INFORMS Presentation on Electoral Process

Monday November 09, 2020

•  INFORMS •  public policy •  elections •  political science •  voting security • 

Natalie Scala asked me to join a panel at INFORMS 2020 on electoral security. Heading into the 2020 election, many people had expressed serious concern about the integrity of the election. While this presentation is showing after the election, this presentation was recorded a day before the election. So prospectively, I made some claims about how hard it is to hack the election.

And I was right. Our election integrity is still unmatched, mostly because of how screwed up the whole system is. See the slides at https://jameshoward.us/informs-2020/ or watch the presentation on YouTube:


This includes a review of how we elect presidents in the United States, since it is quite complicated and has a lot of moving parts. Then it goes on to show why this makes things work for us all.