Should we trust in elections?

In Colombia where I was born and grew up my dad, a German immigrant who with his four brothers started the largest optical company in the country, would say, 'Steffen heute gehen wir auf die bank;” 'Today we'll go to the bank” to get cash before the election.

The reason for this pre-emptive planning was that the losers of presidential elections always claimed fraud and often sent their followers to the streets to riot & loot in protest to the 'fraud” that had been committed.

That brought out the military which was the default national law enforcement agency for massive threats to the public order.

Stores would pull down their 'Santa Marias” -- Holy Marys - as they were called in vernacular. These were the steel shutters that would be rolled down and secured with strong locks to prevent looting.

Then banks were closed for days or weeks but my dad had cash in our safe in Cali and at our Saladito mountain ranch in the Andes. He would also go to the military munitions store with his permit to make sure he had enough ammo for our several firearms just in case - we never had to use the guns.

I share this because in many parts of the world there has been real and pervasive fraud during elections. Thus the suspicion by losing candidates that the system is rigged and stacked against them.

I read that Saddam Hussein often got elected by more votes than there were people in Iraq. Communist leaders always get 99.9 percent of the vote.

That occurs in countries where the government has massive control of the voting machines and the personnel managing them or where hand voting allows for 'ballot stuffing” to slant the outcome. In these countries there is little confidence in the electoral system and of course these are not democracies.

We now face the first serious questioning of the integrity of the American vote. Donald Trump and his campaign have argued that the system is rigged and that he will lose the election because fraud will be committed. He has instructed his supporters to be vigilant and assure voter integrity at polling places.

There are several issues that are causing concern. The first is Russia's apparent effort to discredit the U.S. electoral system and even the rumors that Russian intelligence services have probed and hacked voter registration files. Part of this narrative is the hypothesis by U.S. intelligence services (NSA, CIA, Homeland Security, DOJ, and FBI) that while it's difficult if not impossible to actually hack the voting process because most of it is not internet networked at the county level, it would be easy to hack the voting result count because that IS networked and can easily be hacked.

This scenario would have hackers constantly switching the results reported in real time so that the media and the public would panic realizing that something was terribly wrong. This is equivalent to the hacking of nuclear power plant in Ukraine where the operators of the plant suddenly saw the cursor on the work stations moving and clicking on critical actions without them having any control because the system was hacked and was now controlled by outside forces.

The second narrative is that there has always been massive voter fraud - noncitizens, dead people, and same-person-multiple voting - in the United States and that in 2016 this would steal the election from Mr. Trump.

Most highly reliable studies of voter fraud suggest that there is very little deliberate violation. However, there is a deep mistrust among many Americans of the government in general, of local politicians, and even the security, justice, and intelligence agencies listed above. Therefore, all the 'hard proof” from studies and testimonials by Secretaries of State from almost every state in the nation that voters should not worry falls on deaf ears among the millions who mistrust the system.

Mr. Trump is building on that fear of fraud and suspicion of the integrity of 'the system.” We can only hope that the aftermath of the 2016 election will not produce the sort of violence and confrontation seen in countries around the world and that I experienced after elections in Colombia.

' Steffen Schmidt is a professor of political science at Iowa State University. Comments: steffenschmidt2005@gmail.com