Building Proof, Confronting the Narrative of Untrustworthy Elections

VICKERY LAW PLLC  |  ELECTION LAW

What was once foreseeable yet ignored is now manifest. What was once unthinkable is now a strategic reality. The Electoral Trust and Resilience Assessment is one way to confront it, one election system at a time.

By Chad Vickery · Founding Partner, Vickery Law PLLC

Nine years ago, colleagues and I wrote that the integrity of an American presidential election could be successfully challenged and that a losing candidate could weaponize that challenge to contest a legitimate outcome.

That warning appeared in The Washington Post in September 2016, co-authored with William R. Sweeney Jr. and Katherine Ellena, drawing on two decades of electoral assessment work in fragile and contested democracies abroad. The patterns we documented across dozens of countries were not exotic. They were structural, and the same structural conditions existed here. At the time, the idea that those conditions would be exploited in the United States struck many readers as alarmist.

It is no longer alarmist. It is the record. The strategy we described, which undermines results and, in its most extreme form, uses violence to try to overturn them, is now a familiar feature of the American electoral landscape. And it is only the beginning. Contesting a result after the fact is the visible end of a longer process. The deeper work, the work that makes contestation persuasive, is the steady construction of a narrative that elections cannot be trusted. That narrative is now a durable political asset, ready to be deployed in any close contest, in any jurisdiction, at any level of office.

It is time to build a system to confront it.

I. The Work Ahead

Two Kinds of Reform

We all know the major reforms that must be undertaken. An apportioned House that honors one person, one vote. Independent redistricting. Clean campaign finance. A National Popular Vote. Protected election administrators. Expanding the Supreme Court. Truly accessible voting. These are the foundational reforms a functioning democracy demands, and the case for them is compelling.

But they are hard to implement. They will take years. And they will face determined resistance from a system already geared to favor those positioned to undermine the one-person-one-vote standard. The math of structural reform is unforgiving: constitutional change requires consensus, legislative change requires majorities, and court doctrine shifts over decades. As I have argued elsewhere about malapportionment, the very institutions that would have to enact these reforms are staffed by the people those reforms would disadvantage. That is precisely the kind of structural entrenchment that resists correction from within.

There is a second kind of work, and it receives far less attention. Beneath the structural reforms lie the lower-level, workaday tasks that produce evidence of legitimate election results: trained adjudicators, documented complaint processes, transparent counts, published findings, and credible answers issued before a false narrative hardens. This work is not exciting. It does not swing for the fences. But it is the work that rebuilds trust, and it can be done now, in the cycle before us, without waiting for a constitutional amendment.

> If reform is the destination, resilience is how we get there in one piece.

Several capable groups are already working on these issues. The honest question is whether that work is coordinated and whether it is designed to be as effective as possible given the genuinely limited resources available. Sincere but scattered effort protects no one. In an environment where any procedural gap, however minor, can be amplified into a story of systemic failure, good intentions deployed at random are not a strategy.

II. The Method

Understanding the System Before We Defend It

The United States does not have a single election system. It has hundreds, and arguably thousands, administered by states, counties, and municipalities, each with its own legal framework, institutional capacity, and risk profile. A defense that works for one does not work for another. Before we can protect these systems or direct scarce resources to where they will matter most, we must understand each on its own terms.

That means a disciplined sequence:

1. Assess strengths and vulnerabilities. Evaluate each system honestly, identifying not only where it is exposed to fraud, error, or manipulation, but also where it is demonstrably strong. Proof of what works is as important as a map of what does not.

2. Map where resources are needed and can be most effective. Translate the assessment into a prioritized picture of where limited time, expertise, and money will do the most to build trust in the process, rather than spreading effort evenly across problems of unequal severity.

3. Coordinate, implement, and educate. Align the responses of the many groups doing this work, put the fixes in place, and educate the voting public so that the proof of legitimate results is visible to the people whose trust is at stake.

4. Learn and reform for the next election. Re-assess after the cycle, measure what changed, and feed the lessons back into the next round. Resilience is not a one-time project. It is a discipline repeated election after election.

The Electoral Trust and Resilience Assessment (ETRA) is one way to do this.

III. The Instrument

What the ETRA Is:

The ETRA is a structured, evidence-based diagnostic that identifies and rates where an electoral system is most vulnerable and most resilient. Developed through best practices over two decades of electoral integrity work across more than 40 countries, it has been adapted to the U.S. context. Its premise is straightforward: election integrity depends on both the actual fairness of the process and the public's perception of that fairness. When voters, candidates, or the public believe an election was poorly run or fraudulent, they may refuse to accept the outcome, regardless of what happened. The ETRA is designed to address both aspects of this problem.

The ETRA at a glance. A single assessment produces two outputs: a qualitative narrative of vulnerabilities by category, and a quantitative vulnerability index that lets administrators and stakeholders prioritize reforms and interventions.

• 18 electoral process categories, each subdivided into two to six sub-categories

• 3 risk dimensions assessed for every category

• 0–5 vulnerability and impact scales applied to each sub-category

• 9 steps from desk study to final report, typically over three to four months

Three Risk Dimensions

Every category is evaluated against three distinct types of risk because each requires a different remedy. Confusing them leads to applying the wrong fix to the wrong problem.

• Fraud. Deliberate wrongdoing that distorts the will of voters. Fraud requires intent. Its remedy is detection, deterrence, and prosecution.

• Misfeasance. A breach of an election professional's duty of care through carelessness or neglect, not intent. Its remedy is training, resourcing, and supervision.

• Systemic manipulation. The use of legal provisions or rules that distort voter will. Its remedy is legislative or constitutional reform, not an administrative fix.

Impact is scored differently across dimensions: for misfeasance, impact is the probable consequence if the weakness is left unaddressed; for fraud and systemic manipulation, impact is the potential consequence if the vulnerability is exploited.

The Eighteen Categories

The categories span the full electoral cycle, from the legal foundations to the final adjudication of disputes:

1. Referendum Process

2. Legal Framework

3. Institutional Framework

4. Election Budgeting

5. Training

6. Voter Registration

7. Party and Candidate Registration

8. Electoral System and Delimitation

9. Media

10. Political Finance

11. Public Information and Voter Education

12. Infrastructure and Planning

13. Election Security

14. Observation and Oversight

15. Voting Operations

16. Counting

17. Aggregation and Certification

18. Grievance Adjudication

The sub-category is the basic unit of analysis. For each sub-category, an expert assigns a vulnerability score and an impact score on a zero-to-five scale for each applicable risk dimension, along with a weight reflecting its importance within the category, and, where useful, an estimated timeline and cost of remedy. The weighted average of the sub-category scores produces the category rating, and the category ratings allow a client to prioritize reform efforts.

Cross-Vulnerability and Cascade Chains

The ETRA's most distinctive feature is that it does not treat the eighteen categories as independent. Electoral vulnerabilities rarely operate in isolation. A weakness in one part of the process almost always enables, amplifies, or is amplified by weaknesses elsewhere. The assessment maps these interactions as cascade chains: a root cause that runs through intermediate steps to a specific integrity failure.

The analytic payoff is identifying amplifier nodes, the categories that sit at the intersection of multiple chains. Fixing an amplifier node reduces risk across several chains at once, making it the highest-leverage intervention in the system. This enables the ETRA to direct scarce resources to where they will matter most, rather than to whichever problem is loudest. The method is deliberately diagnostic, not prescriptive. It does not come with a predetermined solution. Different jurisdictions produce different cascade structures and leverage points, and the ETRA is designed to identify those the evidence supports.

> We are not pushing a predetermined solution. We are finding the leverage points that the evidence identifies.

How an Assessment Runs

A full ETRA follows a nine-step process, typically spanning two to three months. It begins with a desk study of the jurisdiction's legal framework, complaint history, litigation record, and administrative structure, yielding an initial map of likely vulnerabilities. The team then identifies focus areas, assembles experts who combine local knowledge with comparative practitioner experience, and prepares for deployment. In the field, structured stakeholder meetings with administrators, civil society, party representatives, the bar, and the judiciary ensure systematic coverage of all eighteen categories. Experts then score their assigned categories; the full team calibrates those scores to consensus; and an optional timeline-and-resource analysis separates what can be fixed before the next election from what requires longer-term change. The process ends with a technical report and a shorter stakeholder summary, both shared with the relevant election body for factual review before publication, so that the collaborative relationship that makes implementation possible is preserved.

Critically, the assessment is not an audit and does not assign blame. Its purpose is to give administrators and their stakeholders an honest, documented picture of where the system stands, including, just as importantly, a record of where it performs well. In an environment where credibility is constantly under attack, documented proof of what a jurisdiction does right is itself a defense.

IV. From Diagnosis to Trust

What the Assessment Makes Possible

A vulnerability profile is a means, not an end. Once a jurisdiction understands its risk structure, the findings feed directly into the day-to-day infrastructure that produces proof of legitimate results. They outline what a credible results tabulation should look like, where to invest in administrator training, which transparency measures will most effectively reassure a skeptical public, and how to design administrative dispute resolution that resolves grievances before they escalate into litigation or, worse, into a narrative.

That sequence, assess, map, coordinate, implement, educate, then learn and reassess, is how trust is rebuilt: not through assertion, but through documented evidence issued in time to matter. Higher-quality local administration is associated with greater voter confidence, including among voters whose preferred candidates lost. The ETRA produces the evidence that makes that confidence earned rather than merely asserted.

None of this displaces the need for structural reforms. Those remain necessary and worth the years of effort they will require. But the gap between long-term reform and present-day risk is exactly where democracy loses. The structural vulnerabilities that make reform necessary are the same vulnerabilities that will be exploited in the next election and the one after. The ETRA is built to close that gap: to protect the system we have while the larger work proceeds and to build the evidence base that makes the larger work more achievable, not less.

What was once foreseeable and ignored is now manifest. The question is no longer whether the narrative of untrustworthy elections will be deployed. It will be. The question is whether we will have built, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, the documented proof needed to confront it.

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Chad Vickery

Founding Partner, Vickery Law PLLC · Board Chair and General Counsel, The Concord Project

Chad Vickery advises election commissions, campaigns, and nonprofits on electoral vulnerability assessment and dispute resolution, drawing on more than 20 years of work in democratic governance and election integrity across roughly 40 countries.

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This article is published by Vickery Law PLLC for general informational purposes and reflects the views of the author. It does not constitute legal advice, does not create an attorney-client relationship, and should not be relied upon as a substitute for advice from qualified counsel regarding any specific matter. The Electoral Trust and Resilience Assessment is a practitioner-developed methodology; its application to any jurisdiction depends on the facts of that jurisdiction. Licensed in MD, DC, and WA. © 2026 Vickery Law PLLC. All rights reserved.