Jennifer Watson: Election officials aren't corrupt, but bad actor could hack machines

To The Daily Sun,

Last week I wrote a letter stating that I believed it was time to get rid of voting machines in our elections due to the possibility that they can be used to cheat with. One reader thought I was suggesting that our local election officials were not to be trusted. That is not what I was saying or implying.

The problem is with the machines themselves. A single bad actor who has access to those machines at some point prior to an election can program them to cheat without any of the hardworking election officials being aware of it. See 2006’s "Hacking Democracy" (here’s a link to the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-N5TIyZVMY) and HBO’s 2018 "Kill Chain" (trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t10DG7CUNQ). Eliminating voting machines would be trusting our local officials more, giving them back the task of actually counting, witnessing, and verifying our votes.

On a completely different topic (but in the same letter due to The Sun’s policy of one letter per person per week), I want to say how absolutely heart-warming it was to see on Nov. 26, the 100th anniversary of "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles Schultz’s birth, seven other cartoonists gave tribute to him in their comic strips. So many of us have delighted in "Peanuts" over the years, and his fellow cartoonists’ honor of Schultz just seemed the right thing to do.

Jennifer Watson

Laconia