October 2020 | Page 27

CityState: Reporter l by Ellen Liberman Stress Test Rhode Island served as ground zero in the mail-in ballot debate when the state GOP brought a consent decree — which loosened witness requirements in response to the pandemic — all the way to the Supreme Court and lost. But in this column from our archives, Ellen Liberman explores other threats to our voting system. George Caleb Bingham was a painter and politician and, in 1852, he joined his vocations in “The County Election.” The sprawling tableau depicts voting in a small Missouri town as it once was. Atop the courthouse steps, a voter swears on the Bible that he has not yet cast a vote and calls out his choice to the clerks in the back, recording the tally. A relic of pre-Revolutionary War polling, the voice vote was gradually overtaken by paper ballots in the United States’ decentralized system throughout the nineteenth century. The concept of the private vote didn’t take hold until about 1892. “The County Election” also depicts voting as it still is: a process that can be intentionally subverted by — in the words of one early voting machine inventor — “rascaldom.” Amid the throngs awaiting their turn, a political operative hoists a barely conscious voter to his feet. In the foreground, a man ladles out more electoral enthusiasm to a gentleman enraptured by the pleasures of civic duty. Over time, trading votes for cheap whiskey was replaced by ballot stuffing, poll ILLUSTRATION BY HERMINUTOMO / GETTY IMAGES taxes, literacy tests and strict voter ID laws. In the modern era, cyber security experts fear rascaldom by computer. Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa who specializes in the use of computers in voting, says the search for an incorruptible voting mechanism has always ended in disappointment. “People keep trying, and each time a new technology is introduced it looks really good at first and then the flaws begin to come out,” Jones says. “It just takes time for people to find the vulnerabilities. Folks are always looking for ways to corrupt the system.” In 2016, President Donald J. Trump, unable to reconcile his popular vote loss, claimed, with no proof, that millions of “illegals” had voted. More sobering is the news that, in the run-up to the 2016 election, Russian government hackers attempted to gain access to a wide variety of computer networks associated with electoral infrastructure. >> RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l OCTOBER 2020 25