If someone was looking to rig a major election,
they probably would not want to start in the United States.
That’s because the system we have for casting and counting ballots is extraordinarily
difficult to tamper with.
Because the constitution gives the states the primary authority to
set their own election rules.
So, the presidential election is really 51 separate elections.
One for each state and the District of Columbia.
And those 51 elections? They’re actually thousands of elections that are administered
at the country or town level.
This decentralized system makes it nearly impossible to “rig” an election in favor
of one presidential candidate.
In order to really influence the outcome, you’d have to to rig a whole lot of elections.
The safeguards start even before you set foot in the voting booth.
Because before you can vote, you need to register.
You fill out a form with your name, signature, and identifying information, which is added
to a giant list of all registered voters in your state.
Those voter rolls are periodically checked for accuracy.
On election day, you show up to your polling place.
Depending on what state you live in, you might show the poll workers your ID, or sign a book,
or state your name and address.
Now, if someone wanted to try to vote more than once, or pretend to be somebody else,
they’d have to convince the poll workers.
Which is a risky strategy, because if they get caught, they’re looking at jail time
and big fines.
Depending on where you live, you’ll either
vote using a paper ballot with an optical scanner, or what’s called a direct-recording
electronic machine, or DRE for short.
DREs are more vulnerable to hacking, but each machine is tested ahead of time by local election officials,
who are supervised by local representatives from both political parties, then the machines
are locked and sealed until election day.
These machines aren’t connected to the internet, so if someone wanted to “hack” them,
they’d have to break them open in person.
Over 70% of Americans will vote with a paper ballot and an optical scanner
which reads and adds your vote to its internal count.
The scanner keeps your ballot, and lets you know your vote has been counted.
After the polls close on election night, Both the DRE’s and the optical scanners
print out multiple copies of their internal tallies.
The poll workers — again, working in pairs, and overseen by poll watchers from both parties —
count up the totals from each machine.
The poll workers send the results to the county board of elections, who sends them on to the
state board of elections, who reports them to the media.
Even if someone did manage to mess up the reported totals, either on purpose or by accident,
the printouts from the machines would prove them wrong.
And many states conduct audits of random precincts, where they hand-count ballots or DRE receipts
to verify that the machines counted them properly.
To “rig” a presidential election, you would need to conspire with lots of people,
from both political parties, who are willing to risk federal prison, or you would need
the ability to break in and physically alter a ton of voting machines.
Which might make a good movie plot, but it's extremely unlikely in real life.