You've heard a lot over the past few days about the security of our electronic voting machines. This is a real and serious issue, no matter who raises it or who tries to dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory.

Electronic voting is not as secure as traditional hand counting. It never will be as secure. Voters can see this, because it's obvious, and it makes them nervous. And why wouldn't it make them nervous? Our leaders have given us every reason not to trust technology. The people now telling us to stop asking questions about voting machines are the same ones who claimed that our phones weren't listening to us. They lie. We all know that.

Other countries don't use electronic voting because they know it undermines confidence in democracy. A system cannot function if no one trusts the vote. That's true here, too, as we're finding out. Going forward, we need to find out exactly what happened in this month's presidential election, no matter how long it takes the investigation to unfold or how much it costs.

Once we get answers from that investigation, we ought to revert immediately to the traditional system of voting, the one that served our democracy for hundreds of years. What we're doing now is not working. That's an understatement. As of Monday night, the state of New York still hadn't managed to count the votes in five House races thanks to mail-in voting. That's a disaster, and we should stop pretending that it's not.