A forensic audit of Dominion Voting Systems machines and software in Michigan showed that they were designed to create fraud and influence election results, a data firm said Monday.
“We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results,” Russell Ramsland Jr., co-founder of Allied Security Operations Group, said in a preliminary report.
“The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified,” he added.
Ramsland, a former Reagan administration official who has worked for NASA, and others from the group examined Dominion products in Antrim County earlier this month as part of an ongoing case.
The team inspected and performed forensic duplication on the county’s election management server, which was running Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5.3-002, compact flash cards used by local precincts in their Dominion ImageCast system, USB memory sticks used by Dominion Voter Assist Terminals, and USB memory sticks used for the poll book. They used X-Ways Forensics and other tools including Blackbag-Blacklight Forensic Software, and Virtual Box.
13th Circuit Judge Kevin Elsenheimer approved the forensic examination in Bailey v. Antrim County, which alleges the infamous vote flip county officials reported last month may have not been the result of human error, as officials had alleged.
Elsenheimer earlier Monday agreed to let the report on the examination be published.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson speaks in Detroit, Mich., on Aug. 18, 2020. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
Ramsland noted that Antrim County officials first reported on Election Night that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden received, out of 12,423 votes, nearly 7,800.
Two days later, they said President Donald Trump actually won the county, receiving nearly 9,800 votes out of over 17,000 cast.
But on Nov. 21, the officials again updated the figures, removing about 1,300 votes from Biden.
Ramsland said the tabulation log for the forensic examination of the server for the county showed 15,676 individual events. Of those, some 68 percent were recorded errors.
“These errors resulted in overall tabulation errors or ballots being sent to adjudication. This high error rates proves the Dominion Voting System is flawed and does not meet state or federal election laws,” he wrote.
“A staggering number of votes required adjudication. This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles still stored on the server. This is caused by intentional errors in the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, or audit trail. Our examination of the server logs indicates that this high error rate was incongruent with patterns from previous years. The statement attributing these issues to human error is not consistent with the forensic evaluation, which points more correctly to systemic machine and/or software errors. The systemic errors are intentionally designed to create errors in order to push a high volume of ballots to bulk adjudication,” he added later.
Ramsland was hired by William Bailey, the plaintiff in the court case.
Gary Miliefsky, a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security and publisher of Cyber Defense Magazine, told The Epoch Times that Ramsland and his team “have the cybersecurity and forensic capabilities and expertise that cannot be dismissed.”
“In fact, looking at their team, their patents, their experience, we now have a credible analysis that as I predicted, the Algorithms being used in the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed to create systematic fraud and influence election results and in this case, not in the favor of President Trump,” he added.
In a separate declaration filed by Bailey’s lawyers, Michigan resident Gustavo Delfino said he was involved in a 2004 election in his native Venezuela. He said he witnessed strange events and later found discrepancies involving Smartmatic computers. He said he was alarmed when he learned the technology was being used in the Nov. 3 presidential election and said the pattern of so-called glitches and voting machines being connected to the Internet mirrored what happened in his country nearly two decades ago.
Spokespersons for Antrim County and Dominion didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in a statement after the report was released: “Let’s be clear: Michigan’s Nov. 3 general election in Michigan and across the country was the most secure in the nation’s history. There continues to be no evidence of widespread fraud.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel added: “Oftentimes, a party will hire an expert witness to support the conclusion that the party wants or needs to reach. It’s why we give the other parties in a lawsuit a chance to depose the expert and challenge their qualifications in court. Anyone can have an opinion, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the opinion is based on fact or science.”
Officials alleged that the team behind the audit doesn’t have expertise in election administration and technology. In a court filing, Michigan Elections Director Jonathan Brater said the report “makes a series of unsupported conclusions, ascribes motives of fraud and obfuscation to processes that are easily explained as routine election procedures or error corrections, and suggests without explanation that elements of election software not used in Michigan are somehow responsible for tabulation or reporting errors that are either nonexistent or easily explained.”
Erik Grill, an assistant attorney general, told the judge during the hearing on Monday morning that the preliminary report was “inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading.” Haider Kazim, an attorney for the county, said it contained several errors the county believes were based on “faulty assumptions and incorrect assumptions.”
A judge in Michigan on Monday permitted parties in a court case to release the results of a forensic imaging examination of Dominion Voting Systems machines, with redactions of code.
The 23-page report was published soon after by Allied Security Operations Group. It includes expert analysis from Russell Ramsland, a former Republican Party candidate who works with the group.
Ramsland’s team concluded that Dominion’s system “intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors.”
Dominion didn’t respond to a request for comment.
13th Circuit Judge Kevin Elsenheimer agreed to remove a protective order that was blocking the release of the report on the request of attorney Matthew DePerno, after attorneys with Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office said they didn’t oppose doing so.
DePerno pushed for the removal in a court hearing, saying the order was meant to be temporary and it had achieved its purpose of preventing him from releasing information on the imaging before Benson’s office had an opportunity to review it.
“We believe that public interest in seeing what we discovered and what we say in the report would outweigh any potential harm to Dominion software,” DePerno told the court.
He argued that confirming the accuracy of the electoral process is a greater public interest in this case than any potential issues related to Dominion software and that the company had an opportunity to intervene in the case but did not do so.
Erik Grill, an assistant attorney general, criticized the lawyer for giving an interview late last week in which he asserted Benson lied, saying doing so essentially violated the protective order.
“The secretary of state has been prejudiced by the premature disclosure of the preliminary report. We just wanted to review the preliminary report and present a counterargument at the same time that the preliminary report was issued,” Grill said. “That is no longer possible as a result of Mr. DePerno’s interview.”
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson speaks in Detroit, Mich., on Aug. 18, 2020. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
He also asserted that DePerno distributed the report to outside parties, pointing to lawyers in a separate case alerting the U.S. Supreme Court of new evidence filed in DePerno’s case.
DePerno said he did not share the report with any other parties.
Benson doesn’t oppose the distribution of the report, provided the secretary of state can release its counterargument, Grill added.
An Antrim County attorney said it didn’t oppose the release, as long as the county is similarly allowed “to explain the several errors that we believe are contained in the preliminary report,” which he said was based on “faulty assumptions and incorrect assumptions.”
The order came in Bailey v. Antrim County. Plaintiff William Bailey asked to be allowed to examine Dominion machines because of the skewed results that the county reported in the presidential election. County officials initially said Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden received more than 2,000 votes over President Donald Trump, but later changed the results to show Trump received nearly 4,000 more votes than Biden.
Benson and Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy have said what happened was due to human error.
“The error in reporting unofficial results in Antrim County Michigan was the result of a user error that was quickly identified and corrected,” Benson said in a statement last month.
But the new suit said many questions remain unanswered, including whether Dominion tabulators in the county were tampered with, whether they have the capacity to connect to the Internet, and whether they had any open VPN ports during the election.
The judge earlier this month allowed Bailey’s attorney and experts he brought in to examine the machines. They conducted a forensic examination.
Elsenheimer had at the same time issued a protective order, blocking the release of the results of the examination.
When it comes time to defend his red wall along the Great Lakes, President Trump is going to come face to face with the consequences of his Pentagon leadership’s failure to implement his oft-promised 355-ship Navy (up from 290 today).
Pennsylvania workers make many of the essentials that go into ships, including shafts manufactured in Erie and cooling systems in York. Every time the Navy awards a contract for a new ship, the president or vice president should be at one of these facilities talking about the jobs the contracts will provide. But the Navy hasn’t been issuing those contracts, so the president can’t make those announcements.
The Navy could have gone big — still could still go big — in Philadelphia. To extend the life of the existing fleet, a person familiar with the planning tells me, the Navy must perform roughly 100 more ship dockings in the next decade than current dock space can accommodate. Philly Shipyard has the capability to build floating dry docks to make up for this shortfall. Why isn’t Trump announcing a plan to expand the Navy’s dry-dock infrastructure while standing in Philly Shipyard?
Wisconsin benefits from Navy shipbuilding in two ways. First, there is the shipyard in Marinette that creates jobs in both Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The Fincantieri Marine Group is a bidder on the new 20-ship Navy FFG(X) guided-missile frigate program, but politics cannot take precedence over ship design, so the contract is not guaranteed to land lakeside in Wisconsin. The least Trump could do, though, is insist that the Navy pick up the pace of its dreadfully slow design competition.
The Fincantieri Marinette Marine is already under contract to build four Multi-Mission Surface Combatant ships for Saudi Arabia. More work would be sent Wisconsin’s way if the Trump administration could persuade the Saudis to increase their order or bring other countries, such as Israel, on board.
Incredibly, Michigan ranks near the bottom of all the states when defense spending is calculated as a percentage of a state’s GDP — 47th out of 50 in fiscal year 2017 for what was once the arsenal of democracy. Per-resident defense spending in Michigan that year was a paltry $386, compared with $1,554 in Oklahoma.
When the Air Force decided in 2017 not to base F-35A fighter aircraft at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan, it missed an easy way to achieve some equity in the distribution of defense-industry dollars in the states. Trump could direct the Pentagon to reverse that decision.
The Navy’s plans for a new “large unmanned surface vessel” calls for a ship which could be built at a Great Lakes facility; near Detroit makes sense, if only out of fairness to a state that has been largely ignored in the Trump military rebuild. Given the likely long-term need for many of these ships in the future, a new facility could be planted and grown along with the program. It pains this Buckeye to say so, but somewhere along the Michigan coast next door to Ohio would be equitable.
A focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin need not be limited to the Defense Department. Recently, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) pushed successfully for the planned relocation of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colo., in a brilliant move to bring bureaucrats closer to the citizens they regulate and whom they are supposed to serve. Sending large parts of the Environmental Protection Agency to Flint, Mich., or nearby locations would drive home the same message.
Trump has the chance to drain the swamp while making government agencies much more attuned to the people in flyover country. But he must act soon.
Yet, it is really the Navy’s utter failure to deliver even a bare-bones plan to realize the president’s promise of a 355-ship Navy that ought to rankle the commander in chief. A new chief of naval operations will arrive soon. The president ought to have waiting on his desk copies of the speeches in which he promised, and then promised again, a 355-ship Navy, along with the slogan famously used by Winston Churchill scrawled with the black Sharpie that Trump likes to use: “Action this day!”
As Democrats move from success in the 2018 midterms to the early stages of picking a 2020 presidential candidate, a narrative is taking root. It holds that the key Democratic voter today is young, liberal and rebellious—in short, a version of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old activist who became the youngest congresswoman ever and who appears to be pushing the party to the left.
There is one problem with this narrative. It largely misses the story of the voters who actually delivered success to Democrats last year—and who may determine the outcome of the next presidential race.
The disconnect between perception and reality is important because it affects what Democrats do—now that they have a piece of governing power in Washington with their newfound control of the House, and because it affects the way the party views the nascent effort to choose the next presidential contender. In particular, it affects views of the largest name in the party not yet in the 2020 field: former Vice President Joe Biden.
It’s certainly true that there was a lot of energy among young, liberal Democrats in 2018, and that figures to be true again in the new presidential cycle.
Yet the Democratic electorate in 2018—the one that swung House seats and governor’s offices from Republican to Democratic—was neither as young nor as liberal as popularly imagined. AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 115,000 self-identified 2018 midterm voters, found that just 15% of those who voted Democratic last November were aged 18 through 29. The largest contingent of Democratic voters—36%—actually were ages 45 through 64.
All told, 60% of Democratic voters were aged 45 or older.
In ideological terms, there is no doubt that the party is moving to the left. An increasing share of Democrats are identifying themselves as liberal. Yet that movement also can be overstated. While half of Democratic voters last year identified themselves as liberal, 48% called themselves moderate or conservative. And moderates outnumbered “very liberal” Democratic voters by two to one.
“The attention may be focused on the left, but the actual energy and votes came from the mainstream and the center,” says Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, an organization that supports moderate Democrats.
As has been widely noted, the key voters in 2018 were white suburban women, who showed up in large numbers to vent their anger at President Trump by voting Democratic. Yet many of these suburban women weren’t fired-up liberals, but rather centrists who previously supported moderate Republicans in their districts.
Their switch is why many of those moderate Republicans washed out to sea; their fate was sealed more by moderate women rising up to vote Democratic than because of a left-wing insurrection. Indeed, candidates endorsed by the moderate New Democrat coalition flipped 33 of the 42 House seats that went from Republican to Democrat.
Geographically, the keys to Democrats’ success came not in the party’s coastal enclaves—such as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s district, which was held by Democrats long before she arrived—but rather in the industrial upper Midwest swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All three states were won by Mr. Trump in 2016, but Democrats won the popular House vote in those states last fall. Democrats also nominated moderates for governor in all three states—and all three won, by a margin of 1.3 million votes.
This reality is important for Democrats as candidates begin drifting onto the 2020 presidential battlefield. The prevailing narrative suggests not only that the advantage goes to a fresh face who excites the party’s young progressives—think former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas or Sen. Kamala Harris of California—but that such a choice has the best chance of success against Mr. Trump.
And maybe that’s the case. But consider the alternative, suggested by the reality of the midterm election results: The votes that will spell the difference for Democrats lie not on the left and on the coasts, but in the center and in the industrial Midwest.
That’s where Mr. Biden enters the picture. Perhaps the 76-year-old former vice president is too old. He certainly doesn’t meet the desire for “new blood” in politics cited last week by former President Obama.
On the other hand, if the Democrats’ key votes in 2020 will lie among centrists in the industrial Midwest, the more moderate profile of the favorite son of Scranton, Pa., will be an attractive one. Moreover, if voters generally are looking for somebody who knows how to get things done rather than simply create controversy, the guy who once prevented a government shutdown by cutting a big budget deal with Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell may have some appeal.
It’s too early to know, of course—but there is more than one narrative at work for Democrats.
