Not everything will run perfectly on Election Day. Still, US elections are remarkably reliable

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On Election Day, some voting lines will likely be long and some precincts may run out of ballots. An election office website could go down temporarily and ballot-counting machines will jam. Or people who help run elections might just act like the humans they are, forgetting their key to a local polling place so it has to open later than scheduled.

These kinds of glitches have occurred throughout the history of U.S. elections. Yet election workers across America have consistently pulled off presidential elections and accurately tallied the results — and there’s no reason to believe this year will be any different.

Elections are a foundation of democracy. They also are human exercises that, despite all the laws and rules governing how they should run, can sometimes appear to be messy. They’re conducted by election officials and volunteers in thousands of jurisdictions across the United States, from tiny townships to sprawling urban counties with more voters than some states have people.

It’s a uniquely American system that, despite its imperfections, reliably produces certified outcomes that stand up to scrutiny. That’s true even in an era of misinformation and hyperpartisanship.

“Things will go wrong,” said Jen Easterly, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

None of these will mean the election is tainted or rigged or is being stolen. But Easterly said election offices need to be transparent about the hiccups so they can get ahead of misinformation and attempts to exploit routine problems as a way to undermine confidence in the election results.

“At the end of the day, we need to recognize things will go wrong. They always do,” Easterly said. “It will really come down to how state and local election officials communicate about those things going wrong.”

One of the major concerns heading into the 2024 presidential election is the high turnover in election offices across the country, in particular in some of the presidential battlegrounds, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor who leads Ohio State University’s election law program.

Before the 2022 midterms, for example, 10 of Nevada’s 17 counties had turnover among their clerk or registration positions, which oversee voting.

Threats and harassment from those who believe election conspiracy theories have fueled the attrition. Despite all the training election workers receive, there’s no substitute for the experience of going through a major election cycle.

Many of those who have left had years and even decades of experience. In some cases, they have been replaced by people with little or no experience, and who at times have peddled conspiracy theories.

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Republished with permission of the Associated Press.