Voting Has Never Been More Secure Than It Is Right Now
Now is the best time in the history of the U.S. to cast a vote. Yes, American elections have flaws. They’re marred by voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, the inherent weirdness of the electoral college and recent cases of ballot box arson. But the act of voting itself has been unfairly tarnished, most notably by former president Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was fraudulent. That claim is especially preposterous because modern voting procedures are only becoming more robust—and those casting ballots by mail or machine in this year’s presidential election can, in fact, be more confident than ever that their votes will be tallied accurately.
One reason for that confidence is the adoption of voting technology that combines machine efficiency with the verifiability of a paper trail. This is the result of a shift that began two decades ago, after system jams and punch-card fragments—Florida’s infamous “hanging chads”—led to a fiasco that left the 2000 election results unclear for five weeks. Congress’s response, the 2002 Help America Vote Act, phased out the use of punch-card ballots and lever machines in federal elections. Most Americans now vote with optical scanners, which process marked selections on paper sheets. In the 2020 presidential election, Georgia’s polling sites used hand-fed optical scanners; an audit of the nearly five million votes cast in the state, the largest hand count of ballots in recent U.S. history, confirmed that President Joe Biden won. County error rates were 0.73 percent or less, and most had no change in their tallies at all.
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