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How “Big Lie” Harassment is Driving Local Election Officials To Quit
A new survey shows that life is getting dicey for election workers
In late 2008, I travelled around the country reporting a story about electronic voting machines.
Back then, there was widespread distrust of the machines. Many people worried they were hackable, and that someone could rig an election. That included Democrats who worried about an inside job, because the Republican CEO of Diebold — makers of one of the major election machines — “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
But as I found, distrust of the machines was pretty bipartisan. That’s because while the machines were certainly insecure and hackable, the more obvious problem was they were buggy as heck, prone to crashing and malfunction. Republican and Democratic candidates had heard from voters who’d discovered that the screens froze up, appeared to record incorrect votes, mangled the “paper trails” that some machines were supposed to leave, and worse. (“In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself,” as I wrote.) Even if you set the risk of hacking totally aside, the machines were untrustworthy.
