In 2018, I interviewed IU’s then-President Michael McRobbie (now University Chancellor) about a report that he wrote called Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy. The committee, co-chaired by Lee Bollinger, argued that the biggest challenge facing American elections at that time was “foreign meddling.”

The solution, they argued, was that all ballots should be on paper. It was a common-sense suggestion, perhaps a bit ironic coming as it did from experts in cyber-security.

Paper may sound like yesterday’s idea, but the future of our democracy may well depend upon it.

As far as I am aware, this suggestion has largely been followed. I have seen different statistics, with the MIT Election Lab showing that most voting is done on optical scan devices (where there is a paper trail) and others on machines that mark paper ballots. Less than 10% of voting is done on digital machines.

After Trump’s 2016 victory, Russian interference was the leitmotif, mainly put forward as an idea by Democrats who were upset with election result.

"In many ways, Trump is the embodiment of everything they had been working toward, and the perfect Trojan Horse for Putin." - Hilary Clinton

McRobbie and colleagues could not have foreseen the challenges that would be on the agenda in 2020. In that case, with the Republicans eventually losing, mail-in balloting became the bête noir, as did ballot harvesting. The Observatory for Social Media conducted surveys in the run-up to 2020, focusing on “unsupported narratives” and the public’s tendency to believe them. About 2/3rds of respondents reported that they were familiar with the idea. In the end, the study found that belief in mail fraud was massively a characteristic of those who supported Trump. Since that time, no party has been able to demonstrate significant fraud. Still, in 2024, the issue persists. Added to it are fears that voters are being counted who are not legitimate voters.

This podcast from 2018 shows a way forward with these types of issues. Although a significant influence of foreign actors was never shown in the 2016 election, a relatively non-partisan group of experts could conclude that a move to paper, to old methods, would be a way to forestall such influence. To that extent some of the more vulnerable technologies were weeded out by going backwards, our elections would become more secure. Maybe such solutions are available for our current electoral distrust?

The podcast is not too long; please listen for a bit of historical context. Unfortunately public confidence in elections has not increased; there are good examples here of how to approach the problem from the standpoint of expertise rather than ideology.

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