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A playbook for balancing pandemic safety and election security

Jeff Plungis
By Jeff PlungisOct 09, 2020
Jeff Plungis

Jeff Plungis is editor of Election Dissection.

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Election Dissection contributor David Levine of the Alliance for Securing Democracy put out a comprehensive guidebook for securing the vote in 2020. The report shows that the innovative ways officials in the United States and Europe are making voting more accessible during the Covid-19 pandemic come with some security risks. On top of that, the persistent risks of foreign interference, cyberattacks and disinformation continue.

Levine addresses everything from added infection-prevention costs to poll watching to post-election audits.

Here's the conclusion:

As countries' authorities and election management bodies make changes to their election processes in response to the coronavirus, they must carefully consider the election security risks such changes introduce, while ensuring that elections carried out during the pandemic are accessible, secure, and legitimate. Doing otherwise risks making elections more vulnerable to adversaries and undermining public confidence in the democratic process.

Read the full report.

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While Georgia will likely conduct a risk-limiting audit and recount of the presidential election later this month, the state appears to have done a good job administering the 2020 presidential election. As a former election administrator and expert on the integrity of elections, my assessment is there is no reason to question the integrity of the election outcome. If any concrete evidence suggesting that wrongful disenfranchisement has or will affect the accuracy of the outcome, that assessment could change. Right now, there isn't.

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