Nelson Otto
Jefferson City
Dear Editor:
I read Cal Winters letter about the Electoral College and had to do one of those face palm gestures. It amazes me how many people are so ignorant of how things work and why. Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised as so many people know more about Kardashians.
So here is how it works. All voting machines are on a dedicated system. They are not connected to the internet and they are not open to outside hacking. Now they can be hacked beforehand, but to do that you would have to have access to each and every individual machine. You would then have to plug directly into each machine and place the hacked code in it. Now there is some evidence to suggest this might have happened in a couple of districts in some states but it would take a large number of people to do the millions of machines that are out there to make a difference in a presidential election. The only people who have access to them before the election is the manufactures and the election committees. Even the people at the polling stations do not have access to the system. So a couple of teenagers with laptops just aren't going to cut it and unless the Russians or Chinese have infiltrated every single county in every single state's election commission they couldn't do it and then we would have more to worry about than them altering an election.
Now this doesn't mean people haven't tried and there are ways around the machine, like dead people voting who haven't been removed from the registry. Which when those people are removed, someone screams racism. I didn't know the dead were a race. Or, rumors of people being bused from one polling place to another or states like New York and California registering illegals or non citizens to vote. Generally, though, the actual voting is fairly safe for now.