Computer Scientists: Breaches of Voting System Software Warrant Recounts

Genuinely not trying to start a political firestorm, but I'm curious - did these same scientists bring up similar concerns in any previous elections?

I'm a firm believer of absolutely no electronic voting machines. In-person, paper ballots, hand tallied, escorted by armed guards/trusted election officials with audited paper trails. It might cause a bit of a ruckus mentioning it here, but requiring photo ID to verify who you are before you vote should be mandatory as well.

If Israel and the USA can deploy offline-based malware to cause damage to nuclear centrifuges in Iran, what makes people think that US-unfriendly countries (or heck, even the CIA) won't try to do the exact same thing to voting machines to undermine democracy?

I wouldn't even trust open source, since I wouldn't trust election officials to keep software up to date on their voting machines, let alone know how to even update them.

> did these same scientists bring up similar concerns in any previous elections?

The stated cause of their warning is that the obscurity of the source code has been recently compromised, and beyond giving similar warnings to the FBI and other agencies as soon as they learned this, the authors appear to have been vociferous about weaknesses in electronic polling in prior cycles as well.

> I'm a firm believer of absolutely no electronic voting machines. In-person, paper ballots, hand tallied, escorted by armed guards/trusted election officials with audited paper trails.

We have voter-verified paper ballots with chain-of-custody in addition to our digital polling, right? These seem to be sampled with statistical comparison to the electronically tallied votes as a matter of routine before states verify. The authors of the letter don't seem to mention that procedure so I'm wondering why they consider that process insufficient for catching digital fraud and are instead advocating for a full recount.

> I wouldn't even trust open source, since I wouldn't trust election officials to keep software up to date on their voting machines, let alone know how to even update them.

Yeah I wonder about this! Australia's system is source-available, but I can't find any information on how the installations and hardware are verifiable to independent auditors.