Oct. 31, 2024 |
How to steal an election in America. This week, someone incinerated hundreds of ballots in Washington and Oregon. It’s not the sort of thing likely to reassure those who worry that next week’s U.S. presidential election risks being manipulated, or undermined, or ultimately stolen by partisan actors.
Already, the former president and current Republican candidate Donald Trump is intimating that the Democrats might somehow commit election fraud next week. Many of Trump’s supporters believe him, as they do his assertions about the Democrats having cheated their way to victory in 2020.
There’s widespread concern among Democrats, meanwhile, that Republicans will try to overturn the election in an even more determined way than did the “stop the steal” movement that led to the January 2021 Capitol Hill riot. So there’s plenty of worry on both sides.
How vulnerable is the U.S. election system, then? Today, Richard H. Pildes explores the threat of election fraud, the safeguards against it, and why so many Americans no longer trust their election process or election outcomes.
—Gustav Jönsson
