michigan has improved its election administration in the last four years, introducing early in-person voting and laws to expedite absentee ballot processing, improvements that should increase confidence in the results. In Georgia, record turnout has accompanied efforts to streamline voting and expedite counts, despite attempts by a partisan Election Board to slow down counting.
But in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where absentee ballots can’t be processed until Election Day, delays are likely. Arizona permits mail ballot drop-offs until 7 p.m. on election night, which could delay counting.
North Carolina faces the greatest challenges thanks to a new GOP-backed law that could slow result reporting and more restrictive absentee ballot deadlines that, combined with Hurricane Helene’s impact, could create a turbulent post-election period. In a worst-case scenario, think of Florida in 2000.
Election officials from both parties are urging patience. If the election is as close as the polls suggest, we may not know the outcome for a few days. This is not a flaw in the system but a feature of its design.
A harder truth is the real possibility of violence. Election workers nationwide have received death threats. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, has been outspoken about the need to protect election workers while Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, describes the election tabulation center in Phoenix as a “fortress.”
“It will get loud and it will get uncomfortable,” Richer recently told me about potential post-election turmoil, noting that his office has deployed more security resources than are “really reasonable,” including drones.
Yet there are also bright spots in this election cycle. We are not in a pandemic, and states have made efforts to speed up vote counting. Although Pennsylvania has not passed legislation to allow earlier processing of mail-in ballots, updated counting rules and new equipment may accelerate results.
Perhaps most uplifting is the emergence of trusted bipartisan leaders in key swing states, who are standing by to observe the elections and vote counts, and verify the integrity of each state’s election administration.
In Arizona, this group includes former Gov. Jan Brewer (R) and State Rep. Daniel Hernandez (D); in Wisconsin, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (D) and former Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen (R), with similarly influential bipartisan partnerships in six additional swing states including Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Hampshire.
Americans can and should have confidence in our elections. Yet as we brace for counting the votes, Arizona’s Maricopa County Recorder, Stephen Richer told me that to minimize the violence, “I would ask leaders to be judicious in their remarks,” adding, “I know that's not really the hallmark of politics these days.”
Fortunately, in eight critical battleground states, leaders have emerged to do just that and to instill confidence in an electorate that, regardless of who wins, will still accept the results of the election — the bedrock principle that must continue in furtherance of our nearly 250-year experiment in representative government.
Margaret Hoover is the executive producer of the PBS documentary “Counting the Vote” and an advisor to the Democracy Defense Project.
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