Electronic voting is still a bad idea

And while I have you in your post-Thanksgiving food coma, let's talk about voting procedures and math.

I know, I know. This is not a moment at which you want to think about systems, trustworthiness, or voting architectures – but in a time where elected officials are deciding whether you can have all the members of your extended family around your dinner table or hold the hand and show a smile to your dying grandmother, this is a moment where you should consider what you are giving thanks for and how to protect it.

This video is from the end of last year, where in the US Democrats had been screaming about how the 2016 election was "stolen" by Russian intervention for little over three years. It talks about why using electronic voting systems – local ones – is a bad idea and the vulnerabilities that they represent. Many of those are procedural, systematic, and inherent. The problems exist regardless of intent and are only magnified if the systems and processes around the voting system, voter validation, the trust of individuals with their neighbor, emergent influence even absent centralized conspiracy, are even a little impacted.

Now, having thought about these issues and watched the videos, considering the problems with electronic voting systems, consider how much easier to subvert, how much wider the attack surface, a mail-in ballot system is. All the attacks and vulnerabilities of traditional paper balloting, which have been refined for hundreds of years, with none of the few checks and balances that can be manifest by poll watching, pole registration, voter crosschecking, or basic end to end security.

The Georgia vote in 2020 appears to be pivotal. Not just for the presidency, which is sufficient enough to be concerned about, but for seats in the Senate which are arguably more important. Now is the time to think about voting systems and how much you trust not just the people that live in your house or the people on your street, exactly the same people for whom you are the most thankful, but people whom you don't even know, have no connection to, but certainly are thinking about you – and why your ideas should never be heard.

Amusingly, this applies no matter which side of the aisle you root for. The underlying issue of voting security is something that everyone should agitate for, in their own best interest. You can readily determine who doesn't have your best interest at heart by looking carefully and noting who is agitating for systems which are less secure, which manifest less trustworthiness. People that are advocating for less validation, for less secure channels of communication, for less surety that outcomes are in line with the intention of the body politic – they are not your friends. They are not supporters of the downtrodden. They are not advocating for those who have a lesser voice.

They are looking to subvert the process for their own profit.

For the last 20 years, those advocating for less security in voting processes have largely been found on the Democratic side of the aisle, for whatever reason. Then they spent over four years screaming about a stolen election, putting forth a highly illegal and grossly misleading Department of Justice investigation followed by a farce of impeachment – which failed, exposing an entire architecture of politically motivated, arrogantly self-appointed individuals who decided that they know better than you do, no matter what you know.

Now many of the same people who have been screaming at the sky for four years are taking to the airwaves or their keyboards to tell you that the voting systems are completely unable to be exploited, utterly bulletproof, and that no irregularities – despite every indication of massive irregularities – have occurred.

Anyone that knows me knows that I am not a Republican. I'm barely a Libertarian. My interest in politics is almost entirely out of pure self-interest to maximize my freedoms and ability to make my own choices. If that just so happens to also increase your ability to make your own choices and your ability to be free, then we both win. Huzzah.

This latest round of egregious stupidity bothers me, and most of it is being spouted by Democrats. It bothers me because it assumes that I am so stupid, so blind, so ignorant of exactly what the same people have been saying for the last 20 years that I won't notice that even opportunists think there was a little bit of a spin on a dime there.

You can lie to me, but at least respect me enough to lie to me well.

I can't tell you what's going to happen. The old saying goes, "the wheels of justice grind slowly but exceedingly fine." It's possible that the current round of ridiculousness will get found out, will get exercise like a cancerous tumor, and the truth will out, along with the rest of the process as defined in the Constitution and in theory sworn to be upheld by all of the political and law enforcement agents in our nation. It could happen.

But think about process. Think about why electronic voting is a bad idea. Think about how long you've been being told that's the case, whether you were listening or not. Spend five minutes and think about how you, yes you, can imagine subverting voting. Then spend a few more minutes and realize that there are people out there who have been thinking about it their entire lives.

You might become cynical as I am and say, "if voting could make a difference, it would be illegal. If not voting could make a difference, it would be illegal." You might decide to double down on your idealism and become a crusader for voting trustworthiness. You might only spend a few minutes and become a little less easy to sway by media agencies and organizations who want you to believe something which you may not want to but which makes you more comfortable than having your own ideas.

I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm just going to tell you to spend a few minutes and think.

And that electronic voting is still a bad idea.

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