CM on voting machines and lettering
I=i L=l
Remember?
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1326422145744990208.html
There is a setting to throw out votes for specific individual contests if you vote for a whole party.
"With the Party Preference contest, the voter selects their preferred party, and any contests which do not belong to the same Elector Group are ignored when the ballot is cast."
A bad operator could theoretically setup the ballot to put a specific candidate into a party that is not his official party. If you select his party and vote for the party, the individual candidate wont get a vote.
Scenario:
Republican -Trump
RepubIican -Trump
LOOK CLOSELY
In the second scenario, if you voted for the Republican party, Trump would NOT receive a vote because he was registered to the "repubiican" party.
This might explain why Trump performed poorly in strong-republican districts. In the second scenario, if the voter just voted straight-ticket, then a Trump vote would be ignored.
Im NOT saying this is what happened, but it is a supported feature of the voting software.