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Printer manufacturers make it so that printers fingerprint themselves on anything that's printed (as requested by the feds), with a pattern of dots imperceptible to the human eye acting as the identifier. So you could see if there's a third party printer printing hundreds of ballots, and then track it to the purchaser.
You can acquire printers that don't do this, but if you found a bunch of ballots lacking the identifier, I'd consider it a strong sign of fraud.
I thought that the identifiers are only on color printers (and maybe only inkjets?). So black & white lasers are generally safe.
You can also similarly encode the printer's identity (and all the metadata associated with the print job--time, originating user, document name, local network information) into the depth of grays on the printout, edge noise, kerning, and probably a thousand other things. No confirmation by manufacturers or the government that that's done, but the yellow dot trick has been around for decades, and I would be very surprised if there haven't been significant advances implemented since then.
I wouldn't trust any printer made in the last two decades for printing anything you don't want traced back to you.
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Knowing what printer was used isn't that much of a threat if you plan around it. People leave out perfectly good printers on the street when they move. They sell them in yard sales without taking ID. Collect a few without being traced, print the fraudulent ballots, then dump them somewhere.
Also wonder how hard it would be to hack a printer to change the dot pattern it imparts.
I imagine the dot pattern is probably pretty hard to hack--AIUI, it was created to make tracking money counterfeiters easier, and the US government definitely takes counterfeit cash seriously.
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It would help for identifying the ballots as fraudulent, at least, unless someone only printed a few ballots per printer.
As far as hacking a printer, it's a question of how much of the steganography is implemented in software vs physical components. At least the printer identity could be done with just physical components.
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