Just because there's only 1 type of buyer doesn't mean the industry is regulated at all. It just means capitalism is at work. I'm not sure how you can conflate

Just because there's only 1 type of buyer doesn't mean the industry is regulated at all. It just means capitalism is at work. I'm not sure how you can conflate the two. The government is massive so you can't just say because the same entity as a whole is the one purchasing the machines that they're essentially also regulating it. To be even more clear there are almost no regulations in this space other than what the companies themselves say they regulate/control/test. That's not regulation, but government simply buying from the only options that are out there who currently poorly regulate things themselves. You're basically saying that building a perfect voting machine is impossible so they're all faulty so we should be okay with faulty ones. You seem to be an engineer from your twitter, which is somewhat shocking for me. In engineering (mechanical, electrical, software) if you said to your boss "hey, we can't make this thing perfect so we shouldn't even bother because someone will complain about it" I'd imagine your boss would fire you and find someone that wasn't so black and white who would actually try to implement something and then make it better. Also, your comparison to spam-free email doesn't actually help your case at all. If you went to google years ago before they created gmail and said 'I heard you were going to try and make a secure and spam-free email system, but that in doing so you'll make tradeoffs and some people will be angry with it' I imagine they'd laugh you out of the room. Moreso today if you said that to them since they have built that system and generally most people like it. Out of curiosity, where are the 'violently angry responses from some group' happening? All I see are people fighting regulation and the use of better systems and people who are dismayed by that and are trying to make things right.