States should conduct mandatory pre-election tests on all voting machines to ensure that they are in good working order before a single vote is cast. Most states already have laws in place requiring state officials to test voting machines and equipment in the weeks and months leading up to an election, though their scope varies depending on the jurisdiction.
Admittedly, pre-election testing is not foolproof and can be manipulated, particularly by sophisticated actors. Testing should be conducted on all election machines and equipment, including e-poll books, on multiple occasions prior to the start of early voting and Election Day.
Testing should be carried out with appropriate public notice and in a public forum in an effort to increase transparency and public confidence in the electoral process. Critically, testing must be completed with enough time to allow for effective remediation. Any abnormalities should be reported immediately to officials overseeing election administration and security, and they should be shared between states, localities, and federal agencies to alert other election administrators to potential threats.
Additionally, in order to understand the full extent of election-related risk, vulnerability analysis should be carried out continuously on all election machines and voter registration databases. Once conducted, states will be better positioned to assess where government resources should be allocated and plan for preventative measures and strategies.
Vulnerability analysis should be carried out by qualified, impartial professionals, rather than election equipment vendors or election administrators, who may have an interest in minimizing shortcomings in election machines and downplaying election vulnerabilities. States too can conduct regular vulnerability assessments on their election infrastructure. Some states—including Maryland and Washington—have employed their Air National Guard to conduct cybersecurity testing on public networks.
Suspicious findings should be reported immediately to federal agencies and to other state and local election officials around the country. The federal government could incentivize such analysis via grant programs, including those that exist at DHS, and Congress should explore whether such programs are sufficiently flexible and resourced to support these efforts.
To gain an overall appreciation of the risk to our election systems, the vulnerability assessments discussed above must be matched with information sharing that includes comprehensive threat assessments. For example, information-sharing organizations such as the state-run intelligence fusion centers and the Information Sharing and Analysis Centers ISACs have enjoyed some success, whether in the counterterrorism or the cybersecurity context.
More broadly, the U. For example, Congress should urge the IC to prioritize collection and dissemination of information pertaining not just to cyberthreats but also to specific threats to elections and election systems, ideally through the National Intelligence Priorities Framework—which sets priorities for the entire IC—with the goal of making this intelligence shareable with state and local officials, via the FBI or DHS, in both classified and unclassified formats.
The U. State officials who have appropriate security clearances should also be provided with regular classified briefings on cybersecurity threats and system vulnerabilities.
The ability to share information and synchronize responses in real time is essential to protecting U. Federal bodies and state officials are already coming together to address the issue. In July , the Election Assistance Commission EAC in coordination with DHS, hosted a two-day meeting with election administrators and stakeholders from around the country to address threats to election infrastructure. Coordinated partnership between levels of government—especially as related to voting and elections—has not always been conducted in the most efficient or effective manner.
For example, some state officials voiced frustration after first learning that their state may have been one of those targeted by Russian operatives during the elections through testimony given recently by DHS officials before Congress.
The See Something, Say Something campaign or the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative may offer guidance to set up public education campaigns in the context of election security. Election vendors, for example, should be required to provide notice to states in the event that their systems are hacked, in order to prevent potential problems from arising during elections. The role of federal agencies in protecting election security does not constitute a federal takeover of election administration.
As aptly described by Sen. Updating outdated election infrastructure, conducting mandatory audits, and putting in place minimum cybersecurity standards and testing is essential and requires resources. It is the responsibility of Congress to defend American interests and ensure that our elections, which are central to a functioning democracy, are free, fair, and secure. The federal government and Congress have a duty to allocate funding and assist in the implementation of measures to guard against disruptions in future elections, at the very least in federal elections.
This would not be the first time that Congress provided funds to upgrade election infrastructure. In the presidential election, antiquated punch-card voting machines resulted in thousands of lost and uncounted votes. Steny H. Congress must act now to pass legislation that, contingent upon the adoption of best practices, provides state and localities the necessary funding to:.
In addition to offsetting the cost burdens on state, county, and municipal election administrators—many of whom simply cannot afford to update and secure election machines and databases—federal funding can stem inequity resulting from uneven municipal operating budgets.
Thaler 2 Kenneth F. Greene 2 Larry Garber 2 Larry P. Goodson 2 Laurence Whitehead 2 Lawrence C. Dodd 2 Lilia Shevtsova 2 M. May 2 Richard W. Soudriette 2 Robert A. Smith 1 Antul Kohli 1 Arthur A. Goldsmith 1 Arturo Cruz S. Carter 1 Carl H. Posner 1 Darren Kew 1 David I. Emmerson 1 Donald L. Horowitz 1 Dorin Tudoran 1 Dorothy J. Solinger 1 Driss Khrouz 1 E. Schamis 1 Henry E. Hale 1 Herbert F. Weiss 1 Hilary Matfess 1 Howard B.
Wiseman 1 John M. Castaneda 1 Josep M. Colomer 1 Joseph Y. Jeldres 1 Julio C. Arriola 1 1 Leslie E. Morales 1 Mark J. Gasiorowski 1 Mark R. Doug Lewis 1 R. Frank 1 Rita Abrahamsen 1 Robert H. Suberu 1 Roya Boroumand 1 Russell J. Wilkinson 1 Steven K. Power 1 Timothy M. Amoretti 1 Vali Nasr 1 Vello A. Pettai 1 Venelin I. Articles Subjects: Elections. July , Volume 32, Issue 3 Latin America Erupts: Re-founding Chile Claudia Heiss Chilean democracy has opted to throw off a constitution written by a dictator, and has chosen an assembly to craft a new one.
April , Volume 32, Issue 2 Tanzania: The Authoritarian Landslide Dan Paget With brutal resolve, the ruling party sought not merely to win an election, but to annihilate the opposition. April , Volume 32, Issue 2 Tanzania: The Roots of Repression Nic Cheeseman Hilary Matfess Alitalali Amani While many blamed President John Magufuli for throwing the country off its democratizing track, the truth is that the party that has ruled Tanzania for six decades has always been authoritarian.
Michael Wuthrich Melvyn Ingleby Is there a recipe for defeating a populist? Mark R. Thompson A trio of national ballotings in tell a tale of waxing authoritarianism in Southeast Asia, but things could have turned out worse. A party can win outright by being only marginally ahead of its competitors in most electoral divisions. In the UK general election in , the ruling Labour party won 55 per cent of the seats on just 35 per cent of the total votes.
If a candidate or party is slightly ahead in a bare majority of electoral divisions but a long way behind in others, they can win even if a competitor gets more votes overall — as happened most notoriously in recent history in the US presidential election of , when George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore. To ensure that each vote has roughly the same weight, each constituency should have roughly the same number of voters.
Threading boundaries between and through centres of population on the pretext of ensuring fairness is also a great way to cheat for your own benefit — a practice known as gerrymandering , after a 19th-century governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, who created an electoral division whose shape reminded a local newspaper editor of a salamander. Suppose a city controlled by the Liberal Republican LR party has a voting population of , divided into three constituencies.
Polls show that at the next election LR is heading for defeat — , people intend to vote for it but the , others will opt for the Democratic Conservative DC party. If the boundaries were to keep the proportions the same, each constituency would contain roughly , LR voters and , DC voters, and DC would take all three seats — the usual inequity of a plurality voting system.
In reality, voters inclined to vote for one party or the other will probably clump together in the same neighbourhoods of the city, so LR might well retain one seat. However, it could be all too easy for LR to redraw the boundaries to reverse the result and secure itself a majority — as these two dividing strategies show. The anomalies of a plurality voting system can be more subtle, though, as mathematician Donald Saari at the University of California, Irvine, showed.
Suppose 15 people are asked to rank their liking for milk M , beer B , or wine W. In a plurality system where only first preferences count, the outcome is simple: milk wins with 40 per cent of the vote, followed by beer, with wine trailing in last.
So do voters actually prefer milk? Not a bit of it. Nine voters prefer beer to milk, and nine prefer wine to milk — clear majorities in both cases. Meanwhile, 10 people prefer wine to beer. By pairing off all these preferences, we see the truly preferred order to be W-B-M — the exact reverse of what the voting system produced. In fact Saari showed that given a set of voter preferences you can design a system that produces any result you desire.
In the example above, simple plurality voting produced an anomalous outcome because the alcohol drinkers stuck together: wine and beer drinkers both nominated the other as their second preference and gave milk a big thumbs-down. Similar things happen in politics when two parties appeal to the same kind of voters, splitting their votes between them and allowing a third party unpopular with the majority to win the election.
Can we avoid that kind of unfairness while keeping the advantages of a first-past-the-post system? Only to an extent. Over time, Canadians have come to trust the outcome of elections as truly reflecting their collective will without political interference. Political parties and candidates in the political arena have also learned that they can have confidence in the fairness of the electoral process. Together, these conditions contribute to a meaningful and peaceful environment for elections, and a lively and long-lasting democracy.
Federal elections are governed by a set of laws and procedures designed to allow qualified electors to have an equal say in the selection of representatives in the House of Commons. Electoral integrity is achieved by ensuring that all electoral participants adhere to the rules designed to safeguard voter participation, and by uncovering and applying sanctions to practices that interfere with it.
Elections Canada's electoral integrity program focuses on measuring the quality and soundness of the electoral process to make sure Canadians can trust that an election was fair and that the results accurately reflect the will of Canadians. Throughout the evolution of the Canadian electoral system, legislators have worked to bring about increased accessibility, fairness and transparency to ensure the prevalence of democratic values.
Candidates, nomination contestants those competing for endorsement as a party's candidate in an electoral district , leadership contestants, political parties, electoral district associations and third parties persons or groups who are not candidates, registered parties or electoral district associations are all subject to strict controls. These begin with an obligation for political parties, electoral district associations, leadership contestants and third parties to register, thereby gaining official status and some associated benefits.
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