73% of Republicans – and according to one poll, 41% of all voters – believe the election could be stolen by Clinton and her lackeys in the media.

Democrats urgently warn that there’s a real threat that Russia could hack our election to steal it for Trump.

While these sound like opposites that are so different that they cannot be reconciled, there’s a bigger picture: our voting systems are so insecure that elections can be stolen.

The alternative media has been warning for years that America’s voting systems are so poorly-designed that it would be child’s play to steal an election.

(Indeed, Democratic president Carter and Republican Supreme Court Justice O’Connor said that the 2000 presidential election was stolen.  And some experts – including the 100th President of the American Statistical Association, professor Fritz Scheuren – say that the Democratic race was stolen from Sanders.)

As security expert Bruce Schneier writes in the Washington Post:

While computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for many years, states have largely ignored the threat, and the machine manufacturers have thrown up enough obfuscating babble that election officials are largely mollified.

We no longer have time for that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers’ spurious claims of security, create tiger teams to test the machines’ and systems’ resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and take them offline if we can’t guarantee their security online.

Longer term, we need to return to election systems that are secure from manipulation. This means voting machines with voter-verified paper audit trails, and no Internet voting. I know it’s slower and less convenient to stick to the old-fashioned way, but the security risks are simply too great.

Unless we shore up our voting systems and ditch the electronic voting systems with no paper trail, American democracy won’t be worth the paper it’s written on  …