I've been using computers since they started to creep into offices, which is mid-1980s. And the important lessons we all learned are these: a computer will always do exactly what you told it to do (not exactly what you wanted it to do). And the lesson we all should have learned once the internet became the way we do almost everything: If someone programmed it, someone else can figure out how to hack it. The internet is indeed a large system of interlocking instances of trust. We trust that the programmer has done an adequate job, and the system admin has guarded it adequately. Need I list the instances where the system was inadequately guarded? (Equifax, Marriott hotels, the United States government, et al.)
In the real world we know that somebody somewhere wants to steal our identity and our money, but we think that voting systems are safe because ... because? In America, the results of general elections are indeed worth trillions of dollars. Our belief in the efficiency of computers is semi-religious, and it flies in the face of massive evidence that computers can be misused in ways we won't understand until it's too late.
And most of us who use computers all day every day don't like to admit how little we understand about how they actually work. Most of us can use the programs provided for us, but very few of us can write the programs.
How about we insist on ... paper ballots, hand counted, with the USPS as the means of getting the ballots to the counting location on time? It's a system we can understand, which immediately puts it ahead of even the simplest computerized system.
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