Election Rigging Possible, But Unlikely

Without offering specifics, Presidential Pretender Donald Trump has suggested that the election "is going to be rigged." The necessary corollary here is that someone - Hillary, Democrats or perhaps disaffected Republicans - are rigging it. It's actually pretty easy to hack into many electronic voting machines. But in Pennsylvania,the state with which I am most familiar, it would be nearly impossible to rig an election. It might be possible in some polling precincts, but a statewide conspiracy would require collusion by too many people.

In Northampton County, I am an election judge. It is impossible to hack into our voting machines because the computers inside them are completely internal. They do not communicate with each other, and no one can communicate with them.

Counties using other voting machines can theoretically be hacked from the outside and manipulated. But unless there is collusion on the inside, it is still almost possible to rig an election.

Here's why. Each precinct gets a book containing the names of all registered voters  The name of each voter is written down by the Clerk, and from time to time during the day, the number of people who have signed in to vote is compared with the total number of votes shown on the election machines.

Ideally, the numbers should match. Now there will be times when a voter walks away without actually casting his vote, so the tally recorded by the clerk could be higher than what appears on the machine. Though I hate when this happens because we really try to make sure each voter actually votes, the biggest discrepancy I ever saw was two votes.

If someone was able to hack into the machine and cast votes, we would notice the difference because the number of votes cast on the machines would be substantially inconsistent with the records maintained by the clerk.

The only real way to rig an election requires collusion among the elections workers in each precinct.

In my precinct, there are five elections workers and a constable. What they would have to do is get together with the voting machine operator and just start casting ballots for the candidate they want to win. To make sure the numbers on the machine match the record of the number of registered voters who actually voted, they would also have to forge signatures of people who never voted. If someone came in and you already cast that person's vote, you'd have to fool this person into signing something else or tell him or her that no signature is necessary.

So it's possible, but would require collusion from five people in my district.

There are over 100 precincts in Northampton County. If just 20 of them were filled with people who wanted to rig the election, that would require over 100 people And while all this collusion is going on, there would be certified watchers visiting the precincts. Human nature being what it is, it is highly unlikely that many people would stay silent for long.

So while it is theoretically possible to hack into a voting machine in some counties, elections workers would catch it because they would notice the discrepancy between the votes cast on a machine and the paper record maintained by the clerk. Collusion inside one precinct is possible and probably has happened. But rigging an election requires that kind of criminal behavior by far too many people to be believable.

Some of you will point to the 2012 Presidential, in which Obama received 100% of the votes in 59 Philadelphia area precincts. That is true, but The Inky would later learn that no Republicans lived in those Democratic districts, and Snopes would conclude that "given the voter composition of the Philadelphia area (and some Philadelphia wards in particular), and the number of voters in each division, that outcome was hardly a 'mathematical and statistical impossibility.'"