I’ve spent 25 years in elections, with nearly two decades administering them as the nonpartisan chief election official in Orange County, California. I am also a lifelong Republican. What continues to surprise—and increasingly dismay—me is how effectively the word “fraud” has become a political weapon.

The playbook is simple: raise suspicion about something the public does not fully understand, suggest something sinister may be happening behind the curtain, and allow fear to do the rest.

For 2026, my greatest concern is that this familiar fraud narrative will be amplified and exploited, damaging confidence in the midterms and potentially providing a pretext for extraordinary intervention in their administration.

We have seen this before.

More than a century ago, electricity was transforming America. Today we flip a switch without a second thought. But imagine encountering electrical power when it was new, mysterious and invisible. Most people could not explain it. They did know it could shock, burn or kill.

That combination—something powerful, complicated, unseen and potentially dangerous—was fertile ground for fear. And where there is fear, there is opportunity for someone willing to exploit it.

During the late 19th-century “War of the Currents,” Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse battled over competing systems for electrifying America. Edison backed direct current; Westinghouse backed alternating current. Enormous commercial interests were at stake, and the fight spilled into public opinion. Historians with the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University  note that Edison had genuine safety concerns about high-voltage AC, but that those concerns were reinforced by his personal and financial investment in DC. Edison’s interests also played on public fear of AC, while animal-electrocution experiments and the emerging electric chair became entangled in the controversy.

Electricity really was dangerous. High-voltage accidents killed people. Edison's concerns were not entirely invented.

That is precisely the point.

Legitimate risks, incomplete understanding and self-interest can turn a problem into a panic.

Human beings are uncomfortable with things we cannot explain. When information is incomplete, we fill the empty space with a story. Frightening stories are especially powerful because fear does not carry the same evidentiary burden as fact.

“Prove this happened” is difficult.

“Can you prove it didn't happen?” is much easier.

That brings us directly to American elections.

Modern elections are complicated operations. Ballots move through systems most voters never see. Equipment is tested and audited through procedures unfamiliar to most citizens. Damaged ballots may be duplicated, voter intent adjudicated, and totals updated as lawful ballots continue to be counted.

To election professionals, these processes are routine and explainable. Seen in isolation, they can look mysterious.

And mystery creates the same vacuum it always has.

A voter receives election mail for someone who moved years ago. A video shows ballots being moved after hours. Two similar voter records appear in a database. Vote totals change as more ballots are processed. There may be ordinary explanations for each, but an ordinary explanation has a serious competitive disadvantage on social media: it is rarely as exciting as a conspiracy.

Fraud has a meaning. An outdated voter record is not fraud. A law someone dislikes is not fraud.  An administrative mistake is not necessarily fraud. Election mail arriving for a former resident is not evidence of a stolen election. And losing an election is not evidence that it was rigged.

That does not mean election systems are perfect.

Stale voter records, for example, create confusion, generate unnecessary election mail and provide raw material for suspicion.

The answer is to fix the anomaly—not manufacture a conspiracy around it.

Election security changed enormously during my career. In Orange County, we worked with federal and local law-enforcement partners while expanding physical security, system testing and post-election auditing. Orange County has conducted risk-limiting audits, and its current security program describes more than 125 election-integrity measures.

We should keep improving. Audit more, not less. Investigate credible allegations. Prosecute violations. Fix weaknesses when they are found. That is how confidence is earned.

But there is an enormous difference between scrutinizing an election and beginning with the conclusion that it was stolen, then searching for something—anything—to validate that conclusion.

America has a real history of election corruption. Political machines and ballot-box stuffing are  not folklore; the U.S. Senate's historical records document them. But acknowledging that history does not require pretending election administration has stood still for a century.

We do not evaluate aviation safety today by pointing to airplanes in 1925. We do not judge modern banking security by the era of Bonnie and Clyde. And we should not evaluate today's elections as though ballot boxes are still being stuffed by 19th-century political machines.

Which brings us back to electricity.

The lesson is not that earlier generations were foolish to be afraid. The lesson is what can happen when genuine risks become indistinguishable from exaggerated ones, especially when people with something to gain benefit from keeping the public frightened.

We are watching a remarkably similar dynamic play out around elections.

There are real vulnerabilities, administrative mistakes and occasional cases of fraud that should be investigated and prosecuted. None of that establishes that elections are broadly fraudulent any more than an electrical accident established that alternating current itself was some malevolent force society needed to fear.

The danger comes when every irregularity becomes evidence of a conspiracy.

At that point, evidence itself becomes almost irrelevant. A lack of proof becomes proof of how well the conspiracy was concealed. Officials who provide explanations become participants in the cover-up. Courts that reject unsupported allegations become part of the system. Each explanation merely generates another accusation, and so on.

That is not healthy skepticism. It is an argument constructed so that it can never be disproven.

Confidence in elections should not require blind faith in election officials. Quite the opposite.  Trust should come from transparency, testing, audits, observation, investigation and evidence.

Ask difficult questions. Demand answers. Audit machines and ballots. Investigate credible allegations. But apply the same standard of evidence to claims of a stolen election that we would apply to any other serious allegation.

Nearly 20 years of administering elections taught me that election systems can always be improved. It also taught me this: an unexplained question is not evidence of fraud.

We did not make electricity safe by pretending there were no risks. Engineers studied the risks, established standards, improved equipment and built safeguards.

Then society did something equally important.

We turned on the light.

Perhaps there is a lesson in that for elections.

The answer in 2026 is transparency, rigorous audits and evidence.

We do not need less scrutiny. We need better scrutiny. We do not need unquestioning trust. We need evidence-based trust.

The next time you flip a light switch, remember that something now so ordinary was once mysterious enough to frighten the public and valuable enough for powerful interests to exploit that fear. 

Then consider how future generations may look back at this moment—and whether they will wonder why we allowed fear to overpower facts once again.