President Donald Trump has continued to perpetuate debunked claims about U.S. elections, and now, experts are sounding the alarm to Politico, warning that the president’s rhetoric is the real danger, injecting poison into the electoral process.
In a piece published Saturday, Politico cited conversations with various experts about American elections, in which they warned that Trump’s rhetoric about voting machines being unsafe was doing real damage by potentially sowing distrust in the minds of the public. While noting that there are issues with the systems that ought to be talked about and fixed, they stressed that none of these issues have ever come close to being enough to flip an election, as Trump has claimed for the better part of a decade now.
“Flaws in electronic voting machines have been well-documented for more than a decade by researchers, and states have poured money into bolstering security,” Politico explained. “Still, none have ever been exploited by malicious actors to successfully change the outcome of an election. Now officials are worried that Trump’s latest comments — when he claimed that ‘Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including the security of electronic voting machines’ — could undermine the electorate’s fundamental faith in voting. Without confidence in the system, the entire process could be called into question, as voters choose not to cast ballots or refuse to accept election results.”
“There’s nothing wrong with pointing out vulnerabilities and therefore doing audits or therefore upgrading to a more modern system that uses a paper record,” Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program, told the outlet. “What’s wrong is trying to use those vulnerabilities to spread distrust in elections.”
“I’m not aware of an incident in which a vote has been changed through a hack,” Scott Algeier, executive director of the Information Technology Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also added. “There’s lots of opportunity for that to happen because we have lots of elections, and I think the fact that it hasn’t happened is an indication of how secure the overall election process is.”
Despite the claims of Trump and his MAGA backers, Politico noted that there has been “no evidence” over the years that any malicious actors, foreign or domestic, have been able to hack into electronic systems and change votes. The latest files released by Trump only revealed that “Russian hackers successfully accessed the voter registration databases of a few U.S. states ahead of the 2016 elections,” though they did not alter any votes. China was also able to access certain registration databases, though reports have noted that many states make such records available to the public.
Vulnerabilities in electronic systems have been known about within the industry for years, with efforts underway to spread the word about them and implement fixes. Concerns about Russian interference in 2016 led many states to move away from entirely electronic systems and “towards either using paper ballots or electronic machines with paper trails.”
“As a result, only around 4 percent of registered voters currently live in regions where only direct recording electronic systems are used for voting, ensuring that there is a paper trail documenting how the vast majority of Americans voted,” Politico noted.
“These are machines that very few Americans actually vote on anymore, where they would pick their selections on a touchscreen, and then the computer would record the selection in its internal system and not actually provide any kind of paper record,” Ramachandran added.