Originally written by: Michael Latner

As he quotes, “In the upcoming months, scientists and science advocates must play a critical role in assisting local election authorities in ensuring free and fair elections. What you can do, starting now,” is as follows.

“I urged attendees to draw attention to the possibility of future election violence as a strategy that will be utilized to rig future elections when the Select Committee hearings on January 6th got underway. The hearings have thus far shown how the Trump conspirators’ legal strategies relied on coercion and violence, from the direct involvement of the former president in targeted attacks against local and state officials to the intimidation of election workers in the Moss family, to sow enough chaos that they might persuade state legislators to choose phony electors and rig the 2020 election. It is becoming increasingly obvious that, as Committee Chair Thompson warned, if conspirators successfully infiltrate administrative positions to supervise and certify future elections, we will not have “close calls” but rather “a disaster.” More importantly, in reaction to threats against his own family and numerous election officials, Committee member Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) stated, “There’s violence in the future, I’m going to tell you. And we can’t expect anything different until we have a handle on telling them the truth,” Thanks to this information, we can now more easily discern how the upcoming election will be rigged. An ALEC and RNC-affiliated effort, ironically dubbed the Election Integrity Network, is being led by Cleta Mitchell, a key conspirator who was present during the call in which former president Trump requested that the Georgia Secretary of State “find” enough votes to declare him the winner and who also requested that John Eastman outline the legal strategy for annulling the 2020 election.

• Use “who are they really?” narratives to target non-profit organizations involved in electoral activities and propagate misinformation.
• Find ways to delete “ineligible” voters from voter registration databases.
• Contest local regulations governing the custody, movement, and location of ballots, voting supplies, and voting machinery.
• They said, “Get knee-deep in absentee and mail-in voting in your county,” in their guidance, “Prepare for observing and reporting incorrect (ballot) curing.” that is how it works.

The list continues, and if it weren’t for the key players who tried to rig the previous presidential election, it might not seem quite as dire. Their objective is to contest, impede, and postpone the certification of election results, particularly the handling of mail-in votes.
We are in severe danger if Congress does not act this summer to put standards and processes in place for the fair and accurate processing and certification of future election results. However, regardless of what Congress does, we need to adopt fair and accurate election integrity locally to prevent these attacks and ensure that the results are properly validated. First, find out who your administrators are by getting in touch with your local election office. Then, ask them how you can help to ensure fair and accurate election results. In addition to voting, there are several positions you can fill depending on your capacity and skill set:

Participate in planning and managing a special election:

Local election offices can benefit from the planning and emergency management skills of people with experience in organizational management, administration, systems, and design thinking. Support the integration of your regional organization into the US Alliance for Election Excellence’s network of Centers for Election Excellence. The Alliance offers local administrators information, training, tools, emergency management, and cybersecurity practices. There should be a plan for potential conflicts and service disruptions at every polling location and vote processing facility. One of the most effective ways for the scientific community to develop a robust electoral infrastructure for the future is to bring together election officers with designers, technologists, and other experts. That could mean helping to create voter-friendly election websites by utilizing templates like those provided by the Center for Tech and Civic Life, or linking your local administrators to management technologies, like the assistance that US Digital Response provides (CTCL). It will be more difficult for organizations like hers to carry out their work in 2022 as they come under attack (CTCL administered third-party grants to elections offices in 2020, including the contribution from Mark Zuckerberg), as Whitney May, Director of Government Services for CTCL, explained in a recent episode of the High Turnout Wide Margins podcast.

HELP MAINTAIN AND TRACK VOTER REGISTRATION AND MAIL-IN VOTING DATABASES

Anyone with knowledge of databases, spreadsheets, statistical programming, or database management can assist their local election agencies in maintaining accurate voter registration and vote-by-mail databases. However, in order to ensure that new voters are added to the system without error, that those who request absentee or postal votes receive them, and that all ballots are generated and delivered to voters in a timely manner, these databases must be updated often, especially during election times.
Learn what data is in your jurisdiction’s voter files, and work with local organizations to provide frequently updated, machine-readable updates at the individual or precinct level (daily or weekly in the months prior to an election). It’s usually simple to use statistics on registration trends from prior years as a benchmark. In addition, simple studies at the precinct level and graphical representations of precinct registration levels, party registration levels, and similar concepts can aid in quality control.

PERFORM AND DISSEMINATE TURNOUT FORENSICS
The same is true for people with expertise working with databases and geographic information systems (GIS), who can put those abilities to use when analyzing election results as they come in before, during, and after Election Day. Election forensics is a collection of data-driven techniques and tools that spot discrepancies in election results. These techniques and tools are simple to apply to local election officials. For example, simple graphical techniques (histograms, timeline plots, etc.) can increase transparency, identify irregularities to report to election administrators, and make it easier to combat misinformation. In addition, these methods can be used in conjunction with regularly provided reports of ballots returned, processed, and rejected, as well as post-election party and candidate vote shares at the precinct level. Importantly, these same techniques can spot disparities in ballot rejection rates and enhance ballot curing procedures by adding more monitoring and the ability to correct administrative mistakes.