By Pippa Norris, Holly Ann Garnett, and Max Grömping

This report was published as "Electoral Integrity in all 50 states, ranked by experts" in Vox on 23rd December 2016.

Ever since Bush v. Gore in 2000, the way that American elections are run has become increasingly partisan and contentious. The 2016 elections ratcheted up the record number of complaints by all parties. Like many issues in contemporary American politics, there is heated disagreement about the nature of the problem – let alone any potential solutions. It does not help that news headlines are fixated on a shiny bauble of a non-issue – alleged voter fraud - whereas far more fundamental flaws in American elections continue to go unaddressed, including problems of partisan gerrymandering, campaign media and political finance. As we head into a forthcoming report by the intelligence community and bipartisan Congressional investigations into hacking, what else should be on the agenda to strengthen electoral integrity?

Potential flaws in American elections

Fraud

For many years, the main complaint by the GOP has centered on alleged incidents of illegal fraud where it is claimed that ineligible people registered and cast ballots, for example non-US citizens and felons, or imposters who registered or voted more than once. Throughout the campaign Donald Trump repeatedly stoked up the heated rhetoric by alleging that victory would be stolen from him. After he won the Electoral College vote, he claimed (falsely) that he also won the popular vote “if you deduct millions of people who voted illegally”, with “serious fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California”. In fact, however, across the country, officials found next to no credible evidence for cases of voter fraud.

Suppression of voting rights

For Democrats and civil rights organizations, by contrast, the main problem has been framed as one of the suppression of voting rights designed to depress legitimate citizen participation. They routinely criticize attempts by GOP State legislatures to tighten voter ID requirements and restrict polling facilities, making it harder to vote, especially for minorities and the elderly. Here the evidence about the impact of implementing stricter registration requirements in depressing the vote is somewhat clearer although debate continues about the size of any effect and which party benefits.

Maladministration

On polling day, journalists highlighted accidental failures in the nuts-and-bolts of electoral maladministration, including human errors and machine breakdowns in registration and balloting. For example, the New York Times reported that scattered problems occurred on November 8th in several polling places, with long lines in North Carolina, Virginia, New York, and Texas, sporadic breakdowns for the electronic register in Durham NC, and malfunctioning voter verification in Colorado. These types of glitches fueled requests by Jill Stein, the Green party candidate, for recounts to verify the results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, demands backed later by the Clinton campaign.

Yet in fact, although detecting some minor technical flaws, when they ended on December 12, the recounts in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin confirmed the declared winner. In Wisconsin, for example, after recounting over 3 million ballots, fewer that 1,800 votes switched columns. There is a good case to be made for automatic random audits of the vote count in all states, as a standard procedure to strengthen public confidence in the process, but any errors are unlikely to determine the overall winner.

Cybersecurity

It only emerged with full force after polling day that the most fundamental challenge to American elections has arisen not from any of these issues at all but from the vulnerability of open societies to disinformation campaigns and breaches of computer security. CIA and FBI officials report that senior Russian officials directed the hack into the computer server of the Democratic National Committee and the private emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. The intelligence services followed the breadcrumbs all the way back to the Kremlin and concluded that the intrusions were designed both to undermine confidence in US democracy and (probably) to help get Trump elected. Russian attacks were weaponized through the stream of stories reported in mainstream journalism. The stream of Wikileaks materials generated a constant series of negative news cat-nip about the goings-on within the Clinton campaign. The plethora of fake news on social media also fueled home-grown conspiracy theories and memes among the tin-foil hat brigade.

(As a point of disclosure, I take this personally. Based on the security firm Volexity, on 13 December the New York Times reported that my own Harvard Kennedy School research paper on “Why American elections are flawed” was downloaded, infected by the Dukes with malware, then circulated immediately after the election under a phony Harvard email in a phishing attempt.)

This problem is not confined to the US by any means and nor is it novel; Germany’s intelligence agency reported on 13 May 2016 that Russia was behind an attempt to hack the German Bundestag and Angela Merkel’s CDU party in 2015, with cyberattacks on government institutions going back for more than a decade. The severe disruption caused by disinformation in the US campaign has heightened concern for European countries heading to the polls next year, where campaigns in France, Italy and Germany are vulnerable to these techniques.

Evaluating the electoral performance of American states

The 2016 campaign therefore saw multiple complaints about how American elections work. These sorts of charges are likely to damage public trust in institutions, undermine confidence in the electoral process, depress turnout, and fuel protests questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s inauguration.

Given divergent claims by each party, is there independent and reliable evidence to support criticisms about the performance of American elections? And, where problems did occur, were these more common in states won by Trump or Clinton?

EIP's survey methods

To evaluate performance, the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), an independent academic project based at Harvard and Sydney Universities, conducted an expert survey of Perceptions of Electoral Integrity. EIP has used this method for the last five years to evaluate the quality of parliamentary and presidential elections around the world, including the 2012 and 2014 US elections. This technique is commonly used for evaluating performance in the absence of directly observable indicators and it is similar to that employed for the Perception of Corruption Index by Transparency international.

The core concept of ‘electoral integrity’ refers to international standards and global norms governing the appropriate conduct of elections during the pre-election period, the campaign, polling day and its aftermath. In this regard, it is a far broader concept than simply a focus on the final stages of irregularities in the electoral register, fraudulent votes being cast, or miscounted ballots.