The NYT did a self own?
No. Or at least not really.
Google, NBC, ABC, Fox, etc. all partner with either the AP or DDHQ (Decision Desk Headquarters) either directly or through a middle man. AP/DDHQ are in turn clients of Dominion and the other vote system companies.
When votes are tabulated, AP/DDHQ makes API calls on the Dominion (for example) servers and gets the data. The news services in turn make API calls on AP/DDHQ to get their numbers.
You can scrape that data from, say, the NYT every X time period and thus get a log of how the data changes over time and since NYT/etc. are public facing that can't really be prevented.
Someone decided to do just that, scrape the NYT site, and dump the take into a spreadsheet.
Well negative votes don't exist in our system, so the total number of votes should never go *down* over time. Running a script to find any time when a decrease occurred is pretty easy and it you find one it means something weird happened there.
How the API serves up the vote totals is kinda dubious as well. See it lists the total votes and then the percentage of that vote total that each candidate has. This is done (almost certainly) to conceal weighted voting/fraction magic.