WITH LESS than three months to go un-W til polling day, a president talking up the threat of fraud and a virus keeping people at home, Americans are understandably worried about this year's presidential election. Even in more normal times, America's system of casting and counting ballots is more complicated and inconvenient than it should be. In Georgia's primary elections in mid-July some voters queued for five hours to make their voices heard. In New York, tens of thousands of mail-in ballots have been disqualified or are being disputed six weeks after the primary election there. To simplify a bit, at election time Americans now worry about three groups of bad actors. The first is foreigners, who might meddle with the results. "Russian election interference" conjures-up images of hackers ensconced in St Petersburg breaking into vote-counting machines, or corrupt- ing lists of eligible voters. But this is not what happened in 2016. The Russian interference that became such a big post-election story was an influence campaign rather than a technologically sophisticated plot to mess with voting returns.
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