No, the Results Weren't Hacked

The Internet is abuzz due to an article in New York Magazine that alleges that there's something fishy in the Wisconsin tally because "Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. All they've done here is point out what they feel is an anomaly. The people at 538 debunk the theory when controlling demographics. The people with this theory offer no theory of how these results were fixed. New York decides the voting machines were hacked, even though there's no evidence of hacking. Hacking is often detected. When the DNC was hacked, they discovered it. Of course it's possible people hack and we don't detect it. If that happens, what's the point of asserting it? We can't prove it.

Let's say there was hacking. How would you do it? Well, the problem with hacking an election is that the ballots aren't counted in one central location. There are 3,620 precincts in Wisconsin and each counts their votes and then transmits them to the state. If the vote totals were hacked at the state level and didn't match what the precincts transmitted, people would know. So you'd have to hack the precincts. Wisconsin was decided by roughly 26,000 votes. The final Wisconsin polls showed Hillary Clinton winning by roughly 6%. To assure Trump would win you'd want to manipulate over 100,000 votes. If you hacked into 500 precincts you'd have to change you could change each precinct by taking 200 votes from Clinton and giving them to Trump. That sounds like something that might not arouse suspicion, but that's a lot of voting machines to hack and not be detected. And that assumes the polling was accurate. What if Clinton actually beat the polling the way Barack Obama did in 2012?

Flipping Wisconsin back to Clinton wouldn't change the electoral college vote. Trump would still win. You'd have to also flip Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump was polling closer Colorado, New Hampshire, and Nevada than those three and was supposed to do better in Virginia than any of those. If you didn't want to be detected and wanted to arouse the least suspicion I'd think you'd go after those four states. Of course it's possible they did and they failed. So your number of states they would've had to hack would be anywhere from 3-7. Did the Russians hack into 3-7 states and no one detected it? We certainly won't find out by doing a recount. It is undetectable after all.

Some people on the left are saying that since Trump had narrow victories in these 3 states where the polls showed Clinton ahead by 4-6 points there must be something fishy. California polls showed Clinton winning by 20-26%. Clinton is winning the state by 31.5%. If we use the theory that beating the polls means there’s fraud, then there’s some massive fraud in California. Clinton stole 350k votes from Trump! Trump fixed states that helped him win. Clinton fixed a state that didn't help her at all. Or something like that.