No matter how much damage you think he is causing, he is still exposing the vulnerabilities of the political process.
To whom and for what purpose?
All the 'I didnt know that we had to look at the envelopes before opening', and 'I was told I should just tick off anyone - If I didnt find that person coming in in the voter registry, and if the other person shows up, give them a provisional ballot' issues are - LITERALLY, you - as a nation are unfit to have democracy. I'm sorry. You are too dumb not to get manipulated by authority figures.
All the voting machine fraud issues will be hushed over forever, becuase changing any of them means repeat costs for purchasers (security patches), and less profit for the companies literally just banging together Win95 machines, and then certifying. Replacing them with paper ballots will not fly - because 'too much work for our election watchers', and too costly to run elections. You literally just epoxy the USB ports and hope for the best.
If you have vote scanners in place at all (regardless of you not knowing how the firmware looks, they are running on, or how the hardware design looks, which could contain a firmware switchover), and dont even understand, that you have to use 'one way feed' models, with bags at the bottom, just like with ballot boxes - sorry...
If you dont understand that you shouldnt allow votes being recast if invalid in certain districts, but not in others, sorry... (At the same time you have repression efforts going on to get people off of voting lists, simply by them holding 'ethnic sounding names' in the past (a little more than allegedly) on which you shine no light).
If you dont know, that you cant leave the voting process as a voting observer 'when you feel tired'.
If you cant keep track, if a certain batch had been 'scanned twice', ... if...
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None of that is 'structurally' fixable - because at least a decent amount of those cases can be explained away with 'human error'.
The voting machine issue is structural, but wont go away - because it would mean less convenience and less profits. And it didn't need the Trump campaign to surface it in terms of a rumor, you had entire university departments pointing the issue out for years, but noone listened.
The 'statistical manipulation' possibility the 'Trump campaign saw in logs' was contxtualized in the press event as 'almost statistically impossible results' -- none of that was followed up on in detail. So we learn effing nothing. The vote counting/reporting speed differences that showed up on NYT scraping data - where not given context at all (what was that, you had people at those places) in the press conference. The theories, that votes should 'oscillate' from one countin time slot to the other and not stabilize towards a near average percentage 'if they were sufficiently randomized in the postal system' was nonsense. Despite the fact, that they arent probably 'randomized' in the postal system - because post delivers 'first come first serve'.
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The 'dead people voting lists' didnt scale in concept (where do you get the Ids or home ownership from? (One guy with three postal boxes requesting 3000 ballots? That gets caught by sanity checks, and put into jail for 10 years?).
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Yes, we knew all those possibilities, and many more (gerrymandering, removing people from voting lists based on racial group, reducing number of ballot boxes in black districts...) for ages.
If you really control lets say 20 of those methods, so efficiently that it 'actually ads up to something' (which isnt that easy - because one case of 'didnt look at an envelope being opened' doesnt mean 1000) and therefore so smartly that you target those places, where they'd be most efficient in use. All the while not knowing how voter turnout will be, and simply accepting, that you might produce 10 illegal 'schemes' that simply become non relevant in 10 different states, because turnout was different, and your scheme just became statistically irrelevant. Which means - high risk on empty spending on illegal efforts - that if caught and pronounced structural, lead to revotes, or at least recounts --- you can manipulate the election.
And then next year, depending on voter turnout alone, or a message that might have hit with another demographic - you might not.
(And the most promising of those 'nested' schemes (vonting mashine fraud), because its the hardest to detect, the easiest to scale, and the best to adjust - year over year) - at this election obviously was the only one to fail according to Rudy..)
All the while knowing, that once you are caught (not on an 'idividual 'I've seen it' level, but lets say an organizer stepping forward) - its over.
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And you think all of this should be fixed - while the most blatent way of vote manipulation is unfixable?
Brainwash a buch of people having no clue about anything, and have them vote for a guy, because you gave them stimulus money, or are protecting them from Cuba, Venezuela, Germany and Spain.
Getting dumb voters, is so much easier, scales so much better, can be scaled up and down, based on ad hoc investment - can be targeted, can be expanded and retracted over the years. Has long term benefits (people will remember that one time)...
Is legal.
And has no recourse.
And is known to be done with billionaire donor money.
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Summerizing:
This is a case of people not wanting to recognize what voting is. And how f*cking dumb they are.
- They are willing to fight for miniscule theoreticals being eliminated untill their teeth fall out. On hypotheticals that are not proven to have been used at scale in the past.
- They are willing to 'add up' single cases and just believe, that this must be able to affect 100.000 of votes - if coordinated, without proof of plausibility
- They are willing to ignore instances where some of them (Gerrymander, register manipulation, and yes probably even 'selective notifications' (as in - in certain districts) to tell people when they only used one envelope and their vote became void) have been proven to exist - and change outcomes in the past. Because admitting that would mean, they had to seriously question in what society they are living in. And they simply dont want to.
- They are ignoring, that election spending in the US has reached 14bn USD, where 'billionaire donor spending' and 'personal spending from rich candidates' are the highest two sections of 'income' - and fundraising is the 'most funnest - part of the election experience' (free food).
- They arent saying a word against attack ads, that work based on misleading imagery and audio cues.
- They are happy - that most advertisments are payed by 'packs' they have no idea who is financing.
- They are literally so stupid, that you can get them to an election in record numbers with the question pending, do you want the candidate, that promises not to kill more of you, or do you want the one, that wants to continue -- and no other political program.
- They then are stupid enough, that they believe 'a president' will change their political system (institution based), or outlook - even though they dindnt get a majority in the senate.
- 10 people in here are still telling you how Joe will, make this a communist nation - and making their country communist, and surveilling them personally, and do something for the environment, and tax them more - even though he has absolutely NO POWER to (senate), and made election promises not even to tax the rich? (No increases up to 400k of yearly income).
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This whole episode is - is f*cking morons screaming 'fix my computer', while being ideologically, religiously, and emotionaly manipulated to the brim. Not knowing anything about anything -- and getting into a panic frency - when someone tells them, a villain has stolen something from them.
The very basic truth is - if someone has the capacity to do what you are insisting they are doing (to really make a bunch of different small manipulation vectors count in a way where coordinating them would have impact). You are f*cked. Truely f*cked. Unfixably f*cked.
You even have the agency that monitors electronic voting fraud lying to you - telling you that 'certification' and 'logs' would allow you to catch electronic manipulation.
(Real answer is 'if you epoxy the ports', 'if you have a good regime of actually locking the systems away, when not in use', 'If you look _very carefully_ into procedures, where a bunch of them are updated, if you have an understanding about the hardware design (important) - then 'hacking' them (locally, one by one - with an USB stick) -- in a way that spot-recounts cant detect statistically, might be sufficiently hard to not scale.)
And you want the world to be perfect. Without thinking about your own psychological shortcomings. (What goes into an average voting decision?)
AND YOU WANT TO DEFER THE ULTIMATE DECISION towards 'judges' who then 'rule' over something they might not understand in full. And then you sleep well - and pronounce your democracy, wonderfull, free, and kicking?
If you want all that - I have two words for you.
And I should probably not write them out, for the risk of getting into trouble with moderators.
How about this istead.
Hacking peoples believes is far easier. Although you might have to supply them with groups and a leader. And legal. And costeffective. And scales -- and from many theoretical perspectives, is the actual answer to the question 'what democratic elections are about'.
When I'm resorting to 'elections are just a way for 'transitions of power' to take place' without civil wars, I'm not exaggerating much. If you can "steal an election" -- regardless of which methods you used. Against the safeguards that are in place. All power to you. If you can hold a society sufficiently happy - to not kick you out the next time they can - all power to you.
The rest is just there, so that manipulation cant scale too easily.
And if you believe in the world where all of those problems are fixable to get a 'just election' you have a different problem.
Lets just say - that educated people, kind of start to catch how this works at one point in their life. Some even at school, when they read latin or greek texts on 'statesmanship'.
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At the same time, this is also why you need institutions. Which are positioned in a way that they share structural power and are only manipulatable (get other people in) over a longer period of time.