It’s just like the whole thing right now with Bricks and Minifigs. They could have just made the guy whole in the first place but refused to let a customer make demands.
Getting it professionally done is still pretty cheap. Unless you have a lot of them, it probably isn’t worth doing yourself. Inexpensive tools for consumers tend to result in very poor quality exports and anything that actually looks good tends to cost $100 or more to set up. Most professional services for VHS to DVD or VHS to MP4 can give you high quality results for under $20/tape.
I would argue most journalists got exactly what they wanted out of him, which was clicks and short term financial success. The problem for them is that he was supposed to be gone by now, and those short term deals with the devil now look like bad deals.
Except that it’s already secure. There are monitors, studies, and statistics to back the fact that illegally voting is a statistically nonexistent problem. The number of such cases is vanishingly small. There is no problem that needs solving here. It’s just assholes like yourself trying to impose their will on the law.