Election crimes are crimes

The conviction on Monday of former Mesa County (Colorado) clerk Tina Peters, for tampering with voting machines, produced a few reactions as I’ve read the various news reports this week.

First, when I first started studying election fraud and election crimes back around 2000 (which seems like a very long time ago!), I kept running into an important fact. That while there are always claims and allegations about different types of election fraud in the United States, there is very little evidence that election fraud is perpetrated, especially in larger federal elections. This conclusion has been replicated in study after study, ranging from the 2008 book on Election Fraud that I edited with Susan Hyde and Thad Hall, to more recent studies like the 2021 paper by Eggers, Garro, and Grimmer in PNAS. As I tell people when they ask me about election fraud, we are constantly on the lookout for fraud, and I’d be the first to go public with any evidence of election fraud if it existed. But that evidence just never arises in our many, many studies.

Second, sometimes when we talk to people about election fraud, they express concerns about “insider attacks,” in other words, threats that might be perpetrated by someone who has behind-the-scenes access to election materials and technologies. When I hear these concerns, it’s generally easy to counter these concerns, when I talk through the many layers of scrutiny and security that we see in election offices and around election procedures, not to mention the many people who are involved in every aspect of administering an election. In game theoretic terms, “insider attacks” would be really hard to accomplish because they would require that the perpetrator somehow manage to attack the system and then get all of the people watching and participating in the election process to stay silent about the attack. The likelihood of that occurring is very, very low. And the evidence is that we just don’t see evidence of “insider attacks.”

But in the case of Tina Peters, that was an “insider attack.” So you can read all about this “insider attack” in the many news articles that have been written, and you can even read through many of the legal filings, some of which are available to the public (thanks to Caltech grad student Matt Estes for finding these filings!). Here is a case of an “insider attack.”

Guess what - she got caught, easily, and while the legal process has been drawn out, she was convicted on seven different criminal charges.

What does this tell us about election fraud via an “insider attack?” It is hard to perpetrate, in most situations it will easily be detected, and it is against the law. If someone tries an “insider attack,” they are likely to get caught and then convicted of criminal activity.

So why don’t we see significant election fraud in the United States? It’s hard to do, the perpetrators are likely to be caught, and they are also very likely to be convicted of election crimes.