The electronic voting machine industry is one big fraud. Machines are neither secure nor dependable. State election commissions don’t have the expertise (or budget) to understand the technical issues for a market to properly work. Clear, strong, enforceable, and enforced regulation is necessary, but until that happens, we’re stuck in the position where any claim of fraudulent manipulation (at least at the level of state election commissions) needs to be taken seriously. There was the recent bug in machines in Texas which was switching votes. And now security researchers are pointing out that machines since 2016 are less secure than previous ones! From simple research by Brian Varner in Wired (a la Bruce Schneier):
This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines—those that were used in the 2016 election—are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as “next generation,” and still in use today, are worse than they were before—dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation