I may know a bit about programming, but I am not an expert on variety of voting machines being used in various parts of the country. My guess is there are many different types.
Your point about 25 voters and 65 total votes is a valid one. However that is too obvious and I do not think that is the commonly used method of fraud.
If I was a democrat leaning technician/programmer in charge of voting machines in a district, and I wanted to commit voting fraud, I would not add many fictitious votes. I would instead, show on the screen your vote is for Romney but internally in electronics of the machine would switch every fourth vote for Romney to Obama. That would result in Obama gaining 25% of Romney’s votes. In many closely contested states that would be sufficient to change the results.
I am not in favor of voters marking paper ballots. Those are error prone. Remember Florida 2000 and the problems with punch cards manually recorded by voters or the butterfly ballots.
My preference is for voters using an electronic machine to record votes using an easy to read screen. After the voter is done, a paper sheet gets printed showing the votes. The voter can examine the paper and then deposit it in a ballot box. It is easier for poll watchers to keep track of a physical box rather than what is inside electronic memory of a voting machine.
These computer generated paper ballots will be free of reading errors by the paper scanner machine. And in case of a problem, they can be manually counted. The actual vote count will be done by a paper scanner in full view of poll watchers. If the result is suspiciously skewed, a manual count can be done.
May be all electronic machines have a paper trail. I just do not know, but have my doubts.
Though I wonder, how easy would it be for another programmer to spot this in the code? And I wonder how easy/possible would it be for the bad guys to code it to do this for a length of time and then revert back to the legitimate code.
All very distressing to think about.
As I said we in OK. do have paper ballots and run through a scanner. I don't remember ever getting a receipt after it is scanned. I think that would be a good thing.
Not much to worry about in OK. ad we are the only RED STATE so far. I think there will be many more this election.
Thank you again.