Thread by @normative

The truly perverse thing about the current electronic voting security freakout, motivated by a desire to deny the results of the presidential election, is that for DECADES this really was an absolute security horrorshow with minimal mainstream media attention.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of serious security researchers and activists, the situation has materially improved as more and more states adopted requirements for manually-auditable, voter-verifiable paper trails, though plenty of jurisdictions still need to up their game.

Some of the states at the center of the present freakout are those that have adopted the best security practices. Pennsylvania is one of only a handful of states that does automatic manual audits for all races. Meanwhile eight states still don’t require paper audit trails.

Nobody is freaking out about fraud or filing lawsuits in those eight states. Why? Because the presidential vote in those states wasn’t close. So nobody cares, except the experts who’ve been on this for years & actually care about election security, not partisan fanfic.

Also, look, there were valid reasons to object to this specific bill, but there was legislation floated JUST LAST YEAR to require an auditable paper trail in federal elections, and fund states to upgrade their systems to comply. Republicans blocked it. thehill.com/homenews/house…

I am *not* saying Republicans should have voted for that specific legislation—there was room for improvement. But a whole lot of the rhetoric of opposition was along the lines of: “There’s no problem here, and only liberals who want to delegitimize Donald Trump say otherwise.”

Judging by current rhetoric, you’d think electronic voting is a big problem in Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. All of them use either hand-marked ballots or machines that generate a voter-verifiable audit trail, and have mandatory post-election audit processes.

Now there ARE states where elections are less secure because paper audit trails aren’t yet standard statewide. Texas. Mississippi. Louisiana. New Jersey. Indiana. Kansas. Kentucky. Tennessee.

Heard any conspiracy theories about those states lately? Me neither.

Why aren’t you hearing about those states? Because the presidential vote wasn’t close there, and most of them went for Trump. The people pushing these conspiracies are profoundly ignorant about, and don’t appear to be particularly serious about, real election security.

So now voters are getting a message that’s totally backwards. They’re hearing utter fantasies about electronic fraud in states that actually listened to the experts and implemented better policies, because that’s what serves the fiction that maybe Biden didn’t really win.

They are NOT hearing anything about states where the voting system does actually remain insecure, and public pressure to upgrade would be useful—because that’s not helpful to sustaining a make-believe reality where “Donald Trump won by a landslide.”

The irony here is, as @C_C_Krebs said, this really WAS the most secure national election, if not “ever,” then certainly in decades, at least technologically. The folks currently stoking fears had relatively little to do with making that happen.