Three Tools for Rebuilding Trust in American Elections
The Plurality Institute, on how technology can improve basic democratic processes
To celebrate this Election Day, I’m giving my column over to pro-democracy technologists. Yes, they exist!
While much of our tech news is consumed with moves to consolidate power by figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, another network of visionary designers and coders has chosen a different path. They call this path “plurality,” to contrast with the pursuit of “singularity” that has inspired the drive toward technology intended to replace and surpass human beings. The outstanding figure of this plurality movement is the former digital minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tang, recently featured on PBS.
The approach of the plurality network starts from recognizing that human beings are characterized by multiple kinds of intelligence, not one single, imitable type. Machines, too, can exhibit multiple kinds of intelligence.
Second, this network of thinkers and technologists recognizes and appreciates human pluralism. Pluralism can be a source of creativity, innovation, economic productivity, and cultural richness. Of course, it can also hold the seeds of tribalism, conflict, division, and war.
Third, plurality researchers and practitioners share the goal of developing pro-social technologies that start from and complement the multiple forms of human intelligence with plural kinds of machine intelligence, and that will activate the positive potential in human social pluralism.
In other words, they are working to build pro-social media platforms to replace our existing (and highly anti-social) social media platforms. They also seek to build democracy-supportive technologies to replace all the democracy-eroding technologies that we’ve been gifted in the past two decades.
The team at The Plurality Institute has some thoughts about how technology can help us improve the stability and trustworthiness of our election system. I am glad to share their post below.
— Danielle
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Three Tools for Rebuilding Trust in American Elections
By Peter Darche, Isaac Levine, and Rose Bloomin
Peter is a research engineer at Plurality Institute and a lead developer of OpenBallot, a platform for creating and sharing voter guides. Isaac is a research assistant at Plurality Institute. Rose is the co-founder and executive director of Plurality Institute.
Election Day arrives today against a backdrop of institutional skepticism. Recent Gallup polling shows only 28 percent of Americans have “quite a lot” of confidence in major institutions like Congress and the public school system. Only 21 percent trust Washington to do what is right “most of the time.” And the percentage of Americans who believe elections will be run and administered “at least somewhat well” across the U.S. is down 8 percentage points since 2018.
Other measures indicated how volatile and tenuous voter trust is: Gallup’s tracking of the 2024 election cycle showed that public sentiment swung with events, with AP-NORC reports indicating that election outcomes significantly affect perceptions of legitimacy.
Against that churn, three new tools are showing how technology can support trust in voting when trust in the institutions running it is declining. Each does this through a distinct mechanism: social proof (OpenBallot), institutional transparency (VotingWorks), and cryptographic verifiability (Secure Internet Voting). None is a silver bullet. Together, they represent new ways to make this foundational democratic process more robust during increasingly partisan and skeptical times.
OpenBallot: Trust Through Social Relationships
OpenBallot is a nonpartisan platform for exploring, creating, and sharing personalized voter guides for local elections. It aggregates ballot information and independent guides into a single, transparent interface so that you can see, side-by-side, the voting recommendations of people and institutions you already trust: your neighbor who tracks school board candidates, the local transportation group, the editorial board you respect, or a faith community you’re a part of. OpenBallot is built to make long, complex ballots navigable — not by dumbing them down, but by contextualizing them with perspectives that matter to you.
Why this matters for trust: Most of us form durable beliefs through relationships. By foregrounding social proof — “Which sources aligned with my values support Measure C, and why?” — OpenBallot treats trust as something we build together rather than something handed down.
It also reduces the cognitive load that breeds cynicism and disengagement. When voters can compare across guides, open the source, and trace a recommendation back to arguments they find compelling, skepticism has a real outlet: interrogate the reasoning, not the process. In this way, OpenBallot doesn’t tell voters what to think; it gives them a scaffold to see how trusted people and organizations reason about the same ballot they face.
VotingWorks: Trust Through Transparency
VotingWorks is the only nonprofit, open-source voting-machine vendor in the United States. Its mission is to increase trust in elections with transparent, simple, and secure technology. VotingWorks achieves this transparency by not only open-sourcing the voting machine, but also by designing tests, audits, and documentation for public scrutiny and professional evaluation.
VotingWorks’ open-source platform for post-election audits, Arlo, helps officials confirm reported outcomes by sampling and hand-counting paper ballots according to rigorous statistical methods. Arlo has been used by multiple states, institutionalizing a practice that moves “trust” from faith to evidence. Such audits are now well-established in state practice as a way to ensure machine tallies match voter-marked paper ballots.
Why this matters for trust: Transparency reduces skepticism by introducing verifiable checks into the system. Open code is helpful, but public, repeatable auditing is what makes ordinary citizens and cross-partisan observers confident that any error — or malfeasance — will be detected and corrected.
Secure Internet Voting: Trust Through Cryptography
SIV is a mobile, end-to-end verifiable platform for casting ballots remotely, built around three pillars: end-to-end encryption, verifiable auditing, and voter-verifiable receipts. The goal is to offer cryptographically secured remote voting that preserves ballot privacy while allowing voters and independent observers to verify that ballots were cast as intended, recorded as cast, and tallied as recorded.
Skeptics are right to note that networking voting systems expands their attack surface; U.S. standards bodies have historically urged caution about Internet return of voted ballots. But real-world deployments offer evidence that the technology and system design is improving. The U.S. Department of Defense currently uses SIV to help overseas members of the military cast their ballots, and the system has worked well in multiple elections. Estonia has operated national-level Internet voting for years, continuously iterating on verifiability and procedural safeguards; in recent elections, a large share of ballots were cast online.
International standards bodies, meanwhile, are actively reviewing legal and technical frameworks to ensure any internet voting aligns with democratic principles and auditability.
Why this matters for trust: SIV eases the tradeoff between convenience and security. Voters receive cryptographic evidence that their encrypted ballot made it to the tally unchanged, and independent parties can verify the aggregate without learning how anyone voted. That evidence of correctness becomes a key source of trust. In other words, SIV aims to earn trust the same way modern browsers earn it for secure transactions: by turning “do you believe it worked?” into “can you verify it worked?”
Multiple Pathways, One Goal
Trust comes in many forms. Some voters need help sifting complex choices through the lens of communities they respect, and OpenBallot meets them there. Others want election technology that is open, testable, and routinely audited. VotingWorks delivers that. Still others need secure access without sacrificing privacy or verifiability: Secure Internet Voting makes that possible through cryptography and public audit trails. Moreover, these approaches are composable.
In an environment where electoral confidence rises and falls with partisan fortunes, tools that anchor trust in relationships, transparency, and verifiability give democracy a sturdier keel.
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