> These would be reasonable thoughts if this was an industrial process that was done regularly, but it’s not. It’s done once every 2 years, and the voting machines are relatively new. There is no reason to assume they’ve done all this testing and contingency planning, and frankly they don’t need to.

Fair enough. But then THAT is where the reporting starts. Lede'ing with "blah blah blah conspiracy theory..." is lazy and dangerous.

If The Fourth Estate is going to play the "omg...preserve the democracy" card then The Fourth Estate needs to do a better job of keeping its own house clean and fulfulling its obligations to the democracy. TFE feeding status quo tropes - for profit - is not a good look, and it's dangerous.

Otherwise we're going to be stuck with what we have, or worse.