Those claiming 2020 election fraud keep pointing to experts who say that voting machines can be hacked. That’s true, that’s what experts say. But experts also say there’s no reason to believe they have been hacked, not the slightest bit of evidence. Indeed, part of their justification for improving election computers is to give those like Trump less reasons to make baseless accusations of election fraud.
And example is this letter from very well respected election experts from a recent hearing in Pennsylvania, which clearly makes this point. None-the-less, the Republicans are trying to use that letter to cast doubt on past elections. None of the signers of that letter have every publicly expressed the opinion they think the 2020 election was stolen, yet Trump supporters regularly make the claim that their letter says just that.
All the letter suggests is that elections can be improved going forward. That’s not necessarily the same as saying things are broken. There has never been an election in American history where interest groups have not expressed such opinions on how things should be changed, to make things “better”. That this group claims problems that need to be fixed is no different than any other election. Once all those things are fixed, they’ll have a list of more suggestions to improve things.
Their executive summary obliquely references Trump, by saying among their goals “no reasonable candidate or party may have grounds to object that the process was unfair, insecure, or compromised”. Of course, the bulk of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims haven’t involved computers. He has mostly claimed things like counting being paused in the middle of the night, inserting new ballots, so that when people woke up the next morning, state where Trump was leading suddenly switched to Biden.
But nonetheless, nonetheless, as Trump has included computers in his conspiracy theories, it’s important to work to prevent that in the future.
The weakest links in elections aren’t the computers but the people. Getting rid of the computers won’t fix that. Indeed, computers provide opportunities to fix human flaws. That’s among the reason for “DREs” and “BMDs” — to fix human error.
Getting rid of computers isn’t an option, an indeed, the experts don’t argue that. Indeed, they argue the reverse, that computers help reduce inaccuracy and fraud.
The only thing they are arguing for is an auditable paper record that keeps computers accountable. In other words, we can still have a fair election even if all the computers get hacked.
In other words, if humans fill out their own ballots, that’s the official record of the vote that can be audited even if the computers that scan the votes have been hacked.
This list isn’t too controversial. The main controversy is that state and county election officials around the country are resistant to change, and perceive those suggesting change as “the enemy”. A good example is how George’s Security of State reacted to proven vulnerabilities that will be in its computers in the upcoming 2024 election. They refuse to fix important bugs that possibly let hackers into the machines. This Pennsylvania hearings have a similar problem, pitting Republican politicians against officials and Democrats — the Republicans don’t actually care about fixing future election so much as casting doubt on the 2020 election.
The point is simply this: every time Trump supports point to experts, they are refering to actual experts (such as the 20 experts above who signed onto the lettter) that they are misrepresenting, or fake experts (e.g. Ben Cotton) who lie. No trustworthy experts have supported the conclusion that there’s evidence the 2020 election was stolen. If they had such evidence, you could simply show their evidence.