The Improbable Resilience of Untrustworthy Election Technology

Despite the fact that American elections are chaotic, error-prone and open to corruption, they seem pretty simple: People show up on election day to vote for one candidate or another. A good election system has to accurately count the number of votes for each candidate and report the totals to the public while ensuring that contests are fair, votes are secret, only eligible votes are counted, nobody votes more than once, and—once cast—ballots are not altered, lost, or destroyed. Since the earliest days of the Republic, results of national elections have been contested and manipulated. Nevertheless, the underlying systems have shown remarkable resilience. Whether by design, accident, or built-in checks and balances, elections have been an enduring democratic institution.

Many people believe that, in an Internet-enabled world, secure, safe voting should be easy to achieve. For example, using known cryptographically secure protocols (maybe even blockchains), a secure website might be developed to relieve voters of the burden of driving to a polling place on election day. While we're at it, we can probably improve on the election algorithm itself, since there is a rich literature on fair voting schemes that more accurately and reliably reflect actual voter preferences. You could imagine a world in which technology sweeps in to rescue voters from the messiness of American elections. Except there is no one in charge of elections. The U.S. Constitution delegates that authority to states and localities. A national election is more than 10,000 independent elections, each one operating autonomously, using its own rules for casting, recording, and counting votes. Losing candidates are often unconvinced that the result is accurate. Although no one trusts anyone else, elections generate public evidence to convince those who voted for the loser that another candidate won. We now know that there are active, well-funded adversaries who are trying to disrupt elections with information and cyberattacks on election systems. Election laws and Constitutional restrictions prohibit many security-enhancing simplifications and therefore complicate the problem of conducting modern elections in such an environment. This talk will address ongoing efforts to maintain trust in election outcomes in light of these obstacles.