As I posted on a similar thread, I’m a TV techie who actually does this testing, and a mistake like this is my greatest fear! I was monitoring test numbers being fed by AP earlier this week, recalling national and local results screens.
The scariest part, I was at a West Coast station remotely testing two stations in a Mid West state! I wouldn’t of had a clue if someone there had it on air.
So much of television tech support today is done remotely across regions or even the entire county from one or two locations.
Could it be intentional, yeah, but pretty unlikely! I wasn’t even providing the test numbers, just making sure our interface was putting all the data in the right places.
Case in point, on one test screen, the “winning” check mark was next to the losing candidate. We’ll obviously have to get the fixed this week.
I wouldn’t be too concerned about this, nor surprised if there are more cases that come to light in the next week.
Also, if I were "testing" data, I think having the Greens beat the Libertarians would be a completely viable test. Or how about the Libertarians get 85% of the vote, and the Greens get 15% of the vote? Wouldn't that serve as test data? And if it gets out of the box and becomes visible to the public, wouldn't it be VERY obvious to everyone that this is totally bogus information, clearly intended to test the equipment? Completely harmless.
But if MSM consitently shows "test data" where Democrats come out just a few percentage points ahead of Republicans, then I really start to think that it isn't "test data" -- it's final results being pre-positioned before the voting has begun.
This is all BS.