As some on the left and the right challenge the electoral system, voters should know that it can meet the challenges of another presidential contest.
A s the high-profile 2024 campaign cycle approaches its end, voters may have concerns about the sanctity and fairness of our elections. We hear and understand many of these concerns: about foreign interference, about the ability of the U.S. Postal Service to deliver election mail, about the emergence of artificial intelligence.
As chief state elections officials and proud Republicans from across the country, we come together to pledge that America is ready and prepared to carry out a secure, safe, and fair election process.
We understand the nature of politics and recognize that the closer we get to the election, the more tactics and party politics come into play. As in previous election cycles, Democrats are alleging that commonsense security practices are evidence of voter suppression.
We acknowledge that some are also sowing doubts from the political right, focusing on issues such as potential noncitizen voting or voting-machine malfeasance. These doubts recently led the Georgia State Election Board to push through a rule requiring poll workers to count, by hand, the number of ballots cast. At a high level, these kinds of changes should not be made at the last minute and risk creating more chaos than voter confidence.
Specifically, this change risks delaying the process of counting votes — it could take days or weeks to match up the hand counts in each jurisdiction with the machine count. Additionally, hand counts have proven to be significantly less accurate than machine counts and lend themselves to human error and potential fraud. This new rule perpetuates the very problem that election officials across the country have worked to solve over the past four years: ensuring accurate and timely election results.
As elections officials, we should never stop looking for continuous improvement in our elections. We must also tell the truth about them. In Georgia, and across the country, election administrators have spent years preparing to conduct this general election, putting in place common security and integrity protections. The challenges of conducting the last general election during the Covid-19 pandemic have only steeled our systems and processes, allowing us to mitigate potential threats. We are ready.
We need to move beyond the tropes of voter suppression and voter fraud. Along those lines, we must be honest in noting that Georgia, Kansas, and Utah have some of the best election systems in the country: There is no need to make changes at the eleventh hour.
States across the country all have common security and integrity protections. To ensure that only eligible votes are counted, states are required to maintain voter-registration processes that allow only eligible voters to vote and vote once. Voter-registration forms require sworn statements of U.S. citizenship, and providing false information on these forms leads to stiff penalties, including potential imprisonment and deportation.
Additionally, all states work to confirm the accuracy of voting equipment. Approximately 95 percent of voters in 2024 will vote on a ballot with a voter-verifiable paper trail, and federal law requires all jurisdictions to produce a paper record for audits and recounts.
We know that in the next few weeks, voters will hear a variety of narratives about election administration and policies, and partisan actors across the political divide may look to sow doubts about the fairness, security, and sanctity of results. We are working to demonstrate that American voters can trust our elections. We urge states to resist putting into effect last-minute changes that will only create more confusion for voters. We urge voters to exercise our American privilege of casting a vote — and know that it will be counted fairly.
— Brad Raffensperger is Georgia’s secretary of state. Scott Schwab is Kansas’s secretary of state. Deidre Henderson is Utah’s lieutenant governor.