Dominion Voting Systems and Fox reach last-minute settlement
The worst damage done by GOP rhetoric on the 2020 election is that it set us back decades in terms of our ability to have rational and productive discourse about election security. It&#x27;s become an albatross that otherwise rational and technically minded people are unwilling to publicly discuss, lest they be labeled extremist by association.<p>The fact of the matter is our elections are <i>not</i> secure, in the sense that their results cannot be cryptographically verified. You either cannot verify your vote was counted, and&#x2F;or cannot verify it contributed to the total votes received by the candidate for whom you voted. In aggregate, we can rarely verify that &quot;all legitimate ballots were counted,&quot; and can never verify that <i>only</i> legitimate ballots were counted.<p>This is a problem, it&#x27;s been a problem, and it will continue to be a problem. Our election infrastructure is only secure insofar as people trust it&#x27;s secure, and people can only trust what they can verify. Otherwise, the winning party is asking the losing party to commit an act of faith in &quot;trusting&quot; a system that cannot be verified for correctness.<p>In 2017, Democrats recognized it as a problem, just like Republicans did in 2021. Yet we have so much whiplash from back and forth politicization of the issue that it&#x27;s impossible to have a sane discussion about it.