Nobody hacked Wisconsin’s voting machines, because they’re not connected to the internet, and are almost entirely simple optical scanners that read paper ballots. (Most polling locations also have one or two touch screen machines that were added to provide “handicapped accessibility” a few years ago. Those machines are generally not used much, and they still produce a paper record of each ballot cast.)
I’d be surprised if the optical scanners could even be programmed to do anything but tabulate the votes from position a, position b, etc - and doing so would require compromising the code for literally hundreds of different ballots in hundreds of combinations/permutations of municipalities, districts, counties, etc. But if anyone really wanted to disprove such a theory, in the hopes that the candidate who got 1% of the vote actually won, they could test a sample of ballots by tabulating them manually, and then tabulating them by machine. They won’t match; in any sufficiently large sample, the hand count will be LESS accurate than the machine tabulation.
Thanks for that description. I feel better about that now. The only way for the optical scanner totals to change is by “after the fact” manipulation i.e. filling in empty ballots.