Establishing Electoral Integrity

Constructive Conflict Resource Guide

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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Many public conflicts cannot be resolved through win-win bargaining. Elections are one of the principal democratic ways of making such win-lose decisions without violence. Certainly, elections do not make everyone happy. They do, however, give people a fair opportunity to compete for power, persuade others, and accept temporary defeat with the knowledge that they will have another chance in the future. For this to work, elections must be both trustworthy and trusted.

Establishing electoral integrity starts with the basic promise that every eligible voter can vote, and that every valid vote will be counted accurately. This requires well-maintained voter registration systems, accessible polling places, clear rules for mail and absentee voting, secure voting equipment, trained poll workers, and reliable procedures for counting and reporting results. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission was created to help improve election administration, and it provides guidance on issues such as voter registration, voting systems, poll worker training, and election security. These administrative details may seem technical, but they are central to democratic legitimacy.

Election integrity also requires credible safeguards against fraud, error, intimidation, and cyberattack. Safeguards should be real, not merely symbolic. They should protect the election without making it unnecessarily difficult for eligible citizens to vote. The Election Assistance Commission’s election-security guidance describes practices used to protect voting systems throughout the election cycle. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency treats election infrastructure as critical infrastructure and works with state and local officials to reduce cybersecurity and physical-security risks. Other safeguards include chain-of-custody rules, bipartisan observation, transparent canvassing procedures, and post-election audits. Risk-limiting audits, for example, are designed to check whether the reported winner really won.

Trust also depends on transparency. Voters need to know what the rules are before the election, how ballots will be counted, who has authority to certify results, and how mistakes can be corrected. Election officials should explain procedures clearly and make non-sensitive information available to the public. At the same time, political leaders and media figures have a responsibility not to manufacture distrust by making unsupported claims of fraud. The Brennan Center for Justice has warned that false fraud claims can be used to interfere with vote counting and certification. Such claims are especially damaging when they persuade citizens that an election was stolen without providing evidence that can be tested through lawful procedures.

For constructive conflict and healthy democracy, electoral integrity is important because it makes losing tolerable. If people believe that they lost because most voters chose another option, they may be disappointed or angry, but they can continue the struggle through other democratic means. If they believe that they lost because the process was rigged, they may conclude that persuasion and voting no longer matter. That belief can lead to cynicism, withdrawal, radicalization, or attempts to seize power by other means. Establishing electoral integrity is therefore not a narrow administrative task. It is a peacebuilding task within democracy itself: a way of ensuring that high-stakes political conflicts can be decided, challenged, corrected, and revisited without destroying the system that allows peaceful self-government.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.