--- title: How the U.S. Elections Will Be Protected From Interference description: Despite efforts at home and abroad to undermine faith in U.S. elections, the 2024 vote is set to be the most secure ever. canonical: https://time.com/7096453/election-2024-security/ author: Barton Gellman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2024-10-24T11:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:50:15.670Z article:section: Politics og:title: Your Vote Is Safe og:description: Thank new laws, fail-safes, and courageous election officials og:url: https://time.com/7096453/election-2024-security/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbe8b1c7a13f09f3b/698a8a3916d8846525c43bf9/241111WELECTION_005_v2.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: 241111WELECTION_005_v2 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Your Vote Is Safe twitter:description: Thank new laws, fail-safes, and courageous election officials twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbe8b1c7a13f09f3b/698a8a3916d8846525c43bf9/241111WELECTION_005_v2.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- # Your Vote Is Safe > Sponsored content. 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It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, twice a week. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3/newsletters?i=5bb36122-aec7-4337-a9d4-fc82ec7fe30a&cr=time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: THE OFFICIALS Presented by TIME Studios [Watch (HLS stream): THE OFFICIALS Presented by TIME Studios](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/kfEgGM6h.m3u8) (26:59)  _Published 2024-09-10. US election officials in rural and urban jurisdictions of four battleground states hold the line against organized efforts to undermine their work as they prepare for the contentious 2024 contest. Directors/Producers Sara Archambault and Margo Guernsey, Executive Producers Maida Lynn and Sarah Longwell._ Oct 24, 2024 11:00 AM UTC  Illustration by Richard Mia for TIME by [Barton Gellman](https://time.com/author/barton-gellman/) ## Barton Gellman Oct 24, 2024 11:00 AM UTC As Nov. 5 approaches, [former president Donald Trump](https://time.com/7086057/donald-trump-second-term-emergency-aides/) has left little room for doubt about his intentions. He will almost certainly declare victory on election night, as the votes are still being counted. He may turn out to be right. But if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, Trump will reject the result as corrupt and launch a scorched-earth campaign to overturn it. This plot is so well telegraphed that it barely counts as a prediction. Trump has stated repeatedly that he cannot lose unless there is “massive fraud”—and, [separately](https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/oct/02/trump-renews-voter-fraud-claims-as-voting-by-mail/), that the election is “rigged,” with a “bad voting system.” As he [told](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/us/politics/trump-police-voter-fraud.html) the Fraternal Order of Police on Sept. 6: “We win without voter fraud, we win so easily.” Voters, by that reckoning, can make no other legitimate choice. That upside-down view of elections may still have the power to shock, but after Trump’s response to defeat four years ago it cannot be called surprising. Perhaps one candidate will win so conclusively that no reasonable person can doubt it. But pollsters continue to assess, as they have for months, that the presidential contest is too close to call, and a narrow win in the current environment is cause for concern. Public opinion surveys show that many Americans are not sure whether to trust the machinery of elections, and many flatly say that they do not. Barely half of those surveyed in a September NORC poll said they were confident of an accurate vote count. That is nothing like a normal number, historically. We are embarking on a presidential election in which tens of millions of Americans disbelieve the results in advance. [The 2020 election](https://time.com/5811109/kill-chain-hbo-election-security/), relatedly, was the only one in American history which the loser refused persistently to concede. The partisan split—close to 80% of Democrats, but just 30% of Republicans, have faith in the vote count—reflects the cumulative damage of countless lies. As the American experiment nears its semiquincentennial, is it capable of holding a secure election with a trusted process and a widely accepted result? If the outcome is not to Trump’s liking, can democracy defend itself against another attempt to overthrow a President-elect?  Illustration by Pablo Delcán and Danielle Del Plato for TIME Questions like these struck some readers as far-fetched when I asked them before the 2020 election in a darkly headlined story for the _Atlantic:_ “The Election That Could Break America.” If then President Trump lost his bid for a second term, the story argued, the lead-up to Inauguration Day could bring a no-holds-barred struggle to prevent the transfer of power. Some of my forecasts came true: Fabricated claims of fraud. Attempts to halt the tabulation of votes. Partisan pressure to block certification. Appointment of fake electors. Incitement of violence. Desperate maneuvers in Congress on [Jan. 6](https://time.com/6692956/trump-supreme-court-insurrection-jan-6/). But for all it may have gotten right, the story was wrong in a deeper sense. I was uncertain that the nation’s electoral machinery could withstand Trump’s frontal assault. The system had not faced that kind of threat before. It might simply fail. **_Read more:_** [_The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election_](https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/) But it did not. State and federal judges threw out Trump’s baseless lawsuits and eventually sanctioned some of the lawyers who brought them. At critical junctures there were enough principled Republican office holders, none of them famous then—Aaron Van Langevelde on Michigan’s board of state canvassers, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, Pennsylvania lawmakers Jake Corman and Bryan Cutler, Maricopa County supervisors Clint Hickman and Bill Gates—who did their legal duty in the face of crushing pressure to go along with a coup. Trump’s party recoiled, if only briefly, from the lawless violence of the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol. Now, four years later, I have fewer doubts about the resilience of our core exercise in democracy. _WATCH:_ [_The Officials._](https://time.com/7017573/the-officials/) _U.S. election officials in four battleground states hold the line against organized efforts to undermine their work as they prepare for the contentious 2024 contest._ But the arc of the evidence, based on interviews with state, local, and federal election officials, intelligence analysts, and expert observers, bends toward confidence. Since 2020, the nation’s electoral apparatus has upgraded its equipment, tightened its procedures, improved its audits, and hardened its defenses against subversion by bad actors, foreign or domestic. Ballot tabulators are air-gapped from the Internet and voter-verified paper records are the norm. Bipartisan reforms enacted in 2022 make it much harder to interfere with the appointment of electors who represent a state’s popular vote, and harder to block certification in Congress of the genuine electoral count. Courts continue to deny evidence-free claims of meddling. The final word on vote-certification in key swing states rests with governors from both parties who have defied election denialism at every turn. The system, according to everyone I asked, will hold up against Trump’s efforts to break it. The threat remains acute. Trump, backed this time by Republicans who have adopted his pre-emptive election denial, will try again to defy the voters if they choose Harris. He will have a great deal more help this time from the party apparatus and leaders at all levels. Vote counting in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could drag out, opening a window for an army of lawyers seeking to slow or prevent a definitive result. Extremists fueled by disinformation may act on the threats they have made in recent months against polling places, [election workers](https://time.com/6302102/election-security-congress-fiscal-year-voter-fraud/), and other officials.  Trump at an event in Lancaster, Pa., on Oct. 20 Win McNamee—Getty Images --- **At the heart of that system are nonpartisan election** officials at the federal, state, county, and local level who are dedicated to delivering a free and fair election. Poll workers will verify the identity and registration of every person who casts a ballot, in person or by mail. When polls close on Election Day, sooner in some states, election workers will begin tabulating early and mail-in ballots and in-person votes, usually on scanning machines. As they proceed, officials will secure counted ballots, compile the results from the tabulation machines, and save worksheets and (for 98% of votes cast) paper records for official and public review. The entire procedure is overseen by poll watchers from both parties. No human enterprise that spans tens of thousands of polling places, hundreds of thousands of election officials, and more than 150 million projected voters can aspire to be flawless, says Jen Easterly, a former Army intelligence officer who directs the [Cybersecurity](https://time.com/6717129/hackers-ai-2024-elections/) and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “There could be a ransomware attack on an election office,” Easterly says. “There could be a distributed denial of service attack on a website, so you can’t see election-night reporting. Somebody will forget their key to a polling place, so they could open late. A storm may bring down a power line, so a polling place needs to be moved.” **_Read more:_** [_Why Hand Counting Ballots Could Create an Election Disaster_](https://time.com/7071959/election-2024-hand-count-ballots/) What matters, she says, is that election officials have trained for all those contingencies. “They are prepared to meet the moment and to deal with any disruption,” she says. Easterly and her state counterparts play this message of reassurance on repeat, interview after interview and speech after speech. It has the virtue of being true. There really are playbooks and backup procedures and well-designed mitigation plans for every bad thing they have ever seen happen to an election, and none of those bad things pose a genuine threat to the integrity of the vote. Easterly, a West Point graduate who oversees 3,400 employees, makes a point of talking about what could go wrong because she wants to inoculate voters against propaganda that incorporates minor incidents into a false narrative that elections are corrupt. The trouble is that Easterly and her allies are up against torrents of disinformation that are faster-propagating and incomparably more voluminous than their earnest rebuttals. And the lies are well calculated to stoke outrage and fear, while the truth “sounds like this wonky inside-baseball bureaucratic thing,” she says. The key period for this disinformation will be the two months between Election Day and the final count of the electoral vote in Congress on Jan. 6, 2025\. As they finalize their counts, the officials will send results from individual polling places to a central office by telephone, electronic transmission, or on a memory device. Election officials will then combine those numbers with mail-ballot totals and begin posting publicly available results. Media organizations will assess the partial results, alongside exit polls, and predict winners and losers in key races and states. The Associated Press, relying on an army of reporters at polling places and election offices, will produce the most widely credited unofficial count. But several battleground states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, do not start processing early and mail-in ballots until after the polls close, [making a delay in results likely.](https://time.com/7022314/election-night-2024-results-timing-delay/) In very close races, mandated recounts or the tallying of provisional ballots could delay the outcome for days. “It always takes time, but as margins get narrower it takes longer until the media can call the races,” says David Becker, executive director of The Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that seeks to build trust in elections. “We’ll just have to be patient and wait for that because it’s more important to get it right than get it fast.” Foreign disinformation about the reliability of the vote is even more pervasive in 2024 than it was in the past several election cycles. Adrian Fontes, the secretary of state of Arizona, says that confidential reports from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have convinced him that malicious foreign-influence operations are accelerating this year. They “make us hate one another so much that we internally tear ourselves apart or we make enemies out of ourselves,” he says. A senior U.S. intelligence officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the Biden Administration made a conscious decision to expand distribution of bulletins from the Foreign Malign Influence Center, an office that reports to the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), to help state and local election officials respond to an active threat. The governments of Russia, China, and Iran, according to an ODNI public update, are likely to call “into question the validity of the election’s results after the polls close.” Russia is doing what it can to help elect Trump, as it did in 2016 and 2020, according to ODNI, while Iran, [enraged](https://time.com/7013497/donald-trump-iran-assassination-plot/) by Trump’s 2020 decision to assassinate Major General Qasem Soleimani, chief of the country’s Quds Force, is backing Harris. According to the senior U.S. official, China is not trying to boost either candidate but is making “broad efforts aimed at undermining trust in U.S. democratic processes and exacerbating divisions in our society.” For all the foreign interference, Fontes, a Democrat, sees a graver problem originating from within. Like his counterparts around the country, of both parties, he names no names. “What I think is our biggest threat,” he says, “is the fact that we still have elected officials and candidates who are lying to our voters about the integrity of our elections, who are continually pushing out these stupid lies about fraud and non-citizen voting and all of this other unsubstantiated garbage.” He fears that “it’s working, sadly, because a lot of people can’t see through the bullsh-t.”  Harris at a rally in Madison, Wisc., on Sept. 20 Scott Olson—Getty Images --- **Trump is putting almost as much effort into discrediting** November’s election as he is into winning it. This time, unlike 2020, he has well-funded and well-organized support for that effort from the Republican National Committee and state parties, allied think tanks, and dark-money operations. Together they are preparing the postelection battlefield for a sustained campaign in courts, in state legislatures, and in Congress to overturn a Harris victory. Trump campaign spokespeople did not reply to questions about why he is attempting to undermine public trust in the election and whether he will try to reverse the results if Harris wins. “We are in an election unlike any other,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, where I am a senior adviser. “The attacks that we are seeing on the election this year are much more widespread, much better funded, much bigger than we’ve ever seen before, much more sophisticated.” What Trump lacks in 2024 are the powers of an incumbent President. He cannot send troops or law enforcement officers, as some allies suggested he do last time, to seize voting machines. He has no Justice Department to draft a letter to legislators in a state that he lost, falsely advising them that the department has “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the election” and hinting that they should support “a separate slate of electors representing Donald J. Trump.” But even out of office, Trump is wielding presidential power prospectively to benefit his campaign—by announcing to supporters and opponents what he will do for them, or to them, if he returns to office. He has frequently promised pardons for the “political prisoners” convicted of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, another of his hints that violence on his behalf may be rewarded. In September, in a Truth Social post, he warned that “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences.” He specified among his targets “Corrupt Election Officials,” along with “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, \[and\] Illegal Voters.” Describing Harris and her supporters as “the enemy from within,” he said on Oct. 13 that the enemy “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” **_Read more:_** [_The Huge Risks From AI In an Election Year_](https://time.com/6965299/risks-ai-elections/) Trump’s public disinformation campaign has been amplified on [Elon Musk](https://time.com/7095722/elon-musk-million-dollar-prize-questions/)’s social media platform X, a boost that the former President did not have in 2020\. It has also been reinforced by more than 90 lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign, RNC, and other supporters to disqualify voters, prevent the counting of votes, or shorten the duration of counting, among other goals. The lawsuits, which already far exceed the number filed in the 2020 election cycle, are concentrated in the seven swing states expected to decide this year’s contest: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia. “President Trump’s election-integrity effort is dedicated to protecting every legal vote, mitigating threats to the voting process, and securing the election,” says RNC spokeswoman Claire Zunk in an emailed statement. “While Democrats continue their election interference against President Trump and the American people, our operation is confronting their schemes and preparing for November.” As an example of “attacks on election safeguards” that the RNC fought in court, Zunk cited efforts by Georgia Democrats to extend the voter-registration deadline in parts of the state that were hard-hit by Hurricane Helene. Many of the Trump-aligned lawsuits seem poorly tailored to prevail at trial—demands for purges of voter rolls, for example, filed after the relevant deadline. Some of the litigation could be seen as an attempt to borrow the authority of a court proceeding for thinly supported allegations of fraud to be levied if Harris wins. Several observers see another dark strategy in the current lawsuits and the preparations for others. While the vote-counting system is resilient and reliable, it must meet several immovable deadlines.  A woman holds a sample ballot on Oct. 18, the second day of early voting in North Carolina Allison Joyce—AFP/Getty Images By Dec. 11, top state officials, in most cases the governor, must certify the election results. Members of the Electoral College must vote on Dec. 17\. Under the U.S. Constitution, if any states remain contested when the votes are counted in Congress on Jan. 6, and neither candidate wins a majority of the electors, the decision would go to the newly elected House of Representatives. There Trump would likely prevail, thanks to the 12th Amendment’s requirement that each state cast one vote and the fact that Republicans are likely to outnumber Democrats in a majority of state delegations. Georgia has been a focus of GOP maneuvering to delay or deny certification of the voting results if Harris prevails. After Raffensperger, the secretary of state, refused to alter Georgia’s 2020 vote count in Trump’s favor, Trump tried to defeat his re-election bid. When Raffensperger won his race anyway, the Republican legislature removed him from the state election board and appointed three election deniers to form a new majority. Trump praised the new board members by name as “pit bulls” for “victory.” They passed new rules that, among other things, would empower partisan county officials to reject election results that they believed to be tainted by fraud. A state judge voided all the new rules on Oct. 16\. The board also attempted to reopen a closed investigation that might enable them to fire and replace the officials who oversee elections in Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold that includes most of Atlanta. **_Read more:_**[_Meet the Democracy Defenders_](https://time.com/collection/democracy-defenders/) According to a high-ranking state official, Trump allies on the election board encouraged their county counterparts to refuse to certify election results if they suspected any irregularity in the conduct of the polls. By blocking certification, the state official says, Trump’s allies were looking for a way, if Harris wins the state, to prevent the delivery of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes to Congress. On Oct. 14, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney put a stop to those efforts, ruling that county election officials may not “refuse to certify or abstain from certifying- election results under any circumstance.” Immediately after that ruling, according to another Georgia official who spoke on condition of anonymity, lawyers representing the Trump campaign and the state GOP asked Raffensperger’s office to rewrite the official certification form. One of the lawyers, Alex Kaufman, had been on the telephone line on Jan. 2, 2021, when Trump demanded that Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia. What Kaufman wanted this election, the officials said, was for Raffensperger’s office to remove the words “true and correct” from the description of the count on the certification form that election-board members have been ordered to sign. They said Kaufman also requested the addition of separate signature lines for board members who wish to convey their dissent, with room for them to specify the precincts in which they object to the count. “All of this is about creating doubt,” the second Georgia official says. “And if you view it from that lens, they don’t necessarily need a county to vote down the certification. They just need some sort of doubt to be on record that they can point to, to dispute the results.” [Raffensperger](https://time.com/5958086/brad-raffensperger-georgia-election-law/), in an interview, notes that he has sole authority to certify the state election. And he sounded delighted, all in all, by his removal from the Trump-aligned election board. “I’m not the chair of the mess” anymore, he says. “It’s not my monkey. It’s theirs. It’s up to them to fix it, or a judge will do it for them.” Judges have done so elsewhere. In Arizona’s Cochise County, two election supervisors were indicted last November for refusing to certify a 2022 vote there. On Oct. 21, one pleaded guilty to failing to perform her duty as an election official. One significant obstacle for Trump, if he tries as he did in 2020 to arrange for “alternative electors” in states he loses, is that he would need active collaboration from a governor to throw out a state’s popular vote. Reforms to the Electoral Count Act give governors the presumptive power to decide which electors represent their states. Five of the battleground states this year—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Arizona—have Democratic governors. Trump’s prospects with the two GOP swing-state governors do not look much better. In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp refused Trump’s demands in 2020 to convene state lawmakers to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, a Trump supporter, has nevertheless distanced himself from the six fake electors who face felony charges after trying to substitute themselves for the state’s lawful Biden electors four years ago. Like election officials in other states, Raffensperger described a long list of recent improvements in the reliability and security of voting in his bailiwick: citizenship verification, photo ID, “the cleanest voter list in the country,” a new technology vendor to “audit 100% of the ballots” using human-readable paper records. As for the ubiquitous accusations of fraud, he says, “We’re trying to head them off at the pass. Trying to get ahead of the curve. And we do that with facts.”  Early voting in Anchorage, Alaska on Oct. 21 Hasan Akbas—Anadolu/Getty Images --- **The specter of physical conflict around this election cannot** be dismissed. Intimations of violence are regular features of Trump rhetoric, and many of his supporters may be angry enough to respond. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, a longtime student of political violence, reported that 6% of respondents in a September survey agreed that “use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” Notably, he says, an additional 8% agreed that “the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President.” Indeed, would-be assassins twice made attempts on Trump’s life this summer. Although no partisan motive for either has emerged, Trump and his allies blame the assassination attempts on accusations from Biden and Harris that he is a “threat to democracy.” But Trump’s political language, Pape and other political scientists say, is qualitatively different from that of the Democrats. He has called his political opponents “vermin” and “human scum,” predicted a “bloodbath” if he is not elected, hinted that execution would be justified for the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and lavished praise on violent supporters who assaulted police at the Capitol. Pape described the survey respondents who say they support violence as dry kindling, awaiting a spark. “It is generally leaders on one side of America’s partisan divide,” he said, “who are lighting rhetorical matches.” Election workers and officials are disproportionately on the receiving end of intimidation, doxing, and abuse. In September, Attorney General Merrick Garland described an “unprecedented spike in threats” against them. A recent Brennan Center study showed that 38% reported that they had been threatened, harassed, or abused because of their job, and 54% stated they were concerned about the safety of their colleagues and staff. One state election official, explaining her insistence on anonymity, says, “I cannot emphasize this enough. I hate being quoted because every time my name gets out there, I get really nasty death threats. Because I’m a woman, they tend to be a little bit more graphic than the death threats that \[her boss\] gets, and it is jarring.” Asked for an example, she replies, “It’s always rape. Every single time it’s rape.” Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer has stood at the white hot center of Arizona’s defense against election denial since 2020, and says he sees it gathering momentum again now. “There were some pretty dark moments,” he says, when he had to take daylong breaks away from his phone, doing “grunt labor” to clear his mind. Richer strikes competing notes of exhaustion and perverse pride that he holds the state record, as far as he knows, for death threats that have led to criminal charges. (The number is five.) The defendants have come from California, Missouri, Virginia, Alabama, and, most recently, Texas. One caller, Richer says, promised to kill him and his kids for stealing the election from Trump, saying “Children aren’t off limits.” (Richer has no children.) He also, Richer recalls, said: “I want to throw that Jew in an oven so badly, I can taste it.” Richer is not sure how well the justice system’s response to these threats is working. “Somebody sends you a grotesque voice message to your personal cell phone,” he says. “You report it. And then what is your reward? You have to go, you know, get prepped for trial. You have to respond to subpoenas. And then you have to fly to Missouri at the beginning of December to get, I don’t know, examined in trial and have to face the jackass who said this.” MAGA Republicans put up a candidate to challenge Richer and successfully ousted him in a primary this summer. The current presidential election will be his last, and he won’t miss the stress of running the next one. “I’m worn out,” he says. Other veterans of the election-disinformation wars are sticking it out. Pennsylvania secretary of state Al Schmidt, like Richer a Republican, became the target of persistent, personal attacks by Trump when he supervised 2020 election operations in Philadelphia. He found it shocking then. Now he has become inured. “There is a big difference between this election cycle and 2020,” he says. “In 2020, all of this ugliness was new. Election officials had never been portrayed as combatants before. So I think one unfortunate advantage to this election cycle is people are, election officials are fully aware of the level of scrutiny and likelihood of reckless accusations that might come their way.” **_Read more:_**[](https://time.com/7019433/how-to-get-people-to-vote/)[_11 Things to Say to Persuade Someone to Vote_](https://time.com/7019433/how-to-get-people-to-vote/) Schmidt adds: “I think everyone that I know, everyone that I’ve met, isn’t going to let any of that \[get\] in the way of them doing their job.” But that is not entirely true, he admits. “Since 2020, Pennsylvania has lost more than 80 senior-level election officials. We only have 67 counties,” he says. Neither violence nor the threat of it is likely to have any meaningful impact on the vote count. Since 2020, state and county officials have taken extensive steps to build in layers of security. In Maricopa County, the tabulation center is now surrounded by a sturdy wall, guarded by law-enforcement teams, and surveilled by drones. In Durham County, North Carolina, says elections director Derek L. Bowens, “we also activate our emergency-response center on Election Day and we have patrols of polling locations.” Staff members in every precinct will wear an “alert badge” that summons help at the press of a button. Police officers in all 50 states will be carrying pocket guides to election law, and law-enforcement groups like the National Sheriffs Association are teaming up with election officials for contingency planning. Law enforcement has already been cracking down as part of an effort to deter violence. More than half of the 700 threats cases brought by the U.S. Department of Justice in the past two years have been for threats against federal and state public officials, judges, prosecutors, law-enforcement officers, and election workers, according to public statements by Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. Also an effective deterrent, law-enforcement officials hope, are the convictions of more than 1,000 people for their roles in the riot at the Capitol. One received a sentence of more than 20 years in prison.  An early voting station in North Carolina, Oct. 17 Allison Joyce—Bloomberg/Getty Images --- **Trump could win this election outright. Absent that, if** he has any path to return to power against the will of the voters, it would rely on an improbable decision by Congress or the Supreme Court to discard the results from one or more states that Harris wins. If those electoral votes are not counted, leaving neither candidate with 270, Trump’s allies could call for what’s known as a “contingent election” decided by the newly seated House. Alternatively, if Republicans win both the House and the Senate, they could attempt to certify Trump’s victory with fewer than 270 electoral votes, provided that he had a majority of the electoral votes that had not been thrown out. But these scenarios, and others like them, are remote. One way or another, every election administrator I spoke with agreed, voters will be verified and cast their ballots. The ballots will be counted as cast and audited with paper records. The canvass will be certified, even if a partisan election board tries to balk. The popular vote in every state will control the appointment of electors. Congress will certify the electoral vote, with clear new rules laid out in statutory reforms enacted into law in 2022\. And nothing will prevent the only outcome that our constitutional democracy can abide: the winner of the election will be sworn in as the 47th President on Jan. 20, 2025. Meanwhile, the assault on truth will continue unabated in the ceaseless effort by Trump—in parallel with hostile foreign powers—to sow chaos in our electoral system and undermine faith in the results. “We know it’s a psyops campaign,” says Fontes, the Arizona secretary of state. “We’ve known that since 2016\. This is an intentional erosion of the binding force of society in the United States of America.” Easterly, whose predecessor at CISA was fired by Trump for calling the 2020 election secure and accurate, says, “It is incredibly irresponsible for anyone in a position of power to call into question the security or the integrity or confidence in our elections,” she says. “They really are acting as instruments of our foreign enemies.” The only solution she can envision is for everyone “to come together as Americans in a united way and resist these foreign malign adversaries who very clearly want to weaken our nation,” she says. “And it is up to all of us not to let them.” Democracy, after all, gives more than one power to the people. We not only cast our ballots but exercise our judgment when exposed to the lies of a psychological operation. We don’t have to fall for them. —_With reporting by Leslie Dickstein and Simmone Shah_ [_Gellman_](http://bartongellman.com/)_, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author, is senior adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law_ Correction, October 24 The original version of this story misstated the number of CISA employees overseen by the agency's director Jen Easterly. It is 3,400 not 2,200. Correction, October 27 The original version of this story misstated the name of the organization for which David Becker is the executive director. It is The Center for Election Innovation and Research, not Election Innovation and Research. ## Transcript Really appreciate this opportunity. It really is important to me to have the chance to come and talk to people around the states and to be able to answer their questions directly. You know, I know elections are something that are absolutely, you know, sacred to people. And so being able to get answers to your questions is something I think you'll find I do not take lightly. All right. The first question I have is, if election results can be trusted, why are you here? Appreciate Running elections is not easy. But even when we had tough times in the past, we didn't see anything like this level of scrutiny. Not even close. There's so much that people just don't recognize it happens in elections. To get the calendar blocked, get everything set up, classes for election workers, prepping, you know, all the other precinct tabulators. All of our software stuff has to be looked at holes materials, so it's constant. There's so many details in elections and election officials. Don't have room for error. Thank you. That creates anxiety. And in this environment, you just don't know what to expect anymore. But it's an honor. My job is to make sure the voter's voice is heard. So I'm a complete dork about elections. He got the future voters stickers. So excited. The Administration of election is a thankless child. Nobody grows up and says, I want to be an election administrator. You stumble into it. And you like it because it's worthy. It's a worthy profession. You're helping people. I love all the process of it, the logic of it. I'm like, yes or no, on or off, one or zero. You win? Lis. Wisconsin always has close elections. We are the like most purple of purple states. Knowing that the margins are going to be narrow, we have to be on top of so much. Let me transfer you to one of our election administration specialists. Yesterday, we received 175 phone calls and 461 e mails. As the nonpartisan chief election official for the state, I support the officials who handle everything at the local level, including election day. It is an enormous event. I mean, we have about 4,000 polling places that will be up and running in 2024 during the presidential election. We have 1,850 municipal clerks. We have probably about 40,000 poll workers Think about that just from, like, an events planning perspective. If somebody plans a big event, it's usually in one place. On one day, you sort of have these set conditions. Imagine running 4,000 events on a single day. It has to be done perfectly. And we have four statewide elections in 2024. So we're about to start not just a sprint. We're about to start that marathon that is election year. DTE. With all of this power outage, are we meeting with them or have we met with them? We haven't met with them. These buildings, I'm really concerned with this weather. Yeah. As cold as it is. Election is in a couple of weeks. For the presidential primary election, we received 26,760 applications. Being an elected official in the City of Detroit, you live in a fish f. You feel like you're always being watched. Community wants it done well, and they want it done right. And I've always been the kind of person. If you can do better, do better. I was a teacher and a mother and a wife. And the election results, I think, were 2004, took two weeks for us to get for the City of Detroit, the largest city in the state to get all of our election results, and I thought we can do better. So I told my husband, You know what? I'm gonna run for this because this makes no sense. And I consider myself an educator still. But the walls have been brought down, right? I'm no longer confined to a classroom, but I teach an entire city. Detroit is a gritty town. We've been battle tested, and its people demonstrate that same spirit on a day to day basis. Now, in 2085, when I first started working here with punch cars, elections remained under the radar. The only thing that you heard about elections were the results. You never heard about the administration of the process. It wasn't until the 2000 presidential election that people began to look at elections differently. And for the first time, election workers who had always operated behind the scenes were in the spotlight. Election officials. We plan for a perfect election. That's the goal. There's so much that goes into it, and I'm a planner. I love to know ahead of time how everything's gonna work. These are all color coded, too. Everybody is. So all of their pull books match their color codes. Setting everything up for logic and accuracy testing. If you pull off the seal, it shows a void mark on it. So once the bipartisan teams get done testing, these all get a seal on them when they're locked. We're adding security to the office. We're adding cameras, we're adding sensors. These are the scanners that go to the color coded, like Holer ridges green because it's in the Tora school district, and they're green. It's just a really good feeling. Like, I get to let people vote. I mean, there's not a lot of people that can do that. Marion County Election Center. This is Diana. How may I help you? You have 29 days before any elections to declare a party? 500,000 registered voters in the city of Detroit. We have 200 and some polling locations. So they had enough signatures for the Constitutional amendment, so it'll be on the November ballot. Which one? The abortion issue? We get those ballots that go down to the Department of Elections, they verify the signatures. They upload that information in the Michigan qualified vote fi I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands on nation under God, indivisal, liberty and justice for all. Glad everybody is back. It's great to see so many faces that I recognize. I'd like to start. You'll see if there's any questions anybody has out there as it relates to the election process. Anything's fair game, except for politics and personal opinion. I do run on a party ticket. Okay. I've been a registered Republican. I probably shouldn't named the party, but I did. So I've been registered with a party, you know, basically since day one. But there are no politics as it relates to partisanship inside here. I feel as a supervisor of elections, you know, I get to hold a position that at the end of the night tells you who won and who lost. And my own personal opinion should never cause you doubt. Each office in Ohio is run by a bipartisan team. I'm affiliated with the Republican Party. Rosanne, my partner is actually affiliated with the Democratic Party. So we got to enable everything on them. I think it's really beneficial that we don't have one party running an election. Everyone's represented, and somebody comes in and doesn't know what party we are here, then we're doing our job well. This is my ninth presidential election cycle. And there's one thing that gets said. I think at every single one of them. And that is this is the most important presidential election cycle in our lifetime. So do you believe this one, the 2024 presidential election cycle is the most important in our lifetime? You know, I do. Not from a political candidate perspective like that. It's for the process of conducting elections in and of itself, because the election process is under attack. Election officials across this country have been under attack since 2020, falsely accused of conspiring to steal or rig the last presidential election. Hi. Chill. Amid a torrent of misinformation and falsehood, election denialism is now a potent political force. I am very worried about the fairness and security of our elections that Megan Walk remains in charge of them. It's miss Wolk that allowed for the use of illegal dropboxes in ballad harvesting, and there's so much more. The criticism of election officials that we're experiencing. That's really been the change over the last few years. When the pandemic happened, the environment was so heightened that making claims about elections in order to sort of disparage the process, that really started to take off. This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. Here in Wisconsin, it was a concerted effort to just pile these claims out of thin air on top of election officials, through litigation, through public records request, through courts, through audits, through recounts. All of a sudden, you know, instead of people looking at the record that's in front of them, they were just sort of making things up out of anger. It just felt overwhelming. We were no longer working in a place of reality. We had now crossed over into this place where facts didn't matter anymore. You rigged my election. Several of my colleagues, not only here in Florida, but across the country. We started receiving calls where they would personally name us and personally blame us for the outcome of the election. And one of my colleagues just south of me a little bit, who's register same party affiliation as I am, and they're saying, you know, he was in on the conspiracy to elect the Democratic candidate and here, I'm like, Did you see the results? Former president won the State of Florida and won by a substantial amount. You know, so it didn't make sense to me, still to this day. I don't know to what end are we doing this? To what end? Some stunning testimony before Congress from Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey. She says she's losing staff and living in fear because of claims of fraud in the 2020 election. And the greatest threat came to me when I was taking a walk just to clear my mind. The park is two blocks from my home. One day, this big six foot three Guy gets out of the car. 'Cause I've been watching you. I noticed you don't have your dog with you today. And because of you, Trump lost, why did you allow Trump to lose? And you're gonna pay for that? And a neighbor who happened to be driving by. She saw me and she said, miss Winfrey? Are you okay? I said, absolutely, I'm not. And she kind of circled her car around this man so that I could get home. So I did not tell my husband when I got home. I got very angry. And I went out looking for him. I know. What was that gonna do? What it did for me, it gave me this adrenal, and it's like, Are you kidding me? How dare you? How dare you? It's just a constant demonizing of election officials when we could go back to 2015, and nobody knew we were here. I was kind of great. Now. I go to church and someone sitting at the end of the eu that has just been attacking us on social media. This was happening with different election officials across the country. I hate that elections have been demonized. I hate that people don't understand what we do because we're really proud of what we do. I mean, we know we run good elections. We test everything. We go through every checklist. We make sure everything is done to the letter of the law. Because we want the community to see us as people who are fighting for what's right and fighting to make sure that people's voices are heard no matter what the outcome. What happened is that the process of making sure that the candidate who wins is the individual who received the most votes. That whole process has been politicized. You already sure that things changed in 2020. Can you talk about what kinds of pressures were you undering? Tremendous pressure. I had COVID a couple of times. My husband had COVID, and he was suffering with stage for cancer. So I felt pretty chaotic. This is Hall E of Dn TCF Center, where we were tabulating more than 174,000 absentee ballots. This room was saturated with energy. When the initial results were reported, Trump was leading in Michigan. But after Wayne County began to report their results, Biden was up. And then that's when this chanting erupted. So. But even in the midst of all of the chaos, every last one of those ballots were tabulated. But then the certification of the election results went to the State Board of Canvasses, and that's where the major challenge came. The Board of Canvassers did not want to certify our elections, and they were making it very partisan. And that really irks me because I'm a nonpartisan clerk. But they said they would not certify unless I present myself in person via Zoom. This is the first time I recall ever being called in to speak before the Board of Canvassers. But when you tell me that we won't certify, unless you present yourself and you know that I have COVID, and you know that my family is not well, I do it anyway. We've done everything to ensure that our process is open, that our process is transparent, and that it is. I just picked my husband up from the hospital. And then I went into the conference room and set my piece in terms of why this election should be certified. And thank the Lord, it was certified. And then I went home. Marion County, Supervisor of elections. This is Madison. How can I help you? Did you want all the elections by mail this year? Hello, Mr. Wolfox. It has been brought to my attention that you think this election is yours. This is not your election. This is the election of the people. So if you want to live in a communist country, you go to Cuba, or Venezuela, you go eat dogs over there, but not, right? Wesley Wilcox goes on CNN and tells people that basically he's above audits that you're not gonna audit his elections because he does it right, and you just have to believe he does it right because he says so. I mean, some of the things that get tossed at me, like, you're not doing your job. You're not competent. You need to follow the law, and I'm like, I am following the law. Let me tell you, Mr. Wilcox, I've got a platoon of lawyers ready to bring you to court and the citizens of Merin Tommy won't stand for sigigans in the upcoming elections. You know, I'm being attacked for things that I supposedly said and I never said. The local guy that was on the radio I'd been on that show a couple of times, you know, talking about election stuff, know them for a long time, and the lack of decency to text me and say, Hey, we heard you said this. You know, if you said that, you know, I'm like, you know, at least contact me and see you. And I'll show you everything I've got. Everything I've done, I've done in a public manner. Representative os, I am calling on you to have impeachment papers at the ready to remove her from office so that the state can restore my civil right to have my vote count. Tonight, there's a new turn in the fight over who will lead Wisconsin's elections? Senate Republicans want to have a nomination vote so they can reject Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Megan Wolf. Today, Republicans held the first public hearing on Wolf's free nomination. These are felony crimes. This is the cause of Megan Wolf. We will not back down. We will not tire her out. We are watching your every move. Not only don't renew her, fire her. You know, some of these people, the way they'll just say my name or they'll describe me. They just do it with such anger, such vitriol. It's really almost absurd how drastically the tables turned on me. I mean, in 2018, my commission bipartisanly unanimously supported me as the administrator. And then the Republican controlled Senate unanimously confirmed me. But after the 2020 election, it felt like I became public enemy number one. The governor has implemented or approved extra security for her. We've talked about this before documented some of the threats targeting her. But I can tell you that some of them are threats to her safety and her family safety and well being. And some of them have been treated as very legitimate. In other words from people who had plans and intents and opportunities to do harm. You know, I don't fault people that have these strong feelings and opinions about elections. I have strong feelings about elections. I think we all do, because we know how important it is. All I want is to show people how elections work so that they can have confidence in the process. You know, if there's tough questions tonight, that's okay. I live my life in the hot seat. I really do. And it's my great pleasure tonight to talk to you about the different levels of Wisconsin governments and what everyone's role is in Wisconsin elections. This question is for Megan Wolf. What do you have in place to be able to tell the difference between an eligible voter and extra names that they didn't qualify or aren't eligible? People who your municipal clerk has said, we've reviewed a voter registration, and we say that this person is lawfully able to appear on the poll book. And looking for fraud cases, how many of those per election? Lot of general elections, there's less than 20. But if some type of fraud were committed, there is also audits that are done after the election. And so what they're doing in that audit is they're going to hand count those ballots and ensure that the total is the same as the total on the electronic tabulation equipment. So every single ballot cast in the state of Wisconsin has to have a paper trail. I am wondering why my father who passed away is still on an inactive role. Should he not be completely off because he is deceased? So so much for safe and secure elections. Are you go to pledge to stop that from happening this year? Yes or no. Are you gonna stop that? Anything about Clear. Answer the question Clear. History. The thing that I think the vast majority of election administrators have wished is, you know, not to be any part of the new story? We never wanted to be part of the story. But now, unfortunately, we are. We've had to add security four years ago. You could have shaken the hand of the person on the other side of the desk right there. And now you're behind glass. We had to add monitors and security cameras because in today's world, when people come to visit us, one of the first things that crosses our mind is, are you there to harm us? So those are things that have had to come into this process that weren't ever really contemplated before. That's hard to kind of, you know, accept that no matter how well we do our jobs, no matter how perfectly the election is run, no matter how many recounts we have, no matter how many audits of the election we have, there's still going to be these claims that are made. But as I look ahead to November, You know, if I'm being really frank, I worry about how the turmoil around my position, if it's going to be an easy way for those that wish to so distrust on elections, if it'll be an easy way for them to sort of cast doubt on the state of Wisconsin. And so I worry a lot about M I making the right decision by continuing to push back But I also think that we cannot set the precedent that harassing, bullying, threatening an election official is an effective way to get rid of them. We can not let that be the case, because then it's going to keep happening. Our country is in a very delicate place. It's almost scary. I don't allow myself to be afraid, but I do feel that, all the more reason why we have to do what we do as election administrators, to the best of ability, but more than that, to the letter of the law. I believe that democracy is in our hands is in our hands. I have missed him so much. But he would want us to keep going. He would want us to go big or go home. That's what he says, right? So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna administer this election, like we've never administered an election in the spirit of perfction. I like what I do. I like the election process. I still believe I'm the best person to do this here for Marion County, Florida. And I'm a little obstinate. I don't want anybody to think they've run me out. A You can take a little bit more. The biggest challenge is in order for democracy to be true, people have to engage. Our next election is going to be a superhero theme. At the Polls on election day, if you want to wear a superhero T shirt, you are more than welcome. We are calling you guys defenders of democracy this time instead of poll workers because poll workers just not a good enough title for you anymore. You do way more than that. I don't know if there's going to be animosity or issues in the general election, but I I think anything that happens after the November election is not in my control. If people don't trust our counts, if people don't trust the transition. You're there until you see it, come on. The only control I have is to make sure our election is run properly and fairly. And the rest, that's up to the voters. 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