Imagine this troubling but perfectly plausible outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
It’s another extremely close contest, with the winner decided by a few thousand votes in a swing state that results in another Electoral College, but not a popular vote, majority.
A large percentage of the American public, having been subjected to months of disinformation, fake news, and real reports of attempts at election hacking, believe the election was stolen, despite official assurance that no votes were changed. The mishmash of voting systems used, including some that do not have a auditable paper backup, or use paper ballots that are not easily recounted, leads to a crisis of confidence in the U.S. election system. Aggrieved supporters of the losing candidate rally across America, calling for new “free and fair elections” and attempt to challenge the result in court.
An already divided America is even more radically polarized, with some extremists mumbling about civil war.
Far-fetched?
Recall in the last election Donald Trump believed that he lost the popular vote because 3 million people voted illegally, a myth that he repeated at a rally last year in West Virginia.
“In many places, like California, the same person votes many times. You probably heard about that. They always like to say, oh, that’s a conspiracy theory. Not a conspiracy theory folks, millions and millions of people,” he told the crowd.
Russia, or for that matter any other nefarious state or nonstate actor, doesn’t have to successfully hack into election computers or change any votes to create chaos, they merely have to sow the seeds of doubt to give conspiracy theories oxygen.
The major threat to the security and sanctity of the 2020 elections, it could well be argued, is not so much Russian interference as American paranoia.
As anyone who has watched George Bailey fend off panicked depositors in the classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life knows, no bank can survive a run. If depositors become convinced their money isn’t safe, and all try to withdraw their funds at once, the bank will fail. Could American elections fall prey to the same spiraling crisis of confidence?
Unlike many countries in the world, where elections are easily fixed and losers routinely decry the results as fraudulent, America has enjoyed a long tradition where local election boards are (somewhat) trusted, and polling places are staffed with familiar faces. But the switch over the last 20 years from old-fashioned mechanical machines and paper ballots to touch screens and computer databases has now undermined that trust.
Proposals in Congress have focused on tightening cybersecurity, and requiring paper backups, but there is, or was, a better way.
In the 1980s, when I covered local elections as a radio reporter, my local jurisdiction, Montgomery County, Maryland, used a simple and virtually tamper-proof system made by a company called Datavote. Ballots were printed on computer punch cards and voters placed the cards into a small device to make a clean rectangular hole next to their preferred candidate’s name.
Cards were deposited in sealed ballot boxes, collected around midday and again after the polls closed. The cards were loaded into a counting machine at the board of elections, where, when it was time, a button was pushed and all the votes were counted.
It took only minutes, and once the cards were loaded they could be counted as many times as desired.
The beauty of the system is that it was fast, secure, and did not produce any hanging chads such as the plagued punch cards used in Florida in 2000. And the cards were easy to store and easy to recount if necessary. Just load them up and run them through again.
But the fiasco of the 2000 election prompted Montgomery County to junk its Datavote system for touch screens, in the name of progress. It was a case where a clearly superior system was ditched in favor of inferior, shiny new technology.
Some things are simply done faster and safer the old-fashioned way.
There is an somewhat analogous national security problem facing the Pentagon, when it comes to safety and security of America’s nuclear arsenal. The Air Force is planning to spend more than $70 billion to replace the nuclear command and control infrastructure that in some cases dates back to the 1970s.
One of the big concerns is ensuring that nuclear weapons control facilities are not vulnerable to cyberattack, something that wasn’t a major worry through the 1990s, because the old analog systems including radars, satellite communications, and ground stations weren’t connected to the internet.
We can’t go back to a simpler time, but we can apply lessons of the past in improving the technologies of the future.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
