General Discussion

Trump would have wanted a blowout, his ego required it, but what I'm seeing makes me suspect strongly that they (Heritage Foundation, Thiel, Musk, fill in the blank) still overestimated his support. This was a multipronged approach - massive disinformation campaign, massive corporate media involvement, no doubt a lot of dark money going into shell corporations primarily for purposes of getting him over the finish line, and Trump still only squeaked by.

The oligarchy does not want to be regulated. They don't want to be told what they can and cannot do, they do not want to pay taxes, they want to create a new government completely within their control. Were they going to do everything they can to "cheat"? Hell yes. A tabulator is still a computer - it needs to be programmed, and it needs to communicate with the external world in some fashion. I design information systems for a living, have been staying close to voting machine design for a long time, and I know how vulnerable most of them are. Many of them have blutooth connections, and most are not properly encrypted for authentication (furthermore, the people who maintain them usually aren't themselves all that computer savvy). It's one of the reasons I think that all votes should be hand-tabulated after the fact to verify the count.