An editorial from The Herald-Dispatch
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — How much confidence do Americans have in the accuracy of election returns?
Some, but not enough.
The “hanging chads” of the very close 2000 presidential race helped voters understand the importance of the details in both voting and counting ballots. But the rise in recent years of cyber crime and the increased automation of the election process have raised new concerns.
About 62 percent of Americans say they are very or somewhat confident that votes are counted accurately, according to a recent Gallup poll. That’s down from almost 75 percent in 2004.
Hacking incidents this year have not helped. Voter registration systems in Arizona and Illinois have experienced attacks, leaking thousands of voter registration records. In January, more than 17 million voter registration records from Washington, Delaware, Rhode Island and Ohio were stolen.
Some have even suggested Russian-based hackers could try to tamper with the election, although cyber crime experts told The Hill news service that the hackers impact in other European elections is less about actually changing the results and more about creating “a perception that the results are in question.”
Election officials across the nation insist that safeguards are in place to prevent hackers or others from “re-engineering” the results nationally or locally. Interesting that those polled by Gallup were much more confident – more than 80 percent of respondents -in their local voting systems than they were in the national system as a whole.
Politicians also need to recognize that undermining confidence in the election system with vague claims of fraud and corruption is a slippery slope. That might help them get elected one time, but ultimately eroding confidence in the election system undermines our democracy and hurts us all.
Any suggestion of voter fraud of any kind should be formally reported and investigated thoroughly, and offenders need to be dealt with harshly.
Sadly, most of the fraud uncovered has been committed by elected officials and those running for office, and most of the accusations about fraud are made by politicians and those running for office – too often for their own political gain.