Seriously.
It's tone deaf to one side, but I'm pretty scared since the other side has, just as wrongheadedly, convinced itself these systems work. I'm not worried about 50,000 votes stolen due to doublevoting somewhere or a mailtruck of votes getting lost. If victory falls on the 50.1% mark versus the 49.9% mark, that's okay. I'm worried because we have a system which IS exploitable and which WILL be exploited, if it hasn't already been.
Rigging US elections has incredible ROI for any foreign state actor, and simply isn't hard.
For the record, I made equally tone deaf comments when 9/11 happened and when COVID19 was in its early days. Now, they're common sense to most people. I don't want to wait for Russia, China, or North Korea to pick our next president before we do something.
Open source, transparency, and auditability won't solve the problem 100%, but they'll prevent most types of gross, blatant rigging. Cryptographic voting algorithms or paper trails will get us much of the rest of the way there. We don't need perfect security, but we need to be in a place where a single point of compromise can't break our democracy.
I'm serious. Go read the papers. You very obviously don't have a background in academic security. Because Oakland doesn't tend to accept stuff on trivial matters.
It is. How many papers were been published in Oakland between 2000 and 2010 on election security? Lots. Clearly this is a problem interesting enough to capture the interest of computer security faculty. It isn't a toy problem.
In addition to technical challenges (open sourcing isn't magic), there is a very complex organizational challenge due to the decentralized structure of elections in the US.
But more importantly, making vague claims about hypothetical limitations of the existing systems while tens of millions of americans believe that actual literal fraud stole the election from Trump and are using that as motivation to invade the capitol building and disrupt the process of transitioning power between parties is tone-deaf to say the least.