US Elections: 'If the Result is Close, We are in for a World of Trouble'

Speaking to Radio Sputnik about whether one should expect vote-rigging in Tuesday's US presidential election, Andrew Gumbel, award-winning journalist and expert on the American electoral system, suggested that while the chances of this happening are extremely low, if the election is close, the suspicions of the skeptics will be raised.

Today, Americans are taking to the polls to elect the next president in an election which has been described as historic. Ahead of the vote, polling was conducted showing that over 40% of Americans believe that the election could be stolen from Republican Donald Trump candidate. Speaking to Radio Sputnik about the prospects for such an eventuality, Andrew Gumbel, author of the book 'Down for the Count: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America', stressed that the practice of electoral manipulation, including efforts to suppress votes, has traditionally been largely a Republican tradition going back to the 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

Stressing that "there is really zero evidence" of vote stealing taking place on any meaningful scale, Gumbel noted that "having said that, the United States does have a lot of pervasive problems with its electoral system. The very fact that partisans in states can pass laws that block certain groups of voters from being able to express themselves fairly is in and of itself an anomaly. Most advanced Western democracies have some kind of central electoral commission that lays down standards, sets rules and doesn't make it possible for political parties to interfere in this way. The United States is different." 

Actually rigging the vote on a national scale was highly unlikely, according to Gumbel, because of the level to which the US electoral system is devolved, with "every county, in many cases ha[ving] a different voting system. So you would have to coordinate a tremendous number of people dealing with different technologies that work at different levels of efficiency."

For example, "most of the country at this point uses optical scan ballots, where people fill in bubbles by pen, those get read by a reader, and if there is any question about the outcome, then there is the possibility of a manual recount."

"There are parts of the country where they have machines that are not verifiable – where you can't do manual recounts, and those are a real problem, but they only represent about 10% of the votes being cast today; for the most part, they're not in swing states, with the exception of Georgia…and parts of Pennsylvania – the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburg."

At the same time, "in order to play with those machines deliberately…you would have to have an inside source who would have to do something that would then not go detected by his or her colleagues."

Accordingly, Gumbel suggested that the probability of large-scale tampering is low. "Having said that, is there a history in this country of voting machines being tampered with in certain circumstances? Yes. It happens when one party is in control of the electoral process, where the race is very close, and the stakes are very high. If you see a 5-7% margin between the candidates there is effectively no [sense in] fiddling with the results."

"My biggest concern frankly, is that because of the rhetoric that's been around this election, and all this talk of rigged elections…I think there's a decent chance of violence breaking out. We have to hope that it's not going to come to that, because the United States does not have that tradition on Election Day; it's usually calm, and fairly joyous…If the result is close, and maybe it's not clear who the winner is by tomorrow morning, then I think we're in for a world of trouble."

Ultimately, the journalist suggested that if the US wants to improve its electoral system – including so that other countries do not accuse it of hypocrisy and double standards in electoral transparency, it would need to "have a non-partisan central election commission with teeth that could say ‘Here are the machines we are buying, we are verifying that they work, here are the rules, you can’t get away with changing rules, you have fewer polling stations in areas where your political opponents vote and more in areas where your supporters vote. You can’t have a situation where somebody is both the state guarantor of election results and also member of a political campaign at the same time, which happens routinely in this country. There are a number of basic fixed like that you could enact and it would work."