How Many More Blows Can Trust in Elections Take?
Text size  The issue with New York Citys highly publicized election failure this week isnt that one more voting problem may tip the country into chaos. Its that the nation may already have crossed the line in November, says elections expert Edward Perez. Instead of reining in the chaos, New York officials are spreading it further. The New York City Board of Elections was forced to pull preliminary results in primary elections for mayor on Tuesday after voters and candidates realized that its math didnt add up. The board apologized and said because of human error it had accidentally included 135,000 test votes in the tally. The mistake comes as voting integrity is being questioned in many states, including Arizona, where Republicans have conducted a monthslong partisan review of the 2020 votes. Other states have followed its lead. Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued a major ruling on how the 1965 Voting Rights Act can be applied. To situate New Yorks error in that complex national context, I called Perez, the global director of technology development at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit that develops open-source election technology. Hes spent his career in the guts of Americas voting institutions. In October, he wrote an essay for Barrons warning that the marketplace for election technology was dysfunctional. Since then, he said, hes been through the looking glass, as conspiracy theories have engulfed the rational conversation he wants to have about making elections secure and transparent. We spoke by phone on Thursday. This transcript of our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. This was a human error in one primary election that was resolved relatively quickly. Edward Perez: I think it does matter beyond New York. Generally speaking, the state of public confidence in elections nationwide is so fragile that almost anywhere a highly publicized event takes place that can cause doubt or that people can try to use for political gain, it has the potential to add more doubt and more anxiety in the public mind about whether elections can be trusted or not. Of all the errors that can take place, making a mistake thats going to impact the results that get posted or possibly them needing to retract the results, thats a very big error. On the other hand, it does happen. There certainly have been other jurisdictions where they have similarly realized that a human being, a staff worker, fails to take some important step that was going to impact how their data was loaded, for example. And my understanding is that is what happened in New York. The board indicated that they failed to clear out test votes before they did the actual tabulation of the actual votes. While that sort of thing is not unheard of, its a very big unforced error on the part of the Board of Elections. Modern-day voting technology is very much built around the assumption that theres going to be a pre-election, pretesting phase. The lesson here is, it is important for people to recognize that human errors can occur. Election administration is a highly complex process. In todays politicized and charged environment around elections, its all the more imperative that election officials need to really cross their Ts and dot the Is and be exceedingly careful because again, public confidence is really resting on that. Youre constantly advocating for process improvements. The Board of Elections is a patronage institution thats not led by nonpartisan civil servants. It is possible, but it is definitely challenging. To your point, process improvements like that are made more and more challenging precisely to the extent that different political forces continue to chip away at the firewall that really should protect the impartiality of election administration. I would say that one of the challenges thats happening today, broadly, not just in New York, but across the country, is that the forces that are pulling election administration out of that relatively closed technocratic, impartial environments and pulling it into a more contentious political realm, those forces are getting stronger. We saw them in their most dramatic way when we had a sitting president and many elected representatives in his party very loudly making unfounded claims about the administration of elections. Many have talked, for example, about the importance of postelection audits. When you have something as complex as people and procedures and technology, and especially given the fact that technology is vulnerable, it is not only reasonable but imperative to say, lets do a postelection audit in a way that we can verify that we didnt accidentally report an incorrect outcome. But a postelection audit like everything else Ive said also has to be done in accordance with generally accepted standards that are used by people that are professionals in election verification. One of the things that is happening today is that the whole idea of an audit is itself being hijacked. It is being transformed into, at its worst, a form of political theater that doesnt serve the intent of bolstering public confidence, but actually does precisely the opposite. And in some cases is leveraged to undermine confidence. Republican state senators have been reviewing votes in Maricopa County despite the lack of any evidence of fraud. I am alluding to Arizona. Again, in the same way that I said that things happen in one part of the country matter elsewhere, it is a concern. We have seen that state legislators in other parts of the country, whether its Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Michigan, when something is visible as this so-called auditit is not an audit in any real sense of the termwhen something that visible happens, it does attract the interest of legislators in other states that might be interested in repeating a similar process elsewhere. The wearing down of the firewall around impartial election administration is something that appears to be happening in many different places around the country. That is my greatest concern. I really dont think that people understand just how dangerous it is to our national unity and to our national security, to arrive at a place where the public does not believe the outcome of democratic elections. Well, the most vivid illustration of when we crossed the line is when there was a violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. I will say without hyperbole that as someone who has observed elections for the better part of two decades, it was shocking, sad, and scary to see large numbers of people violently attacking the very building that is the center of our elected representation in a democracy. And honestly I think that the jury on that remains out at the moment. However, in addition to sounding that alarm, I do want to draw everyones attention to the fact that we have the wherewithal to step back from the precipice. We know the kinds of things that need to be done. And some of these things happened as recently as 20 years ago. When the Bush v. Gore election took place in 2000, and it also had a disputed outcome. But despite all that consternation, there was a concession and there was a transfer of power. Not only did we move on, but within two years after all of that, Congress was able to pass bipartisan legislation in the form of the Help America Vote Act. There was implicitly, if not explicitly, a recognition of the value of rule of law. There was a recognition that the two national parties had to work together in some way. Thanks, Eddie. Write to Matt Peterson at matt.peterson@dowjones.com