In Brief:
- Charges of widespread election fraud have failed to meet the burden of proof in court, but some Americans continue to doubt the integrity of elections.
- States are working to help people understand their election processes, as well as all the steps they take to ensure election security.
- A new report from the Secure Democracy Foundation highlights processes with potential to spark distrust before, during and after elections, and what can be done about them.
Before vote counting for the 2024 election began, it was already the most litigated election in American history. With control of Congress on the line, the 2026 election could set another record.
Heightened scrutiny of election administration, and the court cases coming out of it, haven’t unearthed evidence of fraud. Despite this, election administrators face an ongoing battle earning and keeping public trust. An executive order from President Donald Trump stating that the U.S. “fails to enforce basic and necessary election protections employed by modern, developed nations” has cast yet more doubt on the process.
In some ways, it’s not surprising that elections are fraught. The complexity of election processes can set the stage for misunderstanding, says Karen Brinson Bell, North Carolina’s chief election official from 2019 to 2025. “We’ve become a society that lives for sound bites and short snippets to explain things,” she says. Sometimes, those short explanations can be misleading.
Take the task of matching a state voter registration database to federal data, for example: This is required by law, and in theory it seems simple enough. But many factors can make it challenging, from missing punctuation in a name to inconsistencies in how a person fills out government forms.
Such discrepancies, which election officials resolve through painstaking work, can be seized upon as evidence that voter rolls include “fake” voters.
State election rules can also foster distrust. For example, forbidding ballot processing before Election Day adds time and opens the door for suspicions of tampering, especially if results change significantly over the course of the night.
A new report from the Secure Democracy Foundation outlines vulnerabilities at each stage of the elections process and what states can do about them to prevent election crises.
Elements of Controversy
Secure Democracy’s report points to three elements that can spark an election “fire”: real or perceived irregularities in results or registrations, vulnerabilities in state laws or procedures, and bad actors. “Removing any one of these elements prevents an election crisis,” it says.
A crisis can emerge throughout an election timeline: during the period before an election, on Election Day or after votes are counted. Controversy can develop around matters ranging from voter lists to last-minute voting rule changes and processes for counting and certification.
“It was our intention to look at everything holistically and identify all of the areas for which states would maybe need to think about changing their laws or administrative rules,” says Daniel Griffith, senior policy director at Secure Democracy and lead author of the report. “There will definitely be some items on our list of recommendations that each state could undertake.”
Supplementing the report are profiles of vulnerabilities and solutions in 11 key states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, North Carolina, California and Georgia.
The Georgia profile recommends addressing a pre-election vulnerability that has caused trouble in the state (and others): mass challenges of voter registrations. Under existing law, six activists were allowed to challenge the eligibility of 90,000 voters during the lead-up to the 2022 midterm election.
The challenge amounted to an accusation that large numbers of “fake” voters were registered in the state, a falsehood that required a great deal of work to dispel. The proposed remedy: raising the standard for mass challenges. This can include such things as requiring challenges to be based on personal knowledge, enabling voters to contest a challenge or enacting penalties for frivolous challenges. Another recommendation is that Georgia tighten procedures, evidentiary standards and deadlines for post-election lawsuits that prevent election certification.
Sometimes, it’s easier for losing candidates — or their supporters — to blame the process than to accept that somebody else got more votes, says Joseph Kirk, elections supervisor for Bartow County, Ga. He and his staff do all they can to inspire confidence by explaining their work to local voters.
He’d like more help with this education step, including more civics curriculum in high schools, he says. He’d also like more communications and public education help from the state — a bigger megaphone with a better chance of countering disinformation.
Transparency, Consistency, Security
Consistency across voter jurisdictions in a state is another confidence builder, Bell says. Election administration structures vary within more than a dozen states, including Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Texas and Wisconsin.
“Vague statutory guidance regarding the administration and availability of different voting methods, such as early voting and mail voting, can result in varying rules and experiences for voters across localities within the same state,” say Griffith and his co-authors. They point to Pennsylvania as an example, with county-by-county variation in rules around fixing errors on mail ballots and the availability of drop boxes.
Bell now works as a consultant to election officials in her region, in partnership with the former director of elections in Virginia, Chris Piper. They are senior advisers to a coalition of election association leaders on the East Coast, a project of the National Association of Election Officials.
One focus of their work is addressing gaps in cybersecurity as a consequence of the defunding of a system within the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that alerted state officials to active election threats, including social media misinformation. The agency’s external affairs director has also said that past support for state election officials working to secure electronic and physical infrastructure is “on pause.”
A pullback in federal support, whether expertise or financial resources, adds to local election officials’ workload. The more hats election officials have to wear, the more difficult it becomes for them to do their jobs to perfection, Bell says. “There’s a vulnerability, a risk there.” More funding for election operation is one way to reduce this risk.
It’s a pivot from what election officials have known in the past for federal agencies to make the kinds of data requests they have made to some states or advance narratives that long-established election practices are flawed, Bell says. This only increases the need to make these practices as transparent as possible in order to earn voters’ trust, she says.
