Democrat Calls for Investigation of Donald Trump's 'Vote Counting Computers' Remark

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89. That seems unlikely

On one hand, to have actually changed the election outcome would have required a Watergate-style operation in many states. On the face of it, that seems really unlikely.

On the other hand, you don't have to rig any "states", and you probably would not want to hack a central tabulator at the statewide level because that would be easy to expose if the county-level data was available. The place to attack is in Trump-friendly counties, of which there are many. Or more specifically, VERY Trump-friendly precincts/polling places that are under the control of corrupt Republicans. And we already saw in 2020 that the Trump people did, or tried to do exactly that in multiple locations.

I don't have any evidence one way or another so I am not accusing anybody of anything. But to do what Trump apparently described, you might need to find 10 counties in each of the swing states where Republicans control the election machinery and would be eager to cheat. In addition, these counties would either have to be ones without any paper trail (that makes it very easy) or else places where it was unlikely Harris would demand a recount. She ultimately didn't ask for any recounts, so the opportunity at least exists.

The next step would be to corrupt the counts. In my county, we have paper ballots that are retained, but those are generally used only in recount scenarios. Absent a recount demand, you just go with the tabulation that came out of the onsite tabulators at each voting location. In our case, the Inspector at each site removes a memory card from the tabulator when the polls close. We count the ballots to make sure that all ballots are accounted for, matching the number scanned by the tabulator, but there is no manual counting of votes. Without a recount, we rely entirely on the memory card that comes out of each tabulator. The Inspector hand-delivers the memory card to a central location, and should be accompanied by a witness, but that doesn't always happen. The tabulator itself is sealed, placed in locked storage, and collected the next day by county election officials.

Anywhere in that process of hand-delivering that memory card, there can be a chain-of-custody failure. And at that point, a person with some skills could conceivably alter the contents of the memory card to report votes differently than they were actually tabulated. I don't know how elaborate the protections are, including encryption or whatever. But there is zero doubt that a person with Musk's wealth and a few months to plan ahead could fund a team that could crack these cards and manipulate the contents. My guess is that they are not heavily protected because it is always possible to go back and re-tabulate the original ballots. But ... see the problem?

There very definitely is an opportunity to do something like this and avoid detection if recounts are not demanded. And there are undoubtedly plenty of corrupt Republicans. We saw that in 2020. The only real obstacle is scale. For this to work, you would need to repeat this crime 100 or 200 times. I mean that would cost somebody hundreds of thousands of dollars to pull off nationally -- maybe even millions. And nobody has that kind of money to burn ... except ... oh, shit.

If you follow my description, I'm not really talking about hacking anything. I am only talking about modifying the data on a regular old memory card, and you could do that if you know enough about the voting system, specifically the format that the precinct tabulator uses to deliver results to the county tabulators. And how did Trump describe this apparent operation? He said "nobody knows more about these vote counting machines than Elon Musk."