Plenty of tests loom in the coming stretch of the election calendar. In South Carolina’s Feb. 29 Democratic primary, voters will encounter new touchscreen machines that generate paper ballots — technology that many security experts warn still poses a risk of hacking. Transitions to new machines are making halting progress in Texas, where Democrats will vote March 3, and Mississippi, where they vote a week later.

On March 17 comes perennial electoral trouble spot Florida, where Palm Beach County recently deployed the new devices and Miami-Dade is in the process of doing so. It’s unclear what technology Democrats will use at their Feb. 22 caucus in Nevada, where the state Democratic Party promised Tuesday that it won’t use the same vote-reporting app that Iowans used on Monday.

Monday night’s Iowa misfire quickly inspired a raft of online trolling and conspiracy theories, many of them seeming to suggest — without evidence — that the Democratic establishment was trying to derail a victory by Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders. Separate tweets from President Donald Trump’s son Eric, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and blogger Mike Cernovich all used the word “rigged” or "rigging" — with Cernovich implying that the mess was somehow meant to help Pete Buttigieg.

A tweet Tuesday from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a top Trump ally, poked at the rivalry between Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden. “What are the odds,” he wrote, that the app crash “has nothing to do with a Bernie blowout and a Biden crash?”

Guests filling the hours of empty television airtime Monday night also raised the specter, without evidence, that hackers had tampered with the results in Iowa, despite the state Democratic Party's statement that no such thing had occurred. But a cyberattack isn’t needed to weaken the public’s trust in an election’s outcome — a malfunction can also inflict the same kind of civic damage.

The reaction to Iowa “shows that in an environment where social media rumors travel fast, an actual ‘hack’ or system intrusion isn’t necessary to cause doubt and shake the public’s faith; sloppy software development, insufficient testing, poor usability and lack of transparency can ‘hack’ public confidence just the same,” said Eddie Perez, global director for technology development at the OSET Institute, which advocates for open-source election systems.

“Delayed results in the Iowa caucus absolutely provided a window for more primary-related disinformation,” said Graham Brookie, the director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “This is a real stress test for whether or not we're ready, and we're failing.”

Opportunistic trolling about election mishaps has a corrosive effect, wrote Alex Stamos, a Stanford University researcher and Facebook's former chief security officer. “The largest external risk to American democracy is an attack that combines a technical assault against our widely distributed and poorly secured election infrastructure with disinformation that American partisans will happily amplify,” he tweeted early Tuesday.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called on his fellow politicians and the news media to do a lot better.

“When the president’s campaign and prominent senators are spreading conspiracy theories about the election, it tells you everything you need to know about their values,” Wyden said in a statement to POLITICO. He added, “Social media companies and traditional news outlets fail in their responsibility when they contribute to the spread of deliberate misinformation about elections.”

Monday’s was certainly not the first, or worst, bungled election in U.S. history. Palm Beach County produced the 2000 “butterfly ballot” that pushed the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore into a 36-day recount, while misprinted ballots and broken scanners contributed to a four-day delay in declaring Barack Obama’s Florida victory in 2012. (That time, though, Florida was irrelevant to the national outcome.)

Lesser-known elections have produced any number of weird results, many of them linked to technology. They include plagues of blank votes cast in tight local or congressional races on Florida’s old paperless voting machines and an August 2018 primary in Johnson County, Kan., where a software bug prevented officials from declaring winners in some statewide contests.

By the 2016 presidential race, though, social media was helping fuel toxic conspiracy theories surrounding the election — a trend aided by an extensive Russian trolling campaign, U.S. security agencies and Senate investigators later concluded. Trump supporter Roger Stone warned on Breitbart that year that paperless voting machines could help Hillary Clinton steal the election, something he said would create a “bloodbath.”

Election security and misinformation experts said this week’s online confusion provides similarly fertile ground for foreign and domestic actors looking to exploit societal divisions.

“The kind of narratives that come about from incidences like these are definitely being leveraged by adversaries and others who are trying to delegitimize our democracy and our election, and so anything like this is really troubling,” said David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

The top two lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee expressed similar concerns on Tuesday, while seeking to reassure reporters that they saw no reason to believe the conspiracy theories about Iowa.

“I think it’s safe to say that all the mechanisms we have in place to verify the elections process, whether that’s the primaries in states that do hold voter primaries and the general election, were turned on to deal with Iowa Democratic Party with confidence there was no outside interference in their system,” committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the panel’s top Democrat, added that the dust-up shows that, “whether domestic or foreign, efforts to try to undermine confidence in our elections that those threats are out there — they remain out there.”

Becker said some states such as Georgia have already tested their new technology in recent local elections. So, unlike Iowa, they will not be making their debut in the heat of a presidential contest.

“Are they rolling it out for the first time in November 2020? Absolutely not,” Becker said. “They're getting election officials and poll workers comfortable with that technology over the course of the primary period, with the goal that when November comes around, they're not just opening up the box for the first time.”

South Carolina already used its machines for local races in October. But in Texas and Mississippi, where individual counties buy equipment, some of the machines may not have faced a live-fire test yet.

Marian Schneider, the president of the advocacy group Verified Voting, said technology will always carry some risk, particularly when it’s connected to the internet — noting that even large companies with deep pockets get hacked. She said the problems in Iowa reinforce her organization’s argument that voting and reporting should not be done via mobile app.

Another lesson: At least the Iowa caucuses had paper records to back up all of the electronic information. And so should other elections, she said.

“So, the takeaway is that having a low-tech backup is really important whenever you're deploying technology in elections,” she said.

Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.