Election Security and Legitimacy

A recent article considered how to minimize the risk of election subversion and stolen elections in the US. The authors observed that, the United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules. The potential mechanisms by which election losers may be declared election winners are: (1) usurpation of voter choices for President by state legislatures purporting to exercise constitutional authority, possibly with the blessing of a partisan Supreme Court and the acquiescence of Republicans in Congress; (2) fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by law- or norm-breaking election officials; and (3) violent or disruptive private action that prevents voting, interferes with the counting of votes, or interrupts the assumption of power by the actual winning candidate. Until recently, it would have been absurd to raise the possibility of such election subversion or a stolen election in the United States. Few cases have emerged in at least the last fifty years of actual election sabotage by election officials, leading to an election loser being declared the election winner, despite other unique pathologies of American election administration.

The authors argue that political opposition must be mounted against those who embrace the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump and who run for office or seek appointment to run elections. Spreading these false claims shows rejection of a commitment to the rule of law, and those who share the false claims deserve to have their positions on the 2020 election relentlessly challenged during their campaigns. If any of these persons attains office, then oversight from more fair-minded, responsible people will be urgently required. Getting such oversight may require new legislation, lawsuits, or even peaceful protests.

They conclude that, the ultimate safeguard of American democracy during this period of democratic instability may be millions of people taking to the streets for peaceful protests to demand fair vote counting and adherence to the rule of law. In 2020, it was enough to avoid election subversion that some heroes stepped up to assure that elections ran smoothly, votes were fairly counted, and a peaceful transition of power took place. Next time, a few heroes in the right places may be inadequate. I fear that only concerted, peaceful collective action against an attempt to subvert election results stands between American democracy and nascent authoritarianism.

https://harvardlawreview.org/2022/04/identifying-and-minimizing-the-risk-of-election-subversion-and-stolen-elections-in-the-contemporary-united-states/

Following public revelations of interference in the United States 2016 election, there has been widespread concern that online disinformation poses a serious threat to democracy. Governments have responded with a wide range of policies. However, there is little clarity in elite policy debates or academic literature about what it actually means for disinformation to endanger democracy, and how different policies might protect it. This article proposes that policies to address disinformation seek to defend three important normative goods of democratic systems: self-determination, accountable representation, and public deliberation. Policy responses to protect these goods tend to fall in three corresponding governance sectors: self-determination is the focus of international and national security policies; accountable representation is addressed through electoral regulation; and threats to the quality of public debate and deliberation are countered by media regulation. The article also reveals some of the challenges and risks in these policy sectors, which can be seen in both innovative and failed policy designs.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1940161220918740

A recent article highlighted the connection between doubts about electoral integrity and general democratic satisfaction. Doubts about the legitimacy of the 2016 US elections continue to reverberate and deepen partisan mistrust in America. A perfect storm followed Republican allegations of fake news and massive voter fraud, Democratic complaints of voter suppression and gerrymandering, discontent with the Electoral College’s awarding of victory to a presidential candidate who lost the popular vote, compounded by intelligence reports of Russian meddling. These issues raise the broader question: how serious do perceived electoral flaws have to be to raise doubts not just about the election but about democracy itself? Do ordinary people actually care about the quality of their elections or are they more concerned with jobs, growth and taxes and/or influenced by partisan cues? And how do attitudes vary among electoral winners and losers? The key findings of this research, based on World Values Survey data, are that doubts about electoral integrity do indeed undermine general satisfaction with how democracy works.

Theories seeking to explain public satisfaction with democracy differ in the importance they place on measures of ‘procedural performance’, such as trust and confidence in parties, the news media and elections, as contrasted with ‘output’ measures of economic policy performance. Moreover, scholars suggest that public judgments of both procedures and policies may be coloured by partisan cues. The relative weight of each of these factors remains unresolved and interpretations differ, in part because studies adopt different comparative frameworks, measures, models and time periods and, until recently, few systematic social surveys monitored PEI (Hetherington and Rudolph, 2015).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0192512118806783

A recent research article considered the impacts of conspiratorial beliefs and populist ideologies perceptions of election legitimacy. Polls report that, contrary to the evidence, one quarter of Americans believe that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 elections. What explains these types of beliefs? This article tests the predictors of public evaluations of electoral integrity in the 2016 American Presidential election, as measured by judgements about the fairness of the voting processes in the 2016 American National Election Study. The authors demonstrate that conspiratorial beliefs and populist values contribute towards citizens’ electoral mistrust. The results suggest that the paranoid style of American politics is alive and well in contemporary US elections.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17457289.2019.1593181?journalCode=fbep20

This research article considered conspiratorial rhetoric about election interference, and their impact on perceptions about election legitimacy. Under what conditions does conspiratorial rhetoric about election rigging change attitudes? The researchers investigated this question using a survey experiment the day before and the morning of the 2016 US presidential election. They hypothesized that exposure to conspiratorial rhetoric about election interference would significantly heighten negative emotions (anxiety, anger) and undermine support for democratic institutions. Specifically, they expected that Democrats who read conspiratorial information about interference by the Russians in US elections, and that Republicans who read conspiratorial information about interference by the Democratic Party in US elections would express less support for key democratic norms. Their evidence largely supported their hypotheses. Americans exposed to a story claiming the election would be tampered with expressed less confidence in democratic institutions, and these effects were moderated by prior partisan beliefs about the actors most likely responsible for election meddling.

In the wake of the 2016 election and Trump’s norm-challenging presidency, literature emerged on the democratic decline in America. One title How Democracies Die became a bestseller (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). Lieberman et al. (2017) place America’s institutional decline and party polarization in comparative perspective. Muirhead and Rosenblum (2019) argue that the “new conspiracism” that Trump engages in (such as calling an election rigged) “operates at the level of citizens’ attitudes and emotions, insisting that the defining elements of political order are not supported” (33–34). Our study has provided an empirical test of this idea. We relied on a clipping from a newspaper and not on a politician’s words. Trump’s own allegations of vote rigging might cause stronger partisan effects, conditioning emotional effects as well. In contrast, a politician’s allegation could be attributed to self-interest, and an “expert” source may be deemed more credible.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053168020959859

A recent research article highlights the shortcomings of internet voting and the significance of transparency to election legitimacy. In the 2018 midterm elections, West Virginia became the first state in the U.S. to allow select voters to cast their ballot on a mobile phone via a proprietary app called “Voatz.” Although there is no public formal description of Voatz’s security model, the company claims that election security and integrity are maintained through the use of a permissioned blockchain, biometrics, a mixnet, and hardware-backed key storage modules on the user’s device. In this article, the authors present the first public security analysis of Voatz, based on a reverse engineering of their Android application and the minimal available documentation of the system. They performed a cleanroom reimplementation of Voatz’s server and present an analysis of the election process as visible from the app itself.

The authors find that Voatz has vulnerabilities that allow different kinds of adversaries to alter, stop, or expose a user’s vote, including a side channel attack in which a completely passive network adversary can potentially recover a user’s secret ballot. They additionally find that Voatz has a number of privacy issues stemming from their use of third party services for crucial app functionality. Their findings serve as a concrete illustration of the common wisdom against Internet voting, and of the importance of transparency to the legitimacy of elections. As a result of their work, West Virginia and one county in Washington has already aborted their use of Voatz in the 2020 primaries.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/specter