Of course. We know for a fact that they can configure the scanning to flip votes from one candidate to another. That was done "accidentally" in one county in Michigan. They can put whatever bias they want into the algorithm. But it's easy to detect before or after.
Here in Virginia they run counting tests before elections and can recount after. A company providing biased counts would be easy to detect and face jail time.
That's why the claim is outlandish. Not because it's impossible, it's very possible.
I disagree. I think you are being naive in discounting this as “outlandish”. I don’t mean that as a personal insult.
The process has, in my opinion, been created precisely to obfuscate the process. If it were that easy, it would be done. But what they have done is make it nearly impossible to audit in a meaningful way in any kind of viable time frame.
In my state, they destroy the ballot images (the “votes” that are derived from real ballots by taking an image of them as they are inserted into the machine) as soon after the election as they can. They also rush to store the real ballots in “remote” and “secure” locations.
If there is suspected fraud, the process of bringing these stored and “secure” ballots back into the public eye is very likely hobbled by the bureaucratic process of doing so.
And deliberately so.
Their goal is likely the same as the national goal right now-to make the fraud a fait accompli by the passage of time and insisting that everyone move on from it. And the more effectively they hamper that process, the more time passes, and the less likely the process is to be examined from the hand cast ballots up.
Recounting the ballot images means nothing. Counting the ballots and comparing them to the ballot images would mean something, but...that has not and is not going to happen. In my state, it is because the ballot images have likely been gone for some time, right after the ballot images were “counted” they were probably deleted.
And that says nothing at all about the physically fraudulent ballots, which is an entirely different issue.