Reply #24: Look at the ballot order and reboots, that could be the clue.

[skids]

One way to hack this would be to take components that you know are going to fail, that are going to become uncalibrated. They could do this because they were cleaned with an improper cleaning chemical (I've seen reports of that), they could do this because they lose their settings after a power outage or sofware reboot and revert to defaults -- there are a number of ways that you could use a component failure as a "hardware hack" for vote fraud.

Components will usually all fail in a similar manner. That is, if a particular model of touchscreen sensor drifts, then it will usually drift in a known direction.

So in states where the order in which the candidates appear on the screen is changed, those looking to change the vote would make sure that only the machines where the malfunction will benefit their candidate will be cleaned with the wrong chemical, or will experience a power outage, or will "accidentally" crash and have to be rebooted.

Demonstrating that the ballot order correlated with some sort of event like this (and the model of the machine is the same) would be a clue.