Voting machines have been at the heart of some of the most dangerous conspiracy theories of the last five years. I mean, the Venn diagram between the people who believed the wild, false claims about Dominion Voting Systems and the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol is pretty much a circle.
The real scandal, however, is the voting machine industry’s lack of innovation over the past few decades. According to Marker’s Rob Walker, that stunted growth has opened the door for voting machine bugs that, though not big enough to affect the outcome of an election, still cause some headaches. “Instead of a vibrant marketplace with competition forcing those improvements,” Walker writes, “we have a stagnant one with high barriers to entry.”