Last fall Joe Hoft published a story exposing a clause in BPro/KNOWiNK's contract with the state of Oregon which explicitly states: "The System shall allow the County Elections Staff to override the results, if necessary." The article was widely shared online prompting a "Fact check" article to appear in USA Today "Debunking" the claim that election officials can manually override election results.
They claimed the feature referenced in the BPro/KNOWiNK contract only allowed election officials to "Manually update unofficial vote counts on election night in case of failure by the automated systemthis action has no effect on the certified results." After coming across Joe Hoft's article, a Texas election official with direct knowledge of ES&S and Hart election systems reached out under condition of anonymity to confirm that the functional capability to override official election results does indeed exist in the systems the whistleblower is familiar with.
The whistleblower relayed personal knowledge of a time in her county when official election results were manually overwritten because of a mistake that was made in setting up the election.
In typical fashion, several races in that election flipped between election night and the next morning after the manual overrides were put into the system.
They also said that there is no good reason to have that feature in the system.
The only way to tell if results have been manually overridden is to check the cast vote record or ballot images - records which are increasingly harder and harder, or even impossible, to obtain.
Election results produced in election systems used in US elections can be changed and updated.
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