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. >>
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