Americans are understandably bruised by election tampering. But mistrusting the process itself does not make our democracy any stronger.
While millions of Americans excitedly await the upcoming Super Tuesday primary contests, Iowa's disastrous experience with a results-reporting app has joined 2016's Russian influence campaigns in extending a shadow over our democratic processes. In each case, technologies promising to enrich our democracy and broaden participation in it opened the door for both malice and error to blemish voter trust and confidence.
In the end, even if neither Iowa's misplaced reliance on an undercooked app nor Russia's cyber-enabled information operations impacted the integrity of the ballot box, they didn't have to. Technology failures far away from any votes can too easily be weaponized to damage Americans' faith in those votes, making that faith an attractive target for our adversaries and a dangerous blind spot for our mistakes.
This should not stop us from always striving to make our elections more inclusive, accessible, and responsive to the public. But everywhere our electoral system intersects with a computer system, we must ask why that intersection is necessary and how it can be best secured. The most important partner in ensuring our democracy's security, however, is us: the voters. We must become better at inoculating ourselves against threats to our trust in one another — whether those threats are mistakes or malice. We cannot be so willing to assume every delay in election results is a conspiracy. Our litmus-test for truth cannot be whether it is said by someone we like, or something to which we agree. Rather, we must"trust, but verify.
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