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Lindell appeals to the gullible because that is what he is. Since the 2020 election he’s been ripped off by multiple people and companies because he was gullible and incapable of analyzing the voter registration, ballot casting and vote counting processes in the way that a systems analyst would do. Lindell is not a systems analyst. He’s not the right person to solve the problem. That requires an entire team of people that take the work of a systems analyst to engineer a solution. With that said, there’s nothing wrong with him exposing some of the problem.

When any complex system has a flaw it is not possible to fix it simply by changing one or two variables. That’s what Lindell and many others want to do. It seems to be the quickest and least expensive way. The reality is that it will make matters worse. That’s exactly what has occurred over the decades.

To draw an analogy to software engineering, our election system is spaghetti code that has been developed over decades in a piecemeal manner. It lacks fine grained and strong encapsulation. That means when you change a single component it will impact other components in an unpredictable manner. In short, untested fixes break other parts of the system.

There’s never been testing of the entire election system, just components. For instance, things like a scanner that counts votes can be rigorously tested in isolation and thoroughly debugged. But the overall election process is never tested. Real elections have become the test. Thus, things like scanning an incorrectly sized ballot like they had in Arizona never occurred in the testing of the scanner. I’m certain that the test engineers starting point was a huge stack of test ballots, all of the correct size and marked in every imaginable way to test the insides of the scanner. But it was incorrectly sized ballot that was the cause of long lines and people not voting or casting their ballots into an alternative box where other impulse (unplanned?) fraud could take place. The overall system wasn’t tested.

Additionally, the election system has been injected with unneeded complexities over the years. It has an evolutionary architecture with some semblance of what it was a century ago; just enough so that all of its flaws are not readily recognizable at a single moment in time. Over the years, a weakness or two would be exposed, discussed and maybe addressed. When addressed, the changes to the system would have a ripple effect in other aspects of the system. Those effects would not necessarily be immediately exposed. They may only be exposed when a completely unrelated and unpredictable change or event occurs. That can take decades to occur. I submit that 2020 saw the culmination of decades of changes, some not even envisioned by those perpetuating fraud and had been committed fraud for decades.

There is a significant people element to this, as with most systems. A changed system is no longer the same, but most people view a changed system as being very similar to the original. They are blind to all the changes since a vast majority of changes have no visibility to people. When there is an interface to people, the people’s interaction is isolated and disjoint from the overall system. Take voter registration for instance. The methods of voter registration have substantially changed over the years. The change seen by most people is so small and inconsequential at the time of registering to vote that it doesn’t enter their mind that the entire voting system can be been impacted. That’s a change that people get to see. There’s even more changes behind the scenes that people are completely unaware.

So what has happened over the years is the election system has evolved into a dog’s dinner architecture. It is brittle and can be broken in multiple ways, either unintentionally or intentionally by fraud. Not all of the ways it can be broken can even be imagined because of the fundamentally flawed architecture and the overall complexities of the system. Simply put, there are too many variables to simultaneously consider that any one person or group of people can fix the system, regardless of their intelligence.

The election system needs to be scrapped and replaced. All of the election system’s components; voter registration, voting, vote counting, auditing, vote recounting and more; need an architecture that provides strong encapsulation of the components, clear and immutable interfaces, continuous monitoring for fraud, and safeguards to ensure credibility in election results. The guiding principles to all of that should be simplicity and transparency. Everything should be simple enough that any person of average intelligence can comprehend how it works. Everything should be viewable by the public at all times, except one small piece: the moment that you indicate who you voted. That is the sole secret in the entire system.

At this point it does not matter whether fraud has occurred or not. While fraud should be pursued as a matter of law and the people responsible should be held to account, fraud is superseded by the fact that our election system has lost its credibility. Poll after poll show that a majority of Americans do not trust our elections results. That is reason enough to re-engineering our election system from the ground up. Perhaps what is needed is the discussion about what is written above instead of “Election Security Bureau” conferences with drones flying around only to be misrepresented by the media. The real goal is to get the vast majority of Americans to make the decision that a new election system is needed. “Decision” is the correct word. It means to cut from the past and to take a different path in the future. Until that happens there will not be the change required to have credible elections again in America.