Next week, legions of observers will gather at polling places across the nation to keep track of the vote. But they won’t be there at the direction of Donald Trump, who has warned of a “rigged” election and urged supporters to monitor voting sites.
Instead, the poll watchers will be college students sent by the Voting Technology Project, a collaboration between researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The volunteers will keep track of how long voters wait in line before casting their ballots.
The project is supported by a $450,000 grant from the Democracy Fund, one of a handful of philanthropies that works to ensure that the American voting system is secure from attack, can thwart attempts at fraud, and accurately records voter preferences. Those efforts have produced enough data to clearly rebut claims that the balloting is rigged, according to experts at foundations that work on electoral issues.
Sounding those alarms is “irresponsible,” says Joe Goldman, president of the Democracy Fund, which is a creation of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
Mr. Goldman does not specify Mr. Trump’s comments — in an interview, he studiously avoids mentioning either major-party candidate by name — but he says the 2016 election cycle “has given us pause because democracy requires a level of faith in the system. It is dangerous when folks start undermining that faith.”
The possibility of malfeasance tilting an election to one presidential candidate is extremely slim because the voting process is so decentralized, Mr. Goldman and other election experts say. There are about 10,000 separate jurisdictions that supervise elections in the United States, each with its own procedures, rules, and equipment. Votes are cast offline, placing ballots at low risk of a computer hack.
Uneven Results
Still, the process isn’t perfect, Mr. Goldman says. Since it was spun off from the Omidyar Network in 2014, the Democracy Fund has committed about $10 million to make registration easier and more secure and reduce the time people spend waiting in line at polling places. It has put nearly $17 million more into pro-democracy efforts on two other fronts: promoting effective government and ensuring the media adequately reaches and informs the public. Mr. Omidyar also made nearly $4.5 million in grants related to the fund’s work through the Democracy Fund Voice, a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” group that engages in political advocacy.
The fund has used a slate of 2014 recommendations by the Presidential Commission on Election Administration as a yardstick. While the fund has charted progress on the commission’s recommendations for polling-place management, voter registration, ballot technology, and early-voting rules, the results are uneven from state to state. While some states and jurisdictions have developed policies to make registration and voting more secure and efficient, others have not.
Next week’s election will serve as a laboratory for Mr. Goldman and his staff to further test whether those changes are working. He is confident their efforts will provide ample data to counter any assertion that the balloting was rigged, while giving officials a roadmap to make sure future elections run more smoothly.
“In the months following the election we’ll be looking at the data, making assessments and redeploying assets based on what we’re learning,” says Mr. Goldman. “It’s a time to take stock and make adjustments.”
Assessing Priorities
Already, the fund has a good idea where the need to spend more will be the greatest. U.S. intelligence agencies have blamed Russia for hacking into Democratic National Committee emails, an accusation the Kremlin has denied. U.S. intelligence services are also investigating whether an alleged intrusion into Florida’s voter-registration database was carried out or supported by the Russian government.
The specter of a foreign actor attempting to disrupt U.S. elections is chilling, says Adam Ambrogi, director of the Democracy Fund’s elections program. But investing in new, more secure systems is a tough sell to many state lawmakers trying to stretch tight budgets.
“Because of the dollar amount and the complexity, not many states have taken it as seriously as we would have hoped,” he says.
The fund’s grantees want to help. The Center for Civic Design, for instance, is developing an “anywhere ballot” voters could use to securely cast a vote from their own electronic devices. Although voting from an iPhone is probably a long way off, the center says it is likely that off-the-shelf devices will be used at polling stations in the not-so-distant future.
Another grantee, the Open Source Election Technology Foundation, is developing open-source voting software designed to handle all aspects of the process, including creating, casting, and counting ballots.
Thin Funding
A relatively small number of foundations make grants to improve the mechanics of voting. According to the Foundation Center, grant makers have awarded less than $30 million for election administration since 2011 — less than one-sixth of grant spending to increase voter registration and turnout.
In addition to the Democracy Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund are among the grant makers that have invested most heavily in election administration. Along with supporting the nuts and bolts of counting ballots, they have funded registration and get-out-the-vote efforts, advocacy for policy changes, and voting-rights litigation.
Geri Mannion, director of the U.S. Democracy Program at Carnegie, said one problem is that interest in the electoral process evaporates in years when there isn’t a presidential race, making it hard to sustain improvement efforts.
“It gets kind of lonely” supporting the election process, she says. “We should be encouraging all of philanthropy to take this seriously.”
Action at the Polls
As voters arrive to cast their ballots across the nation on Tuesday, the students sent to about 1,000 polling places by the Voting Technology Project will be there to track their every move.
The students won’t push for a particular candidate or ballot measure, and they certainly won’t interfere with anyone casting a vote. The idea is to make the process smoother and faster. Voters who have to wait in line are less likely to return to vote in subsequent elections, says Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor and member of the project.
Long lines were a problem in 2012; in certain polling places in Florida and Ohio, voters waited nearly all day. To prevent another fiasco, some polling stations have begun using queuing technology first developed for the food-service industry and customized for elections by the project.
The technology includes an application designed to allow election officials to estimate how many voting stations they will need to have running at each location and help them allocate workers throughout the day to minimize waiting time.
After the election, Mr. Stewart will use data fed to him by the students who measure wait times and tally the number of would-be voters who leave before casting a ballot, to determine whether polling places that used the app reduced waits.
He will combine the results of those observations with surveys of polling officials and responses from more than 10,000 voters to the Survey of the Performance of American Elections, which is supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Antidote to Fear
By the end of the year, Mr. Stewart predicts, he and other researchers will be able to provide a comprehensive study of voting performance that will allow researchers a much more detailed view of election processes than is currently provided by the news media and election watchdog groups.
A detailed look at the voting experience will give donors like the Democracy Fund a better idea of where to invest money, even if elected officials aren’t so inclined, says Heather Gerken, a Yale law professor whose work in this area inspired the Elections Performance Index, a rating tool run by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
“Politicians have every incentive not to fund the election system in the absence of a crisis,” she wrote in an email. “They’d rather fund things people can see, like roads and schools. The only way to remedy this problem is for philanthropists to invest in building the democratic infrastructure.”
Just as important, Ms. Gerken says, the research should calm fears of widespread election tampering.
“There’s already enough paranoia out there without a major party’s standard bearer making it worse,” she says. “The best antidote to this kind of fear-mongering is data.”
