The IT issues (machines) is a sensitive security issue. But we also have to pull back on the Pandemic's mass mail-in ballots, and mass number of drop boxes not at election/voting locations (a political issue).
Covid issues are Covid issues and should be addressed accordingly. Ignoring election laws was certainly bad and those areas still trying to take advantage must be dealt with in some fashion.
That said, anyone who thinks voting machines could only be manipulated in 2020 and not as far back as 2000 or whenever the first computerized election took place is kidding themselves.
Georgia had voting records hacked when Kemp was SoS. Politicians on both sides had concerns for decades prior to 2020.
Our country is incompetent and inept because we don't prioritize dealing with problems as they exist, but rather to the extent our political motivation allows us to think and act.
Things are often labeled as unbelievable because we don't want to believe them, not because they aren't plausible. And what we want to believe is driven by our preferred political outcome.
The mass paper ballots are a red herring. Most people are focused on the idea of illegals voting. Yes, that needs to be lawfully managed, but the real prize is just having numbers of eligible registered voters.
Anyone wanting to cheat doesn't actually need people to go vote whether in person or mail. It doesn't matter what happens on the front-end, computer programs can do whatever the programmer allows which is all about the output.
I still laugh about how GA started using printers to give us QR codes to then take to the scanner ourselves as some secure solution. Our only validation is that the tally goes up when we scan our ballot. Can you read your QR code? Do you see in real-time your vote increase the correct position for each office and/or issue you voted?
Nope. We have more integrity in online polls on social media than our elections.
Traceability is the most important aspect of security and that's being obfuscated at every turn.
As long as there are 150 million registered voters, a bad actor can do whatever they want with 150 million minus x ballots because who can validate each ballot back to the original registered voter? The greater the delta between registered voters and actual votes makes fraud within the computing realm much easier as no one is validating who actually did and didn't vote in any official capacity.
Yes, there are records of who voted in person tracked by the election software as well as which mailed ballots were returned, but when votes are being counted and recounted no one is tying votes back to the individual who actually casted it one for one.
E-commerce platforms can trace millions of transactions daily without a hitch yet we can't (won't) complete a full audit of our voting systems for elections that happen a few times every couple of years.
We're far beyond "trust, but verify". It's now "don't trust and verify".