In common parlance, a vote is usually some kind of formal expression of where you stand, what you believe, what you support, what you don’t want and where you would like to go. You raise your hand, you say yes or no, you give it a thumbs up or down, you count all in favor-all against. That simple intention has come under scrutiny in the United States of America, one of the world’s largest and most powerful democracies.
“Flipping votes,” the art of changing a vote electronically against the will of the voter, is a new concept recently being bandied about in political circles that has jeopardized this key building block of democracy. Politicians, like Representative Marjorie Taylor Green from Georgia’s 14th district, and other influential figures, such as billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, have made claims through well-funded campaigns to discredit electronic voting machines (EVMs). These well known Trump supporters have stated EVMs can be hacked and are at risk of flipping votes. It is another assertion of an overwhelming crisis that threatens the republic.
And yet, in the aftermath of the Trump election, the crisis seems to have vanished. Or has it? The 2024 election results, much to the surprise of many pundits, saw a clean sweep of the so-called swing states of Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania by Trump and the Republican Party. While all the other states in the union went in the direction politically as expected, these swing states decided the election by way of the Electoral College. None of the swing states had vote counts that were close enough to trigger any paranoia from either side, specifically Trump’s side due to his previous track record of questioning election results. So the question remains, has the crisis been averted if the system was not put in a position of being questioned? What if the vote counts were too close to call in a few of those swing states? What if Trump didn’t have to ask someone to find him 11,000 votes in Georgia, but instead resurrected the old standard of claiming voter fraud through suggesting irregularities with EVMs? All one has to do is think back to 2000 when one of the closest elections in US history turned the country upside down.
The close election of Gore v. Bush represented the wolf at the door in terms of claims over voter fraud. In 2000, the presidential election hinged on the state of Florida to decide the ultimate winner of the electoral college. Gore initially conceded the race given Bush’s insurmountable lead in the state, but when the following morning’s vote tallies revealed the difference was a mere 600 votes, Gore rescinded his concession. Under Florida state law, a machine recount was required for a difference of less than 0.5% in votes. After this machine recount, the vote difference dropped to 327 votes in favor of Bush. At this point, the Democratic party questioned the validity of excluding votes due to ballot issues such as hanging chads (voter cards not punched all the way for the vote to have counted), pregnant chads (voter cards punched to create a dimple, but not enough for the vote to be counted) and overall issues with butterfly ballots that caused confusion and inadvertent voting for wrong candidates by older voters. These were all considered “undervotes”. A hand recount of those votes were then demanded by Gore and his team in four counties. These hand recounts were started, and created even more controversy around voter intent. Even though the Florida Supreme Court ruled in favor of a hand recount of those “undervotes”, the Bush campaign asked the Supreme Court to submit a ruling on the matter.
In a majority opinion ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that the hand recount should not take place. According to the ruling, “Because it is evident that any recount seeking to meet 3 U. S. C. § 5’s December 12 “safe-harbor” date would be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause, the Florida Supreme Court’s judgment ordering manual recounts is reversed. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, Florida may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another. The recount mechanisms implemented in response to the state court’s decision do not satisfy the minimum requirement for nonarbitrary treatment of voters.” Of note, there were four dissenters to the ruling which included Justices Souter, Breyer, Stevens, and Ginsburg. They believed the case should be returned to Florida to have them create a uniform guideline for a recount; these dissenters did not agree that the recount should be stopped. Nonetheless, as a result of the 5-4 ruling, George W. Bush won the Florida electoral college votes and was named the 43rd president of the United States. In the aftermath of this election, Americans on both sides of the aisle were left with a deep distrust of the election process. Voter intent was questioned with those “undervotes”, not unlike the voter fraud claim of vote “flipping”. With this background of issues related to the physical counting of votes, and the delayed process of this method, EVMs were thought of as a failsafe solution. Ballot issues would be addressed, and the rapid vote counting and results of elections would satisfy the American appetite for getting elections results quickly. In the time since the Gore v. Bush election, voter fraud has been claimed, but never as aggressively as the 2020 Trump v. Biden presidential election.
The 2020 presidential election saw former President Trump and the Republican Party protesting the results, claiming voter fraud was partly to blame. However, every investigation that was carried out ruled out any significant voter fraud or wrongdoing. That includes the misrepresentation that a single person can vote multiple times or that deceased citizens can have their votes illegally cast by those committing voter fraud. Yet, again, ahead of the 2024 presidential election, some forces were carting out the same old claims of voter fraud, this time trying to pin the blame on faulty or hacked EVMs.
According to Matt Zdun from Reuters, in the 2022 Midterm election, 70% of voters lived in jurisdictions that primarily used paper-based ballots. Although paper-based, the ballots are generally scanned electronically and counted; rarely are the ballots hand-counted. Approximately 23% of voters lived in districts that used ballot marking devices, which permit voters to enter a vote electronically, which is then printed out. That printout is then scanned by a different machine to count the vote. Zdun then goes on to report that the final 7% used electronic voting machines, which store the vote in its memory to be counted. This last type of voting has become less common in recent years. All of these different types of machine-based voting, with their speed of reporting results, help deliver American need to get their election results on the same day of voting. This desire can only be met with the existing technology.
The first claims about “flipped” votes date back to 2004, with claims made on both sides of the aisle that votes were being switched by EVMs. Every one of those claims was refuted, with the “flipped” votes actually resulting from human error. According to Danny Hakim, Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon from a recent New York Times article, more recently, in the 2020 presidential election, former president Trump supported claims that EVMs were hacked and helped to rig the outcome of the election. Multiple investigations were carried out which did not find any truth to those claims. Dominion, one of the largest EVM companies in the world, successfully sued Fox News for nearly $800 million for false claims supporting EVM conspiracies.
In addition to Trump’s personal attacks against the validity of EVMs, proxies of those conspiracies ranging from politicians like Marjorie Taylor Green to social media billionaires like Elon Musk have been pushing claims of vote flipping and hacked EVMs. Just weeks ago, before the election was decided, a voter in Georgia claimed her vote was flipped from one candidate to another in the early voting for the US presidential election. According to reporting from Stuart A. Thompson from the New York Times, a woman accidentally picked the wrong candidate on her ballot. The woman, recognizing her error, fixed it with another try and ultimately cast the correct electronic ballot for her vote. However, once word of the initial error became viral, Marjorie Taylor Green posted another version of the story on X, claiming the women’s vote was “flipped”. She further claimed this type of vote flipping also occurred during the 2020 presidential election, which has been thoroughly debunked. During a town hall in the swing state of Pennsylvania, Elon Musk claimed a false conspiracy that EVMs had rigged elections in the past. According to reporting from Olivia Rubin at ABC News, Musk stated “I’m a technologist, I know a lot about computers. And I’m like, the last thing I would do is trust a computer program, because it’s just too easy to hack.” Musk went on to mention the voting machine company Dominion in his conspiracy. These vote-rigging conspiracy proxies have been weaponized by Donald J. Trump in order to plant a seed of doubt among American voters. In the event that former president Trump lost the 2024 election, he had already established the foundation of doubt to deny an unfavorable outcome.
One other component of Americans questioning the validity of votes in US elections is the dissemination of misinformation. In 2000, during the Gore v. Bush election, there were no smartphones and the internet was still in its infancy. Conspiracy theories could not spread as fast, and most information to the masses came by way of print and television news outlets. The information landscape has changed dramatically since that election. According to a report from the Pew Research Center in September 2024, 86% of Americans get their news from their smartphone, tablet or computer. Only 26% of Americans get their news from print media. More than half of Americans get their news at least sometimes from social media. That number will likely increase in years to come. The algorithms used in social media platforms means Americans will get information fed to them according to what they will likely want to see, not necessarily what is factual. This poses a huge problem when it comes to concern over false claims about voter fraud in the future. Add the accelerator of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and there can be enormous problems in our collective future.
The use of EVMs, in all of its different forms, is integral to the success of American democracy. We have to trust the system, which has been validated over many decades. The idea of machines “flipping” votes or being rigged through claims of hacking has never been proven. Although Donald J. Trump has recently been elected to his second term as US president, there is still reason to be concerned about his, and his proxies’, goal to cast doubt on the American election system. In the hypothetical that President-elect Trump lost the 2024 election, most experts agree that he would have contested the outcome with the already debunked claims about voter fraud related to EVMs. It seems safe to assume that additional figures in American politics will want to use false claims about the legitimacy of EVMs to push their own agenda for winning elections by any means necessary. Mid-term elections are only a couple of years away; will the American people have to deal with the shadow of doubt over EVMs cast by some, like president-elect Trump, over the election process? Will the delivery of news, more and more through social media platforms increasingly controlled by AI and algorithms, accelerate the doubt Americans have in regards to EVMs and the election process? At this point, there are more questions than answers over this EVM controversy. Only time will tell whether we will have answers suitable for the American people.
