One of the simplest tools for building confidence in an election doesn’t involve any technology at all: letting people watch. Election observers — whether representing political parties, nonpartisan civic groups, or in some cases international organizations — have been a fixture of American elections for well over a century, and their basic purpose hasn’t changed much in that time.
Observers are there to watch, not to intervene. They can note whether procedures are being followed, raise questions with election officials through proper channels, and, in most jurisdictions, file formal challenges if they believe something was handled incorrectly. What they generally cannot do is touch ballots, interfere with voters, or disrupt the process — the rules governing observer conduct are typically as detailed as the rules governing the election itself. Legal scholars have documented how these roles and their legal boundaries have evolved over time, including their expanded use during the civil rights era to help guard against discriminatory practices at the polls.
We think the underlying value of observation is fairly intuitive: it’s much harder to credibly claim that something improper happened behind closed doors when representatives from multiple interests were standing in the room the whole time. That’s true whether the “room” is a polling place on election day or a counting facility processing ballots afterward. Transparency doesn’t just catch problems — more often, its real function is preventing disputes from ever gaining traction in the first place, because there were witnesses to what actually happened.
That said, observation only builds confidence if it’s genuinely open to a balanced range of participants, not just one side of a political contest. Lopsided access — where only one party’s observers are meaningfully present — can end up doing the opposite of its intended purpose, creating the appearance of oversight without the substance of it. We’d argue that election offices have a real interest in actively recruiting observers from multiple perspectives, rather than simply leaving the door open and hoping for balance to happen on its own.
There’s also a training question here, not unlike the one we’ve raised about poll workers generally: an observer who doesn’t understand the procedures they’re watching can misread a routine step as a problem, or miss an actual irregularity because they didn’t know what they were looking at. The most effective observer programs tend to pair access with a real orientation on what normal procedure looks like, so that observation produces useful, credible feedback rather than just noise.
Ultimately, we see observers as a low-cost, high-value complement to the technical safeguards — audits, paper trails, chain-of-custody logs — that get more attention in security conversations. Letting people see the process for themselves remains one of the most direct ways to answer the question “how do we know this was done right?”