U. S. ELECTIONS WON’T BE RIGGED

Honestly, people, this year’s presidential election is not rigged against Donald Trump, no matter what he and his supporters say or — less likely — believe.

Just on Thursday, Trump pointed to a handful of errant voting machines in Texas to support his claim that the balloting will be manipulated to cost him the election. He’s been making such baseless but dangerous claims for weeks now.

We understand how easy it might be for anybody to be taken in. At a time when government agencies and big companies have been hacked by cyber criminals, it might stand to reason on first blush that hackers could skew the results of a national election. And it doesn’t instill confidence to learn that servers operated by a Russian company already have probed electronic voting systems in several states. In August, election databases in Arizona and Illinois were hacked. The Illinois breach revealed the names, addresses and other information of about 90,000 Illinois voters.

But the American election system is simply far too decentralized to be hijacked wholesale. States, counties and local governments all manage independent vote- counting systems, most of which generate a paper trail that can be double- checked later. It might be possible to delay the reporting of results, but not to subvert the results. Moreover, 31 of our nation’s 50 governors are Republicans. You can bet they are not secretly working to throw this election to a Democrat, even if that Democrat is Hillary Clinton and the Republican is Trump.

That doesn’t mean election officials are paying no attention to the possibility of interference. Cook County Clerk David Orr, who runs elections in suburban Cook County, says his office has been in regular contact with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to ensure all safety precautions are followed. Cook County electronic voting machines also record votes on paper, and most other Illinois counties use paper ballots, so there is a record that can be double- checked later, he said.

As Orr has done, all local election authorities should comply with a recommendation by the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the National Intelligence on Election Security to seek DHS cyber- security help, if they haven’t already done so.

But cyber attacks and in- person voter fraud are unlikely to be the biggest challenges to a fair election. More likely to affect the vote are attempts at voter suppression in such states as Georgia, Texas and Wisconsin, where officials are reportedly asking voters for IDs even when none is required, delaying the procession of voter registrations and making it difficult to vote early.

There is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud in our national elections. The occasional small incident of cheating — a single vote here or there — only proves the rule. To claim otherwise, as Trump irresponsibly does, is a disservice to our nation. But as everybody should know by now, Trump serves only himself. Follow the Editorial Board on Twitter: @ csteditorials