I get what you're saying but there are other fail-safes built into elections. Each polling place compares the number of people who show up to the number of ballots they collect. Districts and states as a whole do this too - there is a record of every registered voter who showed up to a polling place, or sent in an absentee or mail ballot. That number of voters is a known quantity.
If there were an 'arbitrary number' of ballots just printed out and added to the stack, there would be a mismatch between the number of ballots they have to count and the number of people who were recorded as voting. That would be noticed and looked into.
So yes it's a vulnerability when viewed in a vacuum but elections aren't run in a vacuum.
You're right, and that's what the canvassing process is there for, and it would catch something like this being used.
In the specific case of Detroit (Wayne County), there was a discrepancy of 433 votes spread out over 179 precincts. That is MUCH more likely explained by sporadic cases of people not signing in correctly, joining the wrong line, entry errors, etc. It's not feasible that this kind of tech vulnerability could be used on that many separate machines in such small numbers to have some kind of real effect.
I get what you're saying but there are other fail-safes built into elections. Each polling place compares the number of people who show up to the number of ballots they collect. Districts and states as a whole do this too - there is a record of every registered voter who showed up to a polling place, or sent in an absentee or mail ballot. That number of voters is a known quantity.
If there were an 'arbitrary number' of ballots just printed out and added to the stack, there would be a mismatch between the number of ballots they have to count and the number of people who were recorded as voting. That would be noticed and looked into.
So yes it's a vulnerability when viewed in a vacuum but elections aren't run in a vacuum.
You're right, and that's what the canvassing process is there for, and it would catch something like this being used.
In the specific case of Detroit (Wayne County), there was a discrepancy of 433 votes spread out over 179 precincts. That is MUCH more likely explained by sporadic cases of people not signing in correctly, joining the wrong line, entry errors, etc. It's not feasible that this kind of tech vulnerability could be used on that many separate machines in such small numbers to have some kind of real effect.