> But how does "not playing the game" work in the context of getting the larger public to care about the real issues, or even just getting election officials to?
On the plus side, there's already a large fraction of the larger public concerned about election safety. They might be worried about a lot of imaginary problems, but they can still be motivated to push back against electronic voting machines which is a win for addressing the real issues.
Election officials are already highly incentivized to make elections appear fair and transparent. That too can be leveraged to push back against electronic voting machines.
The trick is making sure the people who aren't conspiracy nut jobs aren't afraid to listen to and address the very real concerns with these devices for fear of being lumped in with the crazies on the other team. Insistence/persistence might help, but I think having well reasoned arguments and the support of trusted persons on the "right team" speak up about the issues might help too.
I'm all for empathizing with where people are coming from and trying to engage with that. But in my experience, people caring about an issue as a political rallying cry doesn't translate to them engaging with a topic to understand its specific details. Rather most people are just looking for someone to parrot back their party line so they can bond as being on the same team, and deviating from that script with any kind of nuanced point just gets you othered.
Also 'pushing back against electronic voting machines' isn't really the answer. First, in most places that ship has already sailed. Second, hand counted paper ballots are still quite open to tampering (just not scalable tampering). What we really need is cryptographic voting systems that allow the vote to be independently verified, which would necessarily be implemented with computers, but not in the way those "bad" electronic voting machines work - in other words a whole lot of nuance, especially for people currently getting suckered by snake oil salesmen with wifi drones and the like.
On the plus side, there's already a large fraction of the larger public concerned about election safety. They might be worried about a lot of imaginary problems, but they can still be motivated to push back against electronic voting machines which is a win for addressing the real issues.
Election officials are already highly incentivized to make elections appear fair and transparent. That too can be leveraged to push back against electronic voting machines.
The trick is making sure the people who aren't conspiracy nut jobs aren't afraid to listen to and address the very real concerns with these devices for fear of being lumped in with the crazies on the other team. Insistence/persistence might help, but I think having well reasoned arguments and the support of trusted persons on the "right team" speak up about the issues might help too.