As in any process involving people, there will be mistakes. There will even be a few people who either through ignorance or deceit will vote more than once. (Nevada participates in a 30-state consortium to catch people who vote in more than one state — there are a few hundred nationwide each election.)
But I found nothing in the data that shows the election was rigged.
If anything, there are a few small factors that tilt slightly in favor of Republicans. Yet, overall trust in elections has plummeted among Republicans. According to Morning Consult polls prior to the election, 66 percent of GOP voters said they had at least some trust in the U.S. election system. In the latest poll (Dec. 15th), that number dropped to 33 percent. Democratic trust, meanwhile, jumped from 63 percent to 83 percent.
(If it wasn’t fraud, why did President Trump lose Nevada? See Part II of my deep dive into the Nevada election data, coming Wednesday.)
While I can’t argue that the system isn’t transparent (I’ve performed all this analysis and interviews based on publicly available data, and public access), I do think the system lacks visibility. The difference between visibility and transparency is the degree to which the ordinary voter is provided visual proactive updates in a manner that is easy to digest.
Frankly, as an ordinary consumer, I get better tracking and visibility in monitoring a delivery from Amazon than I do from something significantly more important — my vote. It is only because I applied my analytic training and put in many hours of work that I could rule out widespread fraud and increase my own trust in our election process. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so time-consuming or difficult for voters to see the data which addresses doubt about voter fraud.
Increasing visibility and faith in our democratic system of electing our representatives is in everyone’s best interest. It is my view that our state should make a concerted effort to better map the citizen’s voting journey, including clear updates for the individual’s vote, as well as a view of the overall patterns for the county — including one-tap access to videos of the voting and counting processes.
A bipartisan team should reach agreement on enhanced and digitized citizen observation of the voting process. This will increase visibility so there is greater trust in the system and less room for conspiracy theories to grow. It won’t convince those who will believe what they want to believe regardless of the facts, but it will help a meaningful percent of citizens who would like the reassurance of tracking their vote — and being able to see that careful checks for anomalies were conducted in order to rule out fraud and contextualize clerical mistakes.