From
Napa Valley Register
Can an election really be 'rigged'?
Nov 5, 2016
Sean Scully
There’s been a lot of talk of late of a “rigged” election, a presidential vote stolen by dark and malevolent forces.
After more than a quarter century covering elections, including both statewide and presidential races, I can say this is pretty much impossible, but not for the reason you think.
A national election is impossible to steal not because the system is so good, but because it is so bad.
...
Every four years, Americans wake up to rediscover something called the Electoral College, which is a clunky way of electing presidents ...
But that’s not what I am talking about. While Americans seem at least dimly aware of the Electoral College, I doubt many understand the deeper structure of our system. The secret of our system is that elections are run not at the national or even state level, but rather at the county and city level.
That means that instead of having one single presidential election on Nov. 8, or even 50 elections, we will have about 5,000 separate elections simultaneously, ...
...
Because it’s so decentralized “there is not one central point of failure” where a hacker or crooked politician could decide the election, said U.C. Berkeley statistics Professor Philip B. Stark, ...
Generally the system works because voting irregularities in a few places ... tend to wash out in the aggregate ... The system only breaks down in very close contests, such as in 2000, ...
This shows it is theoretically possible that someone could compromise a few key election offices in a few swing states and make a big difference in a close election, said Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professors at the University of Iowa and an author of several books and studies on the accuracy of voting systems and threats to their security.
“On the other hand, searching through the county election offices in a swing state for an office with the right combination of equipment, vulnerabilities, and lax procedural controls won’t be an easy job,” he told me in an email.
And orchestrating such a rigging operation would require a conspiracy of vast size and sophistication. Political machines capable of organizing such a scheme are largely a thing of the past, said Zack Stalberg, ...
“When ‘rigging’ apparently did take place, it was orchestrated by powerful local ‘bosses,’ ...