Election Security: When to Worry, When to Not

This post was written by EFF intern Nazil Ungan as an update to a 2020 Deeplinks post by Cindy Cohn.

Everyone wants an election that is secure and reliable and that will ensure that the voters’ actual choices are reflected in the results. That’s as true as we head into the 2024 U.S. general elections as it always has been.

At the same time, not every problem in voting technology or systems is worth pulling the fire alarm—we have to look at the bigger story and context. And we have to stand down when our worst fears turn out to be unfounded.

Resilience is the key word when it comes to the security and the integrity of our elections. We need our election systems to be technically and procedurally resilient against potential attacks or errors. But equally important, we need the voting public to be resilient against false or unfounded claims of attack or error. Luckily, our past experiences and the work of election security experts have taught us a few lessons on when to worry and when to not.

See EFF's handout on Election Security here: https://www.eff.org/document/election-security-recommendations

We Need Risk-Limiting Audits

First, and most importantly, it is critical to have systems in place to support election technology and the election officials who run it. Machines may fail, humans may make errors. We cannot simply assume that there will not be any issues in voting and tabulation. Instead, there must be built-in safety measures that would catch any issues that may affect the official election results.  

It is critical to have systems in place to support election technology and the election officials who run it.

The most important of these is performing routine, post-election Risk-Limiting Audits after every election. RLAs should occur even if there is no apparent reason to suspect the accuracy of the results. Risk-limiting audits are considered the gold standard of post-election audits and they give the public justified confidence in the results. This type of audit entails manually checking randomly selected ballots until there is convincing evidence that the election outcome is correct. In many cases, it can be performed by counting only a small fraction of ballots cast making it cheap enough to be performed in every election. When the margins are tighter, a greater fraction of the votes are required to be hand counted, but this is a good thing because we want to scrutinize close contests more strictly to make sure the right person won the race. Some states have started requiring risk-limiting audits and the rest should catch up!

 We (and many others in the election integrity community) also continue to push for more transparency in election systems, more independent testing and red-team style attacks, including end-to-end pre-election testing.

And We Need A Paper Trail

Second, voting on paper ballots continues to be extremely important and the most secure strategy. Ideally, all voters should use paper ballots marked by hand, or with an assistive device, and verify their votes before casting. If there is no paper record, there is no way to perform a post-election audit, or recount votes in the event of an error or a security incident. On the other hand, if voters vote on paper, they can verify their choices are recorded accurately. More importantly, election officials can hand count a portion of the paper ballots to make sure they match with the electronic vote totals and confirm the accuracy of the election results. 

What happened in Antrim County, Michigan in the 2020 general elections illustrates the importance of paper ballots. Immediately after the 2020 elections, Antrim County published inaccurate unofficial results, and then restated these results three times to correct the errors, which led to conspiracy theories about the