Guardrails: Can Election Integrity Become a Bridge Across the Left-Right Divide?

July 9 at 3pm ET: Professor Doug Jones on audited paper ballots and democracy defense

Many insightful people understand something important:

Elections are vulnerable.

That sentence can lead in two very different directions.

It can lead to cynicism, conspiracy theories, partisan rage, and a collapse of public trust.

Or it can lead to something much better: a broad, practical, cross-partisan movement for elections that ordinary people can verify.

On July 9 at 3pm ET, we are honored to host Professor Doug Jones for a conversation on:

Audited Paper Ballots and Democracy Defense

Professor Doug Jones is one of the country’s most experienced and thoughtful experts on voting technology and election security. The University of Iowa describes his expertise as “voting technology, how we came to vote using technology, voting system acquisition and evaluation.” His voting technology pages and public writing show a long career of explaining voting systems, threats, evaluation, and public evidence.

This conversation begins with a possibility that could matter far beyond election administration:

Many conservatives and many progressives both worry that election systems can be manipulated — can we begin working together around this and broaden from there?

The powerful idea: don’t ask people to trust. Give them evidence.

The strongest answer to election distrust is not “trust the machines.”

It is not “trust the experts.”

It is not “trust my party.”

The strongest answer is:

Let voters mark paper ballots by hand, preserve those ballots as the evidence of voter intent, and audit the results in a transparent, statistically valid way.

That combination changes the problem.

A purely digital attack can target software.

A machine can malfunction.

A vendor can make mistakes.

A reporting system can fail.

But if the true record of voter intent is a voter-marked paper ballot, and if the reported electronic outcome is checked against those ballots through a transparent, statistically valid audit, then a purely technical attack on the election becomes impractical.

The public no longer has to take the result on faith.

The public can see that the result was checked.

Why audits matter

A serious audit is not just a ritual.

A risk-limiting audit checks a random sample of voter-verifiable paper ballots to provide strong evidence that the reported outcome is correct, or to trigger more counting if the evidence is not strong enough. The National Conference of State Legislatures describes risk-limiting audits as one form of post-election audit that checks whether voting equipment and procedures worked properly and whether an election yielded the correct outcome.

That is the key idea.

We do not need a democracy based on blind trust.

We need a democracy that can generate public evidence.

Doug Jones’s work on voting-system threats has long emphasized that voting systems should be evaluated with their vulnerabilities in mind. That does not mean giving up. It means designing systems so failures and attacks can be detected, investigated, and corrected.

Why this could matter beyond election administration

Election integrity is often treated as a technical topic.

It is technical.

But it is also emotional, civic, and political in the best sense.

People across the political spectrum worry that the system is rigged, hackable, manipulated, or controlled by people they do not trust. Sometimes those fears are exploited in bad faith. Sometimes they are confused. But underneath them is a serious democratic need:

People want proof that the government they live under was actually chosen by the voters.

That need should not belong to the left or the right.

A movement for hand-marked paper ballots and transparent, statistically valid audits could become one of the rare democracy-defense efforts that speaks to people across ideological lines.

It offers conservatives, progressives, independents, technologists, election officials, students, lawyers, and civic groups a shared principle:

We should be able to verify election outcomes without trusting any party, vendor, machine, or official blindly.

That is not paranoia.

That is good system design.

What university communities can do

This session is not just about voting technology.

It is about whether election integrity can become a point of democratic reconstruction.

Can university communities help build a movement that says:

We know elections are vulnerable.

We refuse both blind trust and reckless conspiracy thinking.

We want systems that can be checked.

We want paper ballots.

We want transparent, statistically valid audits.

We want election outcomes that the public can verify.

And we want to work with anyone, left, right, or center, who sincerely wants trustworthy elections.

That is the promise of this conversation.

University-connected people may be able to help the public understand why hand-marked paper ballots matter, why serious audits matter, and why evidence is better than either denial or conspiracy thinking.

They may be able to help build a movement broad enough to strengthen democracy more generally.

The question we hope to explore with Doug Jones

The central question is not merely:

How do we make elections more secure?

It is also:

Can trustworthy election infrastructure become a bridge across the left-right divide, and can that bridge help save democracy more broadly?

We do not know the answer.

But Doug Jones has spent decades writing, advising, advocating, and thinking clearly about voting technology and election security. That makes him an ideal person to help us ask the question seriously.

Who should attend

This conversation is for people who care about democracy and want to think seriously about how to protect it.

It will be especially useful for students, faculty, alumni, election-security advocates, lawyers, technologists, organizers, journalists, statisticians, civic leaders, and anyone who wants to help build a broader movement for trustworthy elections.

You do not need to be an election expert.

You only need to care about whether democracy can prove its own results.

Sign up for the series

Professor Doug Jones’s conversation is part of a broader Action This Day conversation series on how university communities can defend freedom, democracy, and the rule of law through practical, near-term action.

Please sign up for the series here.

And please share the conversation series with people in your own university networks who care about trustworthy elections and want to help build a movement strong enough to defend them.