How to rig the U.S. presidential election -- in 1,000 easy steps!

SO YOU WANT to rig an election. Good. Clearly you’re a smart guy. The smartest. Great intellect, believe me. Anyone who believes in free and fair elections to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power is a sucker. Sad.

But you’d better get started. Like, yesterday. In this country, you’ve got a lot of people to corrupt if you want to make sure you’re the one measuring new drapes for the Oval Office come January. See, the presidential election process in the United States doesn’t work like a lot of other places. Here we put our faith and trust in the people—many, many people—to make sure everyone’s vote counts, and counts only once. Funny thing is, all that trust isn’t just about faith in regular citizens to uphold the ideals of their—our—democracy. When you look at the electoral process in the hard light of logic, you see a highly distributed, incredibly robust system of checks and balances that’s almost impossible to undermine owing to its complexity and transparency. It’s also vastly redundant: a breakdown in one precinct doesn’t cascade to undermine the whole operation, just like killing one node doesn’t do anything to break the Internet.

At the same time, the presidential electoral system resists tampering thanks to an absence of interconnectedness. The US has 3,144 counties, each of which has its own idiosyncrasies. Presidential elections in the US are still fundamentally local, which makes corrupting an election on any kind of scale an exercise in overwhelming inefficiency. “The lack of a network is what makes it nearly impossible to ‘rig’ an election on the scale that is being suggested by the Trump campaign,” says political scientist Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College.