Ever since this country began, the notion of "one man, one vote"
(please excuse the gendered "man" - it's archaic) has been part of our country's DNA (despite it being denied to non-white-male persons). Woman and black people have marched and fought for the right to vote (as recently as in our lifetimes). For most people, it's their only chance to have a say in their government.
Before electronic voting machines came along, there were essentially three types of balloting: mechanical voting machines (where you "pulled the lever"), punch cards, and paper ballots marked by hand. There were always some chances of altering ballots to change the outcome, but it wasn't easy to do. It wasn't until the infamous election results of Florida in 2000 that all that changed.
Because of issues with the punch cards, another system needed to be put into place. That was the electronic voting machine, and vote tabulation software. These are essentially specialized computer laptops with touchscreens that are networked together and feed a tabulation program on a network server. Like anything else network-connected, they are easily hackable. Votes can be changed on the machines or in the tabulation software. There's no way to track any changes. Even once they started printing out a "receipt" of each person's vote, that was really more of a "security theater" action than anything meaningful.
Fast-forward to this year's election. Our country's seeming inability to stay home and wear a mask while performing essential chores out in public means that we are still dealing with deadly a COVID-19 epidemic. This causes two problems with in-person voting. First, there are the lines of people that sometimes wait for hours, with social distancing being difficult-to-impossible. The second problem is poll workers. Those who have voted a number of times know that most poll workers are elderly, retired patriots who understand the sacrosanct nature of voting. They are also those most at danger if they become infected. Because of this, they are not volunteering this year.
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