It’s the popular theory that voting machines are hacked when an election doesn’t turn out the way one would like. But in order for a machine to be hacked, it has to be connected to the internet. At no time are Macoupin County machines connected to the internet. Here’s the process:

  1. You vote on the touchscreen and print out your paper ballot. This machine is never connected to the internet.
  2. You insert your paper ballot into the tabulator to be counted. The tabulator is never connected to the internet.
  3. After the polls close, election judges return the tabulator and paper ballots to the Courthouse. We take the flash drive from the tabulator and insert it into a laptop. This laptop has never been and will never be connected to the internet.
  4. Once the results are uploaded to the laptop, we take a completely different flash drive and copy over a set of results to upload to the public website on a totally different computer. This would be the only step that potentially could be hacked. But let’s say that it was, the results website would show the wrong results. But the official results on the laptop would not have changed. The paper ballots would not have changed. Sure it wouldn’t be great that our results website was showing the wrong numbers, but the actual results and count itself would not be changed whatsoever.
  5. After Election Day, the state randomly sends us 5 precincts as well as one of the early and mail vote tabulators to retabulate or audit. We have to rerun every ballot through the same tabulator and get the exact same number of ballots cast and votes counted for each candidate. If they do not match up, we have to investigate to find the discrepancy.