Distrusting electronic voting machines only marks you out as a Republican conspiracy theorist when a Democrat is president, like now. It was a perfectly respectable position held by tech-literate Democrat supporters in the 2000s under Bush, became one again the moment Trump took office, and ceased to be one as soon as it seemed like Biden won. It really is that simple and that partisan.
On Twitter, where literally everything is a political shibboleth.
If you're security conscious, it's entirely possible to know there's no reason to believe anyone successfully tampered with voting machines, AND know that it's something that could happen one day if we don't take it seriously.
> On Twitter, where literally everything is a political shibboleth.
Left unchecked, that kind of thinking will destroy America. If too many people look at everything through the lens of partisanship, paralysis follows, and that eventually leads to death.
And it's a both sides thing. I've seen a lot of people act like anyone who has problems with the implementation of the Afghanistan withdrawal is a Trumper clone of Stephen Miller. That kind of thinking has led to some truly awful things said in apologia for it.
> Distrusting electronic voting machines only marks you out as a Republican conspiracy theorist when a Democrat is president
I'd modify this.
Distrusting electronic voting machines only marks you out as a conspiracy theorist (of any political leaning) when you only care about the issue if an election doesn't go your way.
People who actually care about the issue continue rallying for changes to election security even if their party won.
If you stop caring once things go your way, you don't actually care about election security, you're just using conspiracy theories to comfort yourself when you lost.
I work in computer security and I see a lot of experts like Matt Blaze being inundated by crazy conspiracy theorists. These are people who have spent years working against the tide to improve voting technology -- primarily by advocating for paper trails in electronic voting systems. Now, having seen many of these goals achieved, these experts are being attacked on Twitter by conspiracy theorists who are attacking even voting machines with a paper record based on insane theories (involving the President of Venezuela). These positions have nothing to do with the security of voting machines, they're crazy nonsense. Much of which is being promoted by supporters of a candidate who refuses to accept that he lost.
To pretend that a bunch of people just "switched sides on the issue of voting machines" is totally counterfactual. It's perfectly reasonable to want to improve insecure DREs, and many people on all sides of the political spectrum wanted this. It is not reasonable to decide (en masse) that the family of Hugo Chavez owns a voting machine company, and that somehow they're conspiring to change votes in ways that can't be detected in the paper trail -- and moreover believing all of this insanity without the slightest shred of evidence.
I don't expect much from HN, but I do expect much, much better.
