The irony of your comment...
Edit: I don’t know anything about the impact of the ADA on the choice of EVMs in the US, so I haven’t commented on it too much, but even ignoring how wrong your dieselgate comment is, your claim about ADA doesn’t pass the smell test for me because EVMs are (or were, until courts stopped them or countries realized how insecure they are) being adopted in large numbers in other countries, many of which don’t have the equivalent of ADA laws, and don’t particularly care about the disabled.
Essentially yes.
>And wasn’t dieselgate about trying to trick US standards rather than about European standards?
No, most likely not. The main motivation at the time they put these "devices" in place was to trick the European standards, the so called Euro 1 to Euro 6, and regulators. Of course it helped with the US/Californian standards too, but hardly the main concern. But the primary diesel market was (and still is) the EU, also with new diesel models introduced there first. E.g. in 2015 over half of all new passenger cars in Europe were diesel. At the same time the US diesel new passenger cars were about 3%. Diesel was incentivized by European governments in particular the German.
What's more is that a lot of other countries outright adopted the Euro standards too, or based their local standards directly on the Euro standards, e.g. Israel, Turkey, Australia, India, and even China to a degree, to name a few. Getting e.g. an Euro 5 certification meant you not only were able to sell in the EU but a lot of those places too.
Of course, it was US researchers and regulators who uncovered this fraud first (or at least the first who made it public and issued fines), kudos to them, so that's probably why there is a perception that this thing was about US and US standards.
BTW, those "cheat devices" really aren't devices per see but ECU configuration data to instruct the ECU to limit the urea solution (AdBlue) use to likely test scenarios. And they started doing this cheat mainly because they fucked up their designs installing too small, tiny urea solution tanks (which often were hard to access) which would have required car owners to refill that tank really often.
Most press on dieselgate was superficial, but there were a few articles that went deeper into why diesel and why mfgs. rigged exhaust tests.
The actual origin of dieselgate was government regulations incentivizing diesel use in Europe for misguided emissions reasons.
A related factor is that mfgs. can apply fuel economy improvements from one model to other models based on percentage.
Regarding voting machines, city and state councils would not budget for new equipment without a good reason. That's why ADA seems like the most compelling reason from what I've read.
Under "Voting Systems Standards" in the link below, an electronic system is required with multiple language support under ADA:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-107publ252/pdf/PLAW...
Dieselgate is about a specific scheme designed to bypass regulations. Your reductive reasoning makes as much sense as saying "it's superficial to think of Watergate as anything else but the byproduct of democratic elections"
I don't know where you're going with the whole Dieselgate thing. But I do agree that part of the appeal of e-voting is the ADA accessibility. Can you point me to where you found in your research where voting officials felt "obligated" or otherwise encouraged to ignore everything else for the sake of compliance? Just because a bank is forced to install a wheelchair ramp doesn't mean they remove the door locks.
From what I've read, the sole motivation for the large "investment" in electronic voting machines was an ADA requirement. City and state government committees felt obligated to budget for electronic voting machines for compliance reasons only. So ADA compliance was the sole requirement, and the security requirements were never a factor.
This is similar to Dieselgate in Europe. Diesel is a filthy fuel, but there is one pollution component, I believe it's CO2, that is emitted less than gasoline. All of the other pollutants are worse, but European governments incentived diesel ICE engines for that one molecule.
We are in a post-facts era, and as technologists we need to be at the table before one-dimensional public policies are made, as in the above examples.