Somehow during the development and acquisition of voting machines over the years, the unnecessary need for proprietary code injected itself.
The actual technology needed for voter tabulation is probably at the level of desktops in the 1970s.
Why the secrecy and high acquisition and maintenance costs for machines that do nothing but count votes?
Why not just go back to paper ballots, one-day voting? The manual approach has to be cheaper, more reliable, more accurate, secure, and faster don't you think?
Ballot-box stuffing was common in the paper ballot days, much as it has been observed in the drop boxes of 2020. And there are virtually NO neutral parties to assure that cheating is prevented. We CAN'T trust them, and they don't trust us.