After the 2000 election of hanging chads and Bush v Gore and a totally non-precedential Presidential decision by the Supremes, I discovered that the Caltech/MIT Electronic Voting Project (https://www.vote.caltech.edu) met sometime at MIT in Cambridge, MA where I live. So I went to a few of the open meetings.
It was an interesting process. Here were all these technical people not only computer people but also sociologists and user-interface psychologists and such looking at the very complicated way the USA registers people to vote, votes, and counts the votes. What I gathered then was that optical scanners with paper ballots are probably the most nearly accurate way to make sure that the votes are counted accurately and accountably. From what I gather now, it still is.
Millions of tax dollars have been spent on voting since 2000 but I tend to think it’s at least as bad and probably worse all these 20 years later.
The Brennan Center Defend Our Elections Program (https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/defend-our-elections) is working on election defense and you can find out much more about the issues around election protection at the Fair Elections Center (https://www.fairelectionscenter.org)
In these days of COVID19, poll workers will be needed. Power the Polls (http://powerthepolls.org) and Work Elections (https://www.workelections.com) will point you in the right direction if you want to help out with the nuts and bolts of democracy.
In my neighborhood, Swing Left Boston is organizing voter protection in swing states (https://swingleftboston.org/sign-up-for-voter-protection-2/) if you want to become a partisan poll watcher instead of a poll worker.
Vote, yes vote but make sure your vote is counted accurately, honestly, and verifiably. As the saying goes, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”
Made worse by the deliberate dismantling of critical post office infrastructure. It’s shocking to me how little press that is getting.