That is funny considering the primary benefit of electronic voting machines is speeding up the gathering of results. I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics.
Otherwise, you are still falling into the same trap. You say we can just use "insider knowledge" to know where to commit the fraud, but that requires both insiders and the ability to actually execute the fraud in all those potentially close places. We are back to needing a widespread conspiracy that operates in several states and can attack in a variety of different ways.
The solution to vote counting scales right along side the problem. You use more human counters. If it takes 2% of the population to count votes, then you just...keep using the same percentage, just more people.
I reiterate: There is no good faith reason to use electronic voting machines. It injects an ability to scale up election fraud, and that is all it does.
And if we build a team of 9 women, I bet they can produce a baby in a single month.
As for alternatives, the answer for a secure electronic system seems self evident. When you vote, you either choose or assigned a secret key. Your ballot and key are publicly posted. Suddenly you have a system where that is 100% confirmable at every single level. Observers can verify exactly the number of voters voted. Voters can verify their vote was counted and was for whom they chose.
The only downside is that you could also prove to another third party that you voted some way or another. Yet this feels largely academic. Coercion/bribing schemes are already illegal and at any meaningful scale they would collapse instantly because this would actually require your "widespread conspiracy." Add in a large "finders fee" for outing said conspiracies and the entire notion of them as a threat becomes silly.
But you are still missing the point. You can't just act immediately. You need to lay the groundwork for acting. This group needs the ability to act in numerous states before they know which states to actually attack. That means even if they don't end up needing to change any votes in a given state, they still need the capability to change the votes. They can't just start the attack on election day. These systems have to already be compromised or at least have a confirmed way to compromise them. The hard work needs to be done before election day and any results are known.
>Coercion/bribing schemes are already illegal
And so is hacking a voting machine so I guess we don't have to worry about that either.
> at any meaningful scale they would collapse instantly because this would actually require your "widespread conspiracy."
But we aren't just worried about centralized conspiracies. A third party knowing how you vote creates new problems that we want to avoid. For example, now you have abusive partners demanding their significant other votes a certain way or an unethical boss demanding their employees vote for a specific candidate. The importance of individual ballots being secret goes beyond who wins the election.
>Add in a large "finders fee" for outing said conspiracies and the entire notion of them as a threat becomes silly.
Always smart to incentivize people to make stuff up for money. If this actually worked, why not just institute it for any election manipulation?
You are the one missing the point.
This is exactly why people find allegations of 2am ballet dumps and the like highly suspect and worthy of looking into.
On some level it doesn't matter whether there's the possibility of fraud or not because the appearance of that possibility delegitimatizes the system and the system only works because people think it's legitimate.
And it needs to actually be looked into even when frivolous because failing to do that has very bad optics
Societies run on faith. Anything that causes people to question the legitimacy of the system we use to transfer power gives others an opportunity to seize it (incrementally of course). Points where one could game the voting system are dangerous to us the same way having a bunch of bastard children is bad for a king.
1) fair, and the people think its fair
2) fair, but the people think its rigged
3) rigged, but the people think its fair
4) rigged, and the people think its rigged
In most people's minds, it's 1/2 and 3/4 are, more or less, the same. After all, all that really matters is what really happened. But in terms of a democracy, it's 1/3 and 2/4. The reason is that the whole point of a democracy is to help create a peaceful and stable system because people believe they can change their political future with a ballot instead of a pitchfork and torch.
But when that belief fades it doesn't really matter if faded because of reality or just perception. And when this happens, you lose the benefits of a democracy and the peace starts to disappear. There is literally nothing more important for the stability and security of a democracy than perception of its integrity. Elections that linger on for days with odd looking events abounds destroy this perception, regardless of whether or not everything is actually completely on the up and up.
The point about voter coercion being illegal is not that it will stop it, but that things like e.g. "an unethical boss demanding employees vote for a specific candidate [and then prove it]" is not just unethical, it's illegal. And a finder's fee means you not only get to give your boss the finger, and send him on to meet Bubba, but also get a nice 'golden parachute' on your way out.
This isn't the type of scenario where a government is paying money for guns, incentivizing people to print guns. This requires another individual committing a crime.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-...
And the tech side's even easier. For instance those 3 states, making up the 45,050 vote margin from 2020, all had districts using the exact same hardware/software: Dominion.