Election officials dispute Trump warning that election will be rigged

Election officials said Friday that Iowans should be confident their votes will count when they cast ballots for president, congress and state and local offices - not only because of laws intended to guarantee the integrity of the election, but because it's being conducted by their fellow citizens.

'We have over 10,000 of our neighbors on the front line,” Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate said, admitting he's a 'little defensive” about assertions by his party's presidential nominee that the election may be rigged.

In addition to the poll workers recruited by county auditors to staff polling places, Pate said both the Republican and Democratic parties supply precinct watchers to observe the voting process to guarantee its integrity and fairness.

'We have a full array of Iowans who are there to make sure these elections are operating on the up and up. So if someone wants to imply otherwise I'm a little sensitive to it,” Pate said on Iowa Public Television's Iowa Press.

The program can be seen at 8:30 a.m. Saturday on IPTV World, at noon Sunday on IPTV and at www.IPTV.org.

Pate's sensitivity was shared by Linn County Auditor Joel Miller, who called GOP nominee Donald Trump's warning that the election will be rigged a 'bogus accusation, has no foundation.”

Those claims by Trump and others undermine public confidence in the people Pate spoke of, Miller said. Many of them have staffed elections for decades 'and to tell them and imply that they are doing something wrong, I think is, well, hurtful to say the least,” Miller said.

Undermining public confidence in the election process is 'kind of horrifying,” added David Andersen, assistant professor of political science at Iowa State University.

'Once you make an allegation of rigging or that an election is rigged it's really, really difficult to disprove it,” he said.

Although Pate and Miller conceded voter fraud has been proven, Andersen said it's very rare. When fraud is alleged, he said, it triggers systematic searches that show there is 'very little evidence that there's anything other than isolated incidents.”

To rig an election. Andersen said, 'You're talking about not just some fraud, but systematic fraud.”

'That is exceedingly difficult to do (because) you have to basically dupe thousands of people who are working in the election system,” he said. 'It's an allegation that it's not just one person is out there casting 10 or 20 votes illegally, it's that thousands of people are collaborating to throw away our democratic system.”