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Voting systems: How they work, vulnerabilities, and mitigation
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Voting systems: How they work, vulnerabilities, and mitigation
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Authors’ Note: Today’s voting systems have strengths and weaknesses. The new report “Voting Systems: How They Work, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigation” was created to explain how these systems work and to discuss vulnerabilities at key junctures that have been exploited by partisans seeking to sow chaos and doubt about the results. It is the authors’ hope that readers—from voters, to trusted community leaders, to journalists, policy experts, and lawmakers—will better understand how elections are run and how votes are detected and counted and will bring an evidence-based mix of skepticism and realism to this foundational feature of American democracy.
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the report “Voting Systems: How They Work, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigation” by Duncan A. Buell and Steven Rosenfeld.
The world of running elections is little understood and widely politicized. Partisans who do not understand the stages of the voting and counting process have been quick to criticize elections as illegitimate when their candidates lose. These critics have made unfounded claims about the operations of voting systems and actions of election workers. Their accusations ignore many of the checks and balances that catch administrative mistakes and are intended to ensure accurate results.
This article was produced in partnership with Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. This excerpt and the full report are both licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Still, election systems, like any large electronic infrastructure composed of subsystems, are not without vulnerabilities that can impede their operation or be exploited by individuals seeking to tarnish the process. One of the biggest problems shadowing the national update of voting systems (following Russian meddling in the 2016 election) has been procedural lapses that caused incorrect vote count results to be released soon after Election Day. These errors were not quickly acknowledged but propelled much of 2020’s election disinformation.
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