The US election won't be rigged - but the system has to be fixed

This experience triggered a major investment in American's electoral machinery with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) distributing omore than $3 billion to state officials - but there are still serious problems.

The Pew Research Center has created a Performance Index to demonstrated the state-by-state variation in the quality of America's electoral machinery. The most recent data from 2014 suggests that North Dakota runs the best elections overall - while Alabama runs the worst ones. If you were a voter in Washington state in 2014, you could expect to wait only around 40 seconds to vote while the average wait time in North Carolina was nearly nine minutes. Virtually no postal ballots were rejected in Washington DC, but Washington state, which conducts its elections entirely by post, rejected 1.3% of all its mail ballots.

As election day approaches, officials in New York City have warned that their infrastructure may not be able to deal with a high turnout.

Not an altogether reassuring picture, then. So how can America's elections be improved?

Doing better

The logic with which Obama dismissed Trump's electoral fraud claim was striking. For him, election rigging was not possible because US elections are so decentralised ... Elections are run by state and local officials which means that there are places like Florida, where you have got a Republican governor, whose Republican appointees are going to be running and monitoring these election sites ... The notion that Trump loses Florida because of "those people" ... is irresponsible.

Put simply, the argument is that localised administrative systems prevent electoral fraud. In the US, each state has considerable discretion over the procedures it uses. There will be also be thousands of counts across the country on the night, each reporting their own result. They will be organisationally and technologically independent from each other, meaning that to orchestrate a fixed result even at the state level would be nigh on impossible.

Any Russian attempt to fix the result would therefore face the longest of odds.

But it is unusual for anyone, and especially the Democrats, to laud the US system for its decentralisation. This same structure has long been blamed for many of the problems with the system, and for many of the inequalities in the services provided to voters. Yale academic Heather Gerken has argued that "localism" has been the cause of a great many problems in American elections. Renowned elections expert Robert Pastor claimed that the US system has been "decentralised to the point of being dysfunctional".

The experience of 2000 begat a new worldwide field of academic study striving to identify the best ways of running elections. My own recently published research shows that introducing some degree of centralisation in an already decentralised system can have both positive and negative effects.

It can provide a more consistent experience for the voter, ensure some minimal standards and reduce local managerial errors. But there is a cost: sensitivity to the needs of each locality can be reduced - and it can be expensive to issue blanket instructions and uniformity where it is not necessarily needed.

There are other known fixes from academic research: recruiting and training high-quality poll workers, using performance management schemes and simply investing more in electoral services are high up on the list. On all these measures, the US could do much better.

Trump may be wide of the mark with his claims of election "rigging", but if these claims sound plausible to much of the American public, it's partly because the country has failed to adequately tighten the nuts and bolts of elections even after seeing the machine fail spectacularly. If voters don't trust the process, that's a serious problem for democracy; once this election is done, the problem needs to be tackled head-on.

Toby S. James, Senior Lecturer in British & Comparative Politics, University of East Anglia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.