We Demand A Recount

The spectre of Russian hacking is blinding the US to a homegrown threat to their democracy: a refusal to verify election results.

- Steve Friess

America is a nation that refuses to double-check. To do so in the aftermath of an election is often seen as an assault on that election’s integrity, an insult to the fine, hardworking bureaucrats whoorchestrate the voting process and an unpatriotic gambit attempted only by sore losers. It is also a key reason American democracy is so vulnerable to attack.

With the mid-terms drawing ever nearer, the mounting evidence of Russia’s social-media influence campaign in 2016 is focusing attention on election integrity. But after that historic showdown, efforts to recount three states that went surprisingly and narrowly for Donald Trump were stymied by legal challenges and subjected to mockery from both sides of the aisle. Since then, several state legislatures have made it even more difficult to double-check election results despite 2016’s foreign meddling and cyber attacks. By now, virtually all saboteurs of democracy know the US is too fussy, impatient and fragile to allow for a secondary process to rule out interference or error.

“People say we shouldn’t do anything that could decrease public trust in our elections,” says Philip Stark, associate dean of mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley and an appointed member of the board of advisors of the US Election Assistance Commission. “That’s putting trust before trustworthiness instead of trustworthiness before trust. What we really ought to have is a demonstrably trustworthy process.”