http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-...
I get that this is a tech site, and we like to think that everything is the result of smart hackers (even the Trump election! because some Russian hacker could be the only explanation), but there are low tech options here as well.
The Project Veritas videos, whatever you may think of them, had high level operatives openly discussing tactics they use to affect elections. A few extra paper ballots seems like something a motivated person with access to a photocopier could accomplish.
Perhaps you'll prove me wrong in a follow-up comment, but in my experience folks who think about paper vote fraud like what you describe, usually have little to no experience at actual polling places aside from popping in briefly to vote.
In contrast, you could have 20 people looking at an e-voting machine, and none of them could tell whether it's working correctly. It's a black box, literally in many cases.
For example, maybe rural counties are more likely to use paper ballots than urban counties. (Or any other variable: income, race, geography.)
Project Veritas is not a credible source.
Edit: It seems like HN has gotten a lot more Trump and conservative since the election. I should hope that reiterating that submitting thousands of paper ballots of a lot more complicated than hacking into a computer system is obvious.
Max you get is 5.
But I don't like any of this rhetoric. Lots of conflicting reporting going on, and lots of F.U.D.
I think it is incredibly dangerous the way this type of talk (which does not look very credible if you believe Nate Silver's analysis) is now being mainstreamed by Democrats, the very people who in the days leading up to the election were setting their hair on fire over the possibility Trump might not respect the result.
I could not remotely imagine this type of thing being mainstreamed if it was Trump who had lost and whose supporters were claiming fraud with shoddy statistics.
Given the amount of hacking that has gone on during the election, to influence the election, it is worth investigating at some level for a sanity check. The kind of targeting required though would mean the Russians had to have the best polls out there. Targeting few counties in WI, MI, and PA, (and OH, FL, AZ) enough to tip it to Trump in a electoral college big-way? Doesn't seem too plausible, but I'm no spy.
Vaguely gesturing at "the amount of hacking" is kinda suspiciously nonspecific given that it was campaign email accounts that were hacked, and in very primitive fashion -- wasn't it a phishing email that the DNC fell for?
The fact that someone can successfully carry out a phishing attempt against a not-particularly-technically-savvy target is hardly evidence that they can just l33tly h4xx0r into any other target you could name, any more than a car break-in is evidence that a bank was robbed in another city.