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“Unless there’s a way that the memory stick could’ve been pre-hacked to throw a certain percentage of votes to another candidate, it looked pretty well guarded. “

That is exactly how the youtube video shows it done. For some stupid reason, some of these reader machine include the actual software to do the counting ON THE MEMORY MODULE. If a pre-hacked memory module is substituted by a crooked poll worker, deliver person, or whoever has physical access, the results on the tape can say whatever they want regardless of what the paper ballots said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkKdJoWG3qQ

They put through 6 NO ballot and 2 YES ballots, but the tape shows 7 YES and 1 NO. The total count is correct, but a predetermined percentage is applied to the total to get the breakdown they want.

The only way to guard against this would be to have a master copy of the correct memory module and a device to verify each machine’s module is a byte-for-byte match to the master. If it isn’t, the the box needs to have all its ballots reprocessed through an untampered counter.

A machine such as the one where I worked had just over 500 ballots, and we were busy almost every minute of a 13 hour voting day. The only safe backup would be an observed physical count of those ballots after the memory stick is removed but before its results were read. Unless a blind human verification step such as that is included, the complexity creates too many procedures for any one person to be 100% confident. We already had a hand count of cast ballots from the signature verification ledger to assure that nobody messes with whose votes count.

Another thing is those dang ballots. They include other stuff such as referendums, state, local, and country elections. It was two pages, both sides, a very large size. A separate vote for just President, VP and any US Senator up for election would be so much easier to work with and a small simple ballot would speed up the procedure.