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by Chardok 2817 days ago
With all of this discussion in Washington about Russian hacking and Russian voter influencing, why are these demonstrably vulnerable voting machines hardly mentioned? It would seem to me this should be a number one priority to prevent outside interference.
5 comments

In fact the voting system seems to be getting more, rather than less, shady in some places. Eg, LA county: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17823702
I've wondered about this and also the fact that 'hacking' our election isn't terribly difficult when all you have to do is manipulate a very small number of swing counties. My conclusion thus far has been that even the media must be necessarily complicit in the farce of a free and fair election system. There's a strong incentive for everyone to believe this in order to maintain stability.
The short unhappy answer seems to be that the parties are happy with a corruptible voting system.
That does seem like a logical conclusion. Conveniently, the GOP has made disenfranchisement part of their platform, which of course the Democrats then oppose by supporting zero-id elections, and we end up with a silly stalemate, hackable voting systemc, etc.

Staff up the FEC and then make it their job to seek out and provide ID to every single eligible voter in the country. Kinda like the census, be proactive and don't make disenfranchisement a thing. And then make it so polling places are open for days, maybe a week, including a full weekend, so everyone gets a chance to vote.

Or vote-by-mail. We've established it works.

Because this doesn't give you political points.
Well, when the best way to obfuscate your own voter influencing and voting machine hacking is to keep blaming it on the Russians (based mostly on the language packs installed in the attackers' text editors...), we have to wonder how much they really care about preventing interference in democracy...
There is no disagreement between every serious security professional I follow, and every security agency that has a prepared a report.

All of them believe it's the Russians based on all the available evidence.