There have been a number of speculations concerning hacking and interference with voting machines recently. The machines are without doubt very vulnerable. But what might a hacker do?
Votes being changed from the Democratic to the Republican column is the most common suggestion. Or some modifications might be made that have the same effect, such as tampering with lists of voters.
Some have also raised the possibility that the change might go in the other direction. If the election looked to be too lopsided for “adjusting” vote totals to be credible, then Russian military intelligence (for instance) might flip votes the other way to destroy the credibility of a Democratic victory. 95% to 5% vote splits would be pretty hard to believe even by those who had every reasonable expectation of a 60% to 40% win.
I have a question about a third possibility. What if the hacker simply destroys records, or perhaps even disables the voting machines? It’s usually easier to bust something than to modify it.
Is there any procedure in place to hold an election again if the machinery for holding the election fails spectacularly, so that there is no victor at all, and no usable records, only chaos? What would happen if the election were self-voided, so to speak?