The least productive (& loudest) election security activism focuses on criticizing vendors for building flawed systems. The reality is ALL complex systems have flaws. That's why experts advocate "software independent" voting that doesn't depend on perfect components to be secure.
The concept of Software Independence was a HUGE breakthrough in election security. Read more about how this can be achieved in this excellent National Academies study: nap.edu/catalog/25120/…
What's sad and infuriating is so much yelling about completely irrelevant "debates" like "ES&S vs Dominion". Both vendors produce some systems that can be used in a software independent way and others that can't. The important thing is not the vendor, but the design.
Don't get me wrong - many of the vendors are terrible, and they often have more lawyers (for stifling critics) than engineers (to build better products). But that's not the central problem, and it's not one that needs to be solved before we can better secure our elections.
Instead, what's important is that the equipment (whatever the vendor) maintain a reliable paper artifact of the voters' ballots and that these ballots be routinely audited in a rigorous way after each election ("risk limiting audits"). Focus on that. please.
Re-upping this because there's been a flare up of "we need to get rid of the evil <vendor-A> machines", which really misses how election safeguards work. With the right architecture (optical scan + audits), we can have high integrity elections even with badly flawed software.
At the same time, with a poor architecture (such as touchscreen DRE machines), the software will never be good enough, no matter how well intentioned and vigilant the vendor.
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