Cast your vote with confidence in 2024 election

As early voting in the 2024 election starts in some states, and New Yorkers consider whether to get an absentee ballot, vote early starting on Oct. 26, or exercise their franchise at their traditional polling place on Election Day, one of the greatest and simplest processes ensuring our democracy is underway.

The accuracy and operation of our voting systems should inspire confidence based on the overall track record of recent years. But the patriotic workers who oversee these localized election mechanisms and keep the checks and balances in place across the 50 states have been subject to unfounded doubt, vicious slander, and even intimidation by political factions that find advantage in cracking the public trust.

Most citizens identified as likely voters in six swing states key to determining who wins the White House expressed "at least some confidence in their state’s election process," according to a CNN-SSRS poll published this month. "But far fewer of them have high confidence in the process, with that mistrust driven largely by voters who support former President Donald Trump," the survey found.

NO EVIDENCE OF FRAUD

Over the past eight years, extreme partisans in the Republican Party have claimed widespread election fraud, such as the alleged intrusion of ineligible voters or "rigged" vote counts, but failed to document that anywhere in the nation.

During the 2016 race, Trump repeatedly claimed that the vote was being "rigged" against him, first in the primary and later in the general election. He won both; his opponents did the traditional American thing and conceded. There was never a clear explanation from Trump's camp as to why he predicted otherwise. Trump won the electoral vote that year but lost the popular vote, while continuing to falsely assert he won that, too.

Soon after becoming president, Trump assigned a panel to explore the prospect of systemic fraud, headed by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Trump supporter. But the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was disbanded amid lawsuits from other jurisdictions over how it operated. No voter fraud was found.

When Trump lost in 2020, he famously tried to get officials in places like Georgia to tamper retroactively with the vote totals, saying in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, "I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state." But he had not won.

In the aftermath of his 2020 defeat, the Trump White House and its allies ratcheted up their baseless fraud claims. It cost Fox News an astounding sum of nearly $800 million last year to settle a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s false reporting of "fixed" ballot counts. Similar lawsuits over the wild conspiracy theory of rigged machines are pending.

In addition, then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was ordered to pay $148 million in damages to two Georgia election workers about whom he spun a fake story about cheating and fentanyl and tried to use it to affect the election. Commendably, the Peach State’s loyally Republican election authorities stuck to the facts and didn’t bend to the nonsense.

Dozens of Trump court cases challenging election results were tossed out of court. The only ruling favoring the 45th president was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

CHECK ALL COMPLAINTS

Add up the most relevant facts over the last two presidential terms and it becomes clear that those screaming fraud the loudest were the very people trying to perpetrate it. That's not to say there have been no irregularities whatsoever. Complaints of fraud should and must still be explored in a bipartisan way as they arise.

In one such case, the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles acknowledged recently that it accidentally and automatically registered 306 non-U.S. citizens to vote. Driver's licenses can be issued to noncitizens in that state. The names are being removed from the rolls. But the state also reports that only two of the 306 people mistakenly registered actually voted in elections since 2021.

For his part, Republican Rep. Andrew Garbarino, the Long Island House member who chairs the chamber's committee with oversight of cybersecurity, told the Newsday editorial board that our electoral systems are currently safe from intrusions and interference. Garbarino said he is more concerned about AI-generated "deepfakes" spreading disinformation on the internet. "Actual election interference in terms of changing the vote count is not a valid [concern], I mean I can't see it," he said.

People who work on elections are your neighbors. They come from all political party affiliations. And they have generally performed well and protected the system just by enforcing the rules. Escalating criticism they have received from Trump, who has labeled them cheaters and has promised to prosecute "unscrupulous" and "corrupt" officials if he wins the election, is unfair and damaging.

There are enough election-related worries to consider without succumbing to paranoia that your vote, either by mail or at the poll site, won’t be properly counted. It is better in this day and age to resist falling for the story lines of any politicians who wish to divide the country.