Now is the best time in US history to vote. Yes, American elections are flawed. They are affected by the lack of voter rights, gerrymanderingthe inherent oddity of the electoral college and the recent cases of ballot box burning. But the act of voting itself has been unfairly tarnished, most notably by former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was fraudulent. This claim is especially absurd as modern voting procedures are just becoming More robust — and those who vote by mail or by machine in this year’s presidential election can, in fact, be more confident than ever that their votes will be counted accurately.

One reason for this confidence is the adoption of voting technology that combines machine efficiency with the verifiability of a paper trail. That’s the result of a change that began two decades ago, after system crashes and punch card fragments — Florida’s infamous “suspended chads” — led to a fiasco that left the results of the 2000 election unclear for five weeks . Congress’s response, the Help America Vote Act of 2002, phased out the use of punch card ballots and lever machines in federal elections. Most Americans now vote with optical scanners, which process selections marked on sheets of paper. In the 2020 presidential election, polling places in Georgia used hand-powered optical scanners; an audit of nearly five million votes cast in the state, the largest number of ballots in recent US history, confirmed that President Joe Biden had won. County error rates were 0.73 percent or less, and most had no change in their accounts.

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Although US voting machines are not completely tamper-proof—no machine is invulnerable—as a precaution against remote hacking, the vast majority do not connect to the Internet (potentially problematic exceptions aside). In a recent election security update, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, said the intelligence community has no evidence that adversaries are trying to compromise the physical US election infrastructure. Intervening in a meaningful way with the country’s diverse, decentralized systems would be essentially impossible, the ODNI update said. Instead, foreign actors prefer the easier route of psychological influence, trying to sway voters or undermine trust in elections through propaganda and disinformation.

“For many reasons, the potential vulnerability of individual voting machines does not translate into a systemic vulnerability,” says the political scientist. Mark Lindemandirector of policy and strategy at Verified Voting, a nonprofit group that tracks election systems across the country. “Hackers can’t go one-on-one with voting machines. There is a whole set of procedural safeguards to protect them.” Physical ballots also add confidence to the system as they are verifiable, auditable and countable. american scientist spoke with Lindeman about why Americans, despite so much election turmoil, are living in a golden age for voting.

(An edited transcript of the interview follows.)

Verified Voting estimates that nearly 98.6% of registered voters live in the jurisdictions where they vote they have a paper trail of some form. Why is this important?

It is twofold. A paper trail provides a safety system. If something goes wrong with the systems — and what we’ve seen in some elections are machines miscounting votes, never because of hacking, always because of an error in the way they were set up — paper ballots have been available for to correct these mistakes.

Perhaps an even greater value of paper ballots that voters have verified and that election officials use in audits and recounts is to provide reassurance. Instead of arguing over whether the machines counted the votes accurately, we can look at the paper ballot evidence and find out. We can move away from abstract speculation about technology into observable reality.

Voting machines in the US are generally not connected to the Internet. In fact, Verified Voting opposed Internet voting proposals. Why is that?

These are paper ballots that voters can verify and that election officials can then use to verify the count. We see electronic ballot transmission, Internet voting in any form, as a step away from what has made elections in recent years more secure than they were 20 years ago when Verified Voting was founded. The country is now reaching the point where virtually everyone votes on paper ballots that they can verify. Internet voting is the antithesis.

If someone claims that an internet election (or an election where many votes were cast electronically) was hacked, I don’t know how anyone can convince people otherwise.

If you vote in this election, how confident are you that your vote will be counted?

I voted early here in New York State using a hand-marked paper ballot and a scanner. New York State has a 3% audit and I am very confident that my vote will be counted accurately.

What is a 3% audit?

New York randomly selects 3 percent of the scanners that are used in elections and manually counts those ballots to make sure they were counted correctly. Most states conduct some sort of post-election audit. The details vary, but having some form of audit based on percentages, as New York does, is the most common model.

Was there ever a voting heyday before this one? (A recent Pew Research Center survey of registered U.S. voters found that approx one in four believes in the presidential elections will be driven at least somewhat badly.)

I don’t think there has ever been a better time to vote in the US. There was also a time when everyone voted by ballot – but frankly, the election administration was rife with corruption. No one really calls to go back to the old days Tammany Hall (laugh).

Paper ballots are not necessarily inherently secure. The paper is fragile. But the checks and balances that have been put in place around paper ballots have never worked more effectively in the US than they do today. Election administration is much more professional than it was even 20 years ago. Election officials are better trained. They are more aware. It seems strange to talk about this as a golden age of elections in the midst of anxiety, but I see no other way to interpret the facts.

What can we do to restore confidence in the American vote?

(He lets out a weary sigh.)

I felt it in my bones.

I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think reflecting on reality is the place to start. Part of this reality is the underlying technology in place: the fact that our votes are recorded on paper ballots; procedurally, the fact that those paper ballots are protected — that, in most states, they’re used in audits to verify counts.

Beyond that, a large majority of Americans actually do trusted their local election officials. In my experience, that trust is well placed. The election officials I’ve worked with across the country are very focused on the mission of making elections work for their constituents. So I don’t really know what it takes to get people to appreciate the good around them instead of building up fear or morbid speculation about terrible things that could happen. It might be above my pay grade.

If you could improve one thing about the mechanics of the American vote, what would it be?

We can do better with a truly accessible vote than we do now. I think accessibility has been grafted onto most voting systems on the market. If we focus more on accessibility from the ground up, we can do better for a wider range of voters.

Can you give me an example of accessible voting?

Many states offer some kind of touchscreen interface that can also be equipped with (“rocker pedals,” large buttons that can be operated with the feet, hands, or other parts of the body) and what are called sip-interfaces. and-puf (devices that are operated by breathing). All of these provide ways for voters with different abilities and disabilities to interact with a voting machine. I can adjust the contrast; I can adjust the font size. And with audio interfaces, if you can’t see your ballot, you can read your ballot.

These are all interfaces that give a wider range of voters the ability to mark and vote independently. And they are a big improvement over nothing. But I also think that voters with disabilities, in many cases, can testify that those interfaces don’t work as well in practice as they’re built to do in theory.

We are in the early days of accessibility and I would like to raise the bar.