I’ve written on this topic before in a sillier way. This is a slightly different take.
I’ve decided not to worry about voting machines getting hacked. As long as there are voter opinion polls we’ll notice any outrageous manipulation of the voting machines. For example, if the computer programmer in the cubicle behind you becomes your next senator, and he wasn’t even in the race, that’s a red flag. Any big fraud will be noticed and corrected.
The other possibility is that the manipulation is subtle and you can’t be sure from the opinion polls that something is truly wrong. Say the guy that would have legitimately received 48% of the votes ends up with 51% instead. You might never catch that fraud. But so what?
If a candidate is able to get 48% of the popular vote legitimately, there’s no way to know he’ll be worse than the candidate who got 52%. Voters simply aren’t that good at predicting the future. Every bad president we’ve ever had managed to get a majority of the votes. Sometimes twice.
I’ve been involved in a number of job interviews for managers and chefs at my restaurants. I consider myself a reasonably good judge of character with lots of experience interviewing people. But when I compare the actual job performance of a person compared to what I predicted, there’s almost no correlation. Voting is the same way. We’re judging how a candidate will handle a nuclear crisis by how well his staff creates campaign ads. It’s a completely nonsensical process.
And realistically, most elections are won by fraud in the form of misleading ad campaigns, intentionally distorted statistics, and outright lies. Just because lying to the voters is totally legal doesn’t make it less bad than voting machine hacking. The intent and the result are identical. We live with one and we can live with the other. And there’s a non-zero chance that voting machine fraud might sometimes cancel out the campaign lying fraud. The net effect could be positive at least some of the time.
We should do all that we can to ensure that voting machines are secure. But I’m moving it off of my list of things to worry about. That list is already long enough.