Our entire election system as it exists today has integrity as an assumption, not as a guarantee.
Voting machines require integrity as an assumption, they offer no guarantee. They actively damage trust, and yet a trade off was made in exchange for cheaper, less complex (to run, not understand) elections?
This means our election officials, with the presumption of integrity, optimized for getting the most people voting (in blue states), not for trust. Choosing to use voting machines when there is significant dissent about their use alone is enough to damage the integrity of an election.
It doesn't matter how many people vote if you can't trust the votes. It doesn't matter if some people trust the votes if the loser of an election does not trust the votes.
Democracy means the loser sees they are the minority and submits to someone else's authority because they recognize that they are the minority. If the loser does not trust the integrity of the system, then democracy has failed.
I watched an election in Taiwan (paper ballot system) happen, and I feel pretty comfortable that I can think about and reason how it operates or how it might be attacked.
I really don't think our election would be that hard to attack an election in a state that would shield the attackers from consequences. We have not seen any consequences for a flagrant attempt to attack our elections in Georgia.
I am a fairly well educated product of the American public education system. I am almost certainly in the top 15% of Americans as far as education goes, and I do not have a firm understanding of how elections operate. I think 70% is a lowball estimate of Americans that probably couldn't tell you a very good story about how elections actually work and why we should believe they are legitimate. That is a real problem.
"It can't happen here" is American exceptionalism, and I've got some very bad news. It can happen here. It is happening here.
Voting machines require integrity as an assumption, they offer no guarantee. They actively damage trust, and yet a trade off was made in exchange for cheaper, less complex (to run, not understand) elections?
This means our election officials, with the presumption of integrity, optimized for getting the most people voting (in blue states), not for trust. Choosing to use voting machines when there is significant dissent about their use alone is enough to damage the integrity of an election.
It doesn't matter how many people vote if you can't trust the votes. It doesn't matter if some people trust the votes if the loser of an election does not trust the votes.
Democracy means the loser sees they are the minority and submits to someone else's authority because they recognize that they are the minority. If the loser does not trust the integrity of the system, then democracy has failed.
I watched an election in Taiwan (paper ballot system) happen, and I feel pretty comfortable that I can think about and reason how it operates or how it might be attacked.
I really don't think our election would be that hard to attack an election in a state that would shield the attackers from consequences. We have not seen any consequences for a flagrant attempt to attack our elections in Georgia.
I am a fairly well educated product of the American public education system. I am almost certainly in the top 15% of Americans as far as education goes, and I do not have a firm understanding of how elections operate. I think 70% is a lowball estimate of Americans that probably couldn't tell you a very good story about how elections actually work and why we should believe they are legitimate. That is a real problem.
"It can't happen here" is American exceptionalism, and I've got some very bad news. It can happen here. It is happening here.