Despite President Donald Trump's continued insistence, with no evidence, that voter fraud was behind Hillary Clinton's accumulation of 3 million more votes than him in the recent US presidential election, evidence has been found which points to an entirely different form of election-related fraud, electronic ballot box stuffing. This form of fraud took the spotlight in the 2016 Democratic primary, when election experts and statisticians alleged that there was strong evidence that the primary was stolen by Hillary Clinton from Bernie Sanders.



In Michigan, 37% of Detroit's precincts reported more votes than the number of actual voters who checked into the polling stations, a sign of "electronic ballot box stuffing." In this form of fraud, a vote-counting machine's software is accessed - hacked into - and instructed to add or subtract votes in a manner which benefits a certain candidate.

Krista Haroutunian, chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, told the Detroit News:

“There’s always going to be small problems to some degree, but we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit. This isn’t normal,”

More votes than voters in a precinct is a classic sign of ballot box stuffing. In the modern era, rather than illicit paper ballots being placed in a box, digital manipulation of the totals is most likely.

Electronic ballot box stuffing takes place when optical scan vote counting machines are preprogrammed to add or subtract votes illegally. More than 70% of the country uses the kind of system in which paper ballots are marked directly by the voter, and then counted by an optical scanner machine.



Trump as been roundly criticized for pressing his allegations of voter fraud without evidence. In contrast to electronic ballot box stuffing, voter fraud requires voters who are not qualified to cast votes, or some voters to vote more than once. Trump has never addressed the issue of electronic ballot box stuffing.



In the hack, the machine software automatically adds or subtracts votes according to a specific formula. The hack was demonstrated by Dr. Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer expert, in the HBO documentary "Hacking Democracy."