I began to read this book before #StopTheSteal was coined and the events that unfolded at our nation's capital on Jan. 6. And reality sort of warped my impression of "42 Million to One," a work of fiction that borrows from current events to create political intrigue.

I first considered the book to be harmless distraction, the sort of breezy read that entertains you before all is revealed before the final page and the world is set right again. My concern is that readers will now see this as closer to factual than I think -- well, I hope -- author Hal Malchow intended.

Perhaps it's unfair to blame Malchow for this. He was just trying to write a book that included a little mystery, a little sizzle and a little insight from his career as a political consultant. But I feel as if I need to make this clear: The scenario that Malchow devises is completely unrealistic. Vendors who provide voting machines don't program machines; that's done locally, at least here in New York. Their source code is vetted by a bipartisan state board before it's put on a single machine and no alterations are made without approval of the state. Those vendors can certainly sell you a memory card to use in their machine. But if that's the lynchpin to making your vote-altering scam work, it's a bad one. The memory cards that work in Dominion machines are available at hundreds of retailers nationwide.

So the premise here: that a single bad actor working for the largest voting machine vendor in the nation could be motivated by greed to skew the election result -- and that the election would be close enough for his work to go undetected, but not prompt an audit -- is, frankly, not reality.

So my suggestion on "42 Million to One" is this. Enjoy the ride. Maybe read a couple of the citations in the back to familiarize yourself with what vulnerabilities have been found on machines over the years. But, for God's sake, don't believe that malicious, self-erasing source code is the reason why anyone wins or loses an election.