Pray but Verify: Can We Trust Our Upcoming Elections?
We all remember Russia’s interference in the last election and we know they are back this time, joined, it seems, by the Iranians. But foreign threats are not the only challenges to election security or the reliability of our results next week. We have the potential for domestic hacking, the possibility of voter suppression, the absence of verifiable audits in 47 out of 50 states, the unreliability of some systems, the track record of some election oversight officials for fiddling the results (we’re looking at you Georgia), stacked courts, and the public posture of the President and his team that are calling results into question even before they have occured. How do we know the results are real? How do we protect the process? We discuss with three people who have been actively considering these issues, election security analyst and lawyer, Jennifer Cohn, David Sanger of the New York Times, and Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center. It’s a discussion you should not miss.