Your Vote Is Safe

As Nov. 5 approaches, former president Donald Trump 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, that the election is “rigged,” with a “bad voting system.” As he told 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, 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?

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.

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

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. 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, and other officials.

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 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

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. 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 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.”

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

Trump’s public disinformation campaign has been amplified on Elon Musk’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.

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

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, 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.”

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: 11 Things to Say to Persuade Someone 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.

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, 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.