People conspire all the time. Firms collude. Politicians bargain behind closed doors. Militaries deceive their enemies. But other conspiracies are detected, or they do not last long. Why do some remain secret while others are revealed?

A simple game theory model can help illustrate that the probability of a conspiracy being revealed depends on the number of independent choosing individuals whose cooperation is necessary, and the incentives those individuals face. The basic intuition of what makes it hard to keep a conspiracy a secret is not new. But there are interesting implications for institutional design.

Insights from game theory can help us think more clearly about election administration. Those insights can help us see why and how the decentralized structure of American elections dramatically increases the number of independent actors who would have to coordinate to manipulate a national election. That decentralization is one reason to trust U.S. election results.

The decentralization of election administration was a deliberate choice by the constitutional framers. They envisioned that the federal government would retain power to intervene to ensure the survival of the government, but the actual running of elections would remain in the hands of the states (see Federalist 59). While Alexander Hamilton argued for decentralization as necessary to preserve the freedoms of both the states and the federal government, it also has the happy effect of making election fraud much harder to accomplish at a national level.

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