How healthy is the U.S. voting system?
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced at last night's debate that he is open to challenging the legitimacy of this year's election — but MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III, a renowned expert on the U.S. election system, says no one should worry that the system is rigged. “What is lost in almost all debates on this is that elections happen one precinct at a time,” says Stewart, a founding member of the influential Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (VTP), which was started in 2000 to prevent a recurrence of the problems that threatened that year's U.S. presidential election. “I don't think you can hack the election. ” Why is that the case? Among other things, election observers are stationed in every polling place; ballots are counted in public; and post-election audits are conducted to spot-check results. Plus, the machines that record and count ballots aren't connected to the internet. As a result,...