Free, Fair, and Safe Elections

I recently read an article by George Ayoub in the Nebraska Examiner (August 25, 2025) titled “Free, fair and safe elections still work.” Mr. Ayoub argues that abolishing mail-in voting and voting machines is “extreme and inane.”

He suggests that if you work in a county election office, you’ll quickly realize how difficult it would be to “rig or steal” a single vote — that doing so would require tremendous planning, subterfuge, and sophistication few individuals possess.

But that misses the point entirely. Why steal one vote when you can add thousands?

Mr. Ayoub claims voter fraud is minimal — perhaps a few individuals voting twice, or a handful of ineligible ballots from non-citizens or felons. But small-scale voter fraud isn’t the real vulnerability. The true concern lies in systemic weaknesses that can be exploited at scale.

Mail-In Ballots

Mail-in voting opens the door to ballot stuffing and ballot harvesting.

• Ballot stuffing occurs when more ballots are cast than there are legitimate voters — producing “legal” ballots that represent illegal votes.

• Ballot harvesting involves third parties collecting and submitting large numbers of absentee ballots, often without verifiable oversight.

In both cases, local election workers — honest, hardworking Nebraskans — would never know an election had been manipulated. Every ballot would appear valid and auditable, even if the votes themselves weren’t legitimate. These are low-tech vulnerabilities that anyone can exploit.

Voting Machines

Electronic voting systems present a different set of risks. Tampering can occur through physical access or remote network intrusion, allowing malicious software to alter vote totals.

Every year, the DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas hosts a “Voting Village” where cybersecurity experts test election equipment for vulnerabilities. Every year, new weaknesses are found. Many states continue using outdated, unsupported machines that are vulnerable to modern exploits.

In 2021, University of Michigan Professor J. Alex Halderman identified multiple severe security flaws in Georgia’s Dominion Voting Systems touch-screen machines. His confidential expert report concluded that these vulnerabilities could allow malicious actors — either physically or remotely — to install software capable of altering votes while bypassing all procedural safeguards.

The Path to Secure Elections

To claim our elections are already “free, fair, and safe” ignores these realities. True election integrity means closing the known gaps, not pretending they don’t exist.

Here’s how we fix it:

• End mass mail-in voting while preserving secure absentee options for military and overseas voters, and mobile polling for nursing homes.

• Require proof of identity and citizenship to vote.

• Use paper ballots and precinct-level hand counts for transparency and verifiability.

• Allow secure early in-person voting up to 30 days prior to Election Day to accommodate working families and busy voters.

Do these things, and Nebraska can once again guarantee elections that are not just “free” and “fair,” but also truly safe and secure.