How Voting Works
It’s 2026, which means… it’s a major election year in the United States. And you’ve probably heard some stories. Elon Musk rigged the 2024 election with Starlink (that didn’t happen). Russian hackers have repeatedly breached election systems (some narrow systems parts, yes, but not tabulation and they didn't alter outcomes). Dominion voting machines stole the election in 2020 (no they did not). There were statistical anomalies in key swing states in 2024 that indicate the election was stolen (no, those aren’t anomalies, and the election wasn’t stolen).
How can you possibly make sense of all of this?
I’m Ben Adida. I received my PhD from MIT in election security & cryptography in 2006. I’ve been working on election technology for close to 30 years in academia and industry. I’ve built large high-security software systems in other fields, and I’ve run product and engineering teams at a number of tech companies you've likely heard of. Since 2018, I run VotingWorks, the only non-profit vendor of voting equipment in the United States. I want to help you understand where we are with voting technology in the US. I’ll make this as objective as possible.
The truth is, American elections have sometimes used questionable equipment we probably shouldn’t have deployed. The paperless touchscreen machines of the early 2000s were generally a bad idea. But the truth is also that voting systems have been dramatically improved over the last 25 years by security, accessibility, and policy experts, as well as advocates and activists. In 2026, with the many safeguards in place, we’re doing okay. We can do a lot better – I wouldn’t be running a voting technology organization if I didn’t think so – but our voting technology hair is not on fire.
What we need desperately is to debate the real issues, so we can actually improve American voting technology together. That's what I’m attempting to do here – lay out the real issues and shoot down the distracting false narratives.
In this blog, How Voting Works, and in the accompanying podcast, I’ll cover every topic: what is a voting machine? Why do we even need them? Have they been hacked, or could they be hacked? Why is this so hard in the first place? And what's this I hear about QR codes on my ballot?
If you have specific question, you can always email how@voting.works and I”ll do my best to answer them.
["Voting" photo by justgrimes is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.]
