I Was Told to Trust the System, I Went Looking for Proof Instead

Nilay Ghodasara, Class of 2027, studies Economics, Public Policy, and History. Nilay is one of our 2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. Read Nilay's first blog post from earlier this summer, What I Learned Traveling Through America's Election System.

People love to throw the phrase "election integrity" around. Ask ten people what it means and you'll get ten different answers. That's exactly what I found after spending this summer talking with election officials across the country. To some, integrity means making sure every eligible voter can cast a ballot without unnecessary barriers. To others, it means making sure the person casting that ballot is eligible and is who they claim to be. Those goals usually get placed on opposite sides of a political argument. I came away thinking they shouldn't be in tension at all.

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Repeatedly, officials reassured me that voter fraud is extremely rare. Nobody I interviewed claimed to have uncovered anything resembling widespread fraud. I believe them. But "fraud is rare" is not the same as "our system would reliably catch fraud if it happened."

California made that distinction especially clear. Yolo County Clerk Jesse Salinas told me about catching a parent whose handwriting appeared on ballots belonging to that person's children. His staff recognized the signatures and stopped the ballots from moving forward. The fact that they caught it is reassuring, but it raises a harder question: what happens when a forgery is better? California places a lot of weight on signature verification. Napa County Clerk John Tuteur told me he has reviewed thousands of contested signatures and recalled catching someone who tried to disguise a signature on a second ballot. Again, the safeguard worked, but it's still built around judging handwriting.

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I encountered the same question in Nevada and Colorado. Both rely heavily on signature verification for mail ballots. Colorado Deputy Elections Director Hilary Rudy described how uncertain signatures move from an initial review to trained election workers and, if needed, bipartisan teams. These are meaningful safeguards, but signatures change with age, injury, haste, and even the pen someone happens to use.

Storey County, Nevada, Clerk Jim Hindle was more skeptical. He told me there were "concerns with voter fraud," particularly surrounding mail ballots, and that "the ability to better verify that mail ballots are coming from the specific registered voter would be very good." His point wasn't that Nevada was filled with fraudulent ballots, but that the system should keep looking for stronger ways to prove a ballot came from the right voter.

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Identification laws raise the opposite question: can stronger verification exist without restricting access? West Virginia gave me a successful case study. When the state tightened its photo ID requirement in 2025, it already had infrastructure allowing registered voters without identification to obtain a free voter ID through their county clerk. Officials and residents told me about getting their photo taken in county offices and polling places, then receiving the new voter ID card in the mail.

Virginia sits farther toward the access side. A voter without acceptable identification can generally sign an ID Confirmation Statement affirming their identity and cast a regular ballot. That prevents someone from losing a vote because a wallet was left at home, but it raises the question of where verification ends and self-attestation begins. Signing under penalty of law isn't meaningless, but outside identification can provide greater confidence when it's readily available.

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Wyoming pushed voter verification earlier in the process. The state now requires proof of citizenship and residency to register to vote. Elections Director Paul Raines told me about cases where officials identified noncitizens on the voter rolls. Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee also described thirteen people who were initially flagged, only for further investigation to establish that they were citizens and that government records had simply been outdated or incorrect.

The part of my research that gave me the most confidence came after the votes were cast. Colorado conducts risk-limiting audits, using randomly selected paper ballots to test whether reported results are actually supported by the underlying votes. West Virginia officials described hand-counting selected precincts, while Nevada officials emphasized allowing observers to watch election procedures and equipment testing. That's the kind of election integrity I find easiest to trust.

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I didn't leave these six states believing American elections are broadly rigged. I did leave with much less patience for the idea that saying fraud is rare should end the conversation. Eligible voters should have every reasonable opportunity to participate, but verification should still mean something, government records should be checked rather than assumed correct, and election results should be audited whenever possible.

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The officials I met were generally confident in the systems they administer. After listening to them, I'm not always as confident as they are, and I think some skepticism is healthy. The strongest systems I found weren't the ones that asked me to trust them because nothing serious had gone wrong. They were the ones designed to check themselves in case something did.

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