> Unfortunately, irresponsible people currently have the power to force fraudits, deny funding for voting systems, and leak administrator passwords. And with its dramatic displays of hacking, DEFCON is perfectly suited to encouraging the kind of paranoia that now threatens even routine election administration.<p>It seems like the author wants to eat their cake and have it too. On the one hand they are implying that untrustworthy people (i.e. Trump supporters, from the author's perspective) are in charge of administering some elections, but on the other hand they are complaining that security researchers are "paranoid" (i.e. delusional for thinking election hardware could be hacked).<p>I'm sure this isn't a contradiction in the author's mind, though. They want their readers to believe that the only electoral fraud that was carried out was that perpetrated by Republicans, and that all the competing claims made by Republicans must be false (so any claim they rely on must also be false, even if proven by security researchers).<p>Don't get me wrong, the author is probably weighing up the two types of threats correctly, but I think they are framing the facts with a very self-serving narrative. A better conclusion would be that voter rolls and ballots should all be done on paper (to the extent that accessibility requirements allow) and they should be counted by hand, before having the hand counts checked by machines. That way the worst a hack can do is force a hand-recount, and we don't have to censor or disparage security researchers.