THE ELECTION FIX, Part 83-Georgia Update:
Georgia Senator: Coordinated Illegal Actions Appear to Have Taken Place During Election
BY ZACHARY STIEBER December 21, 2020
A recent report from a Georgia state senator studying the Nov. 3 election found evidence of illegal activity carried out by workers at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
“The events at the State Farm Arena are particularly disturbing because they demonstrated intent on the part of election workers to exclude the public from viewing the counting of ballots, an intentional disregard for the law. The number of votes that could have been counted in that length of time was sufficient to change the results of the presidential election and the senatorial contests,” the report from the state Senate’s Election Law Study Subcommittee chairman reads.
“Furthermore, there appears to be coordinated illegal activities by election workers themselves who purposely placed fraudulent ballots into the final election totals.”
Workers counted mail-in ballots at the arena. According to surveillance footage and witness testimony from Election Day, workers stopped counting ballots around 10:30 p.m. but resumed after observers and media left.
A spokesman for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement: “The report makes rash conclusions based on a one-sided presentation of conspiracy theories, poorly assembled data and conjecture. Of the many courts that have reviewed this same jumble of misinformation, none have found one shred of it to be credible. It is disappointing that the members of the study committee let their political allegiance cloud their judgment when dispassionate analysis by the courts have determined the allegations to be nonsense.”
Gabriel Sterling, an official who works in Raffensperger’s office, has acknowledged that there was an 82-minute period that night when no monitor was present. The office has blamed media and observers for leaving after the announcement that counting was stopping for the night.
The Georgia Election Law Study Subcommittee is part of the state Senate Judiciary Committee. According to subcommittee Chairman William Ligon, a Republican, the report hasn’t been formally approved by either the subcommittee or the committee.
The report notes that scores of witnesses and experts testified about irregularities and fraud allegations during a public hearing earlier this month.
In summary, legislators wrote, the general election “was chaotic and any reported results must be viewed as untrustworthy.”
Lawmakers heard evidence about proper chain of custody protocols being violated, about fraudulent ballots likely being introduced into the pool of ballots being counted, about pristine ballots whose origins looked suspicious, and about unsecured ballots.
“A great deal of testimony supported evidence of a coordinated effort to prevent a transparent process of observing the counting of ballots during the absentee ballot opening period and on election night. Witnesses testified to hostility to Republican poll workers during the recount—directional signage was unavailable, doors were locked, and Republican poll watchers were sent home early or given menial assignments,” the report states.
“Monitors throughout the state were often kept at an unreasonably long distance—some social distancing was understandable, but monitors were blocked from having the visual ability to see what was written on the ballots or to have any meaningful way to check the counting or to double-check that what was counted was actually assigned to the right candidate.”
Two of the poll observers who testified were later terminated by Fulton County. Raffensperger has called for them to be rehired; Fulton County officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Among the recommendations outlined in the report are that unqualified voters should be purged from voter rolls; violations of state law should be prosecuted; forensic audits of ballots and machines should be carried out; and the state legislature should consider moving to choose the slate of electors.
Ligon led a push to convene a special session of the legislature to consider taking back the power to appoint electors, but that effort didn’t garner the required support. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, can also call a special session, but has thus far refused.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 82-Senators And Congressmen Are Starting To Step Up:
Another GOP Congressman Says He’ll Likely Challenge Electoral College Votes in January-
BY JACK PHILLIPS December 18, 2020:
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said he will likely join Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) in challenging the Electoral College votes for certain states when they are counted on Jan. 6 in a sign that a growing number of Congress members will do so.
“Right now,” the lawmaker said in an interview, “I’m leaning heavily into supporting that plan because we’ve seen so many allegations.”
During a Senate Homeland Security panel hearing that featured testimony alleging voter fraud and irregularities, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said he believed there was rampant fraud during the Nov. 3 presidential election. Paul also said he may challenge the Electoral College count.
Biggs told Newsmax that he agreed with Paul’s assessment during the hearing.
“That’s important when you consider if you’re gonna object,” he said, noting that some Democratic members of Congress tried to object to electors for President Donald Trump after he won in 2016.
“Don’t ever forget that in 2017 that’s exactly what Democrats did when they objected to the sitting of President Trump’s electors, and they did it in 2005, so this is not without precedent, what [Brooks’] suggested, and I’m with him on that because there’s so much fraud out there, we actually need to make the point,” Biggs said.
Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) also suggested that he will possibly challenge the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, coming just three days after he is sworn in as a senator. “I’m gonna tell you: Don’t give up on him,” Tuberville, the former coach of Auburn University’s football program, said of Trump. “Don’t give up on him.”
“You’ll see what’s coming,” he said this week in response to questions about the challenge. “You’ve been reading about in the House. We’re going to have to do it in the Senate.”
The process of challenging electors requires one House representative and one senator. Then, the two chambers of Congress would have to meet separately to vote and debate any disputes.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the Senate Majority Whip, told reporters that he hopes Tuberville or other senators don’t follow Brooks’ lead.
“I think it’s time, like I said before, to bond,” Thune told reporters. “And I know there probably is our members who still have concerns about the election, integrity of the election. But the fact of the matter is, that’s been litigated over and over.”
But during the Wednesday hearing, Paul and former Clinton-era special prosecutor Ken Starr said that of the lawsuits regarding election fraud and irregularities, the vast majority of those cases were not heard on the merits.
“The courts have not decided the facts,” Paul said at Wednesday’s hearing. “The courts never looked at the facts. The courts don’t like elections, and they stayed out of it by finding an excuse.”
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 81-We have not given up:
President Donald Trump’s winning path for the 2020 election runs through the state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, says top Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis.
Using Pennsylvania as an example, Ellis said that the state’s Supreme Court had filed in support of Texas in an interstate election lawsuit brought by the Lone Star State to the Supreme Court, which has since been dismissed.
“One of the great things that came out of that case is that the Pennsylvania State Legislature, their leadership in both the House and the Senate, filed an amicus brief admitting to the Supreme Court and telling the Supreme Court that they agreed with Texas that their state’s laws in the administration of the 2020 election were not followed,” Ellis told The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders on Dec. 16.
“That gives them the basis through their investigations, their findings, all of the testimony and evidence presented by the mayor and myself at that hearing, for Pennsylvania to reclaim under Article II Section 1.2 of the U.S. Constitution, they can reclaim their authority to select the slate of delegates,” Ellis continued.
“And so they have every opportunity to call themselves back into an electoral session for the purpose of voting on which slate of delegates they’re going to send. So that is what should happen in each of these six states prior to Jan. 6.”
Ellis made the remarks in response to a question about what scenario the Trump campaign envisions unfolding after Dec. 14, the day when the Electoral College cast its votes for the next president. Republican electors casting dueling votes in New Mexico and the six states, Ellis said. The Biden electors in each of the seven states also cast votes, setting up a “dueling electors” scenario not seen in U.S. elections for decades.
The governors in each state certified the Biden electors, with the Trump electors casting votes that the state legislatures can substantiate by convening special legislative sessions.
“I know that Georgia is looking at this very closely. Also Michigan with the Antrim County report that came out with all of those, not just irregularities but sheer percentages of discrepancies and all of the violations of law that occurred in Michigan. So in Michigan, as well as Arizona, and also in Wisconsin,” Ellis said.
“I think that once one state actually calls an electoral session and is willing to run that resolution to vote by simple majority and say, ‘We’re not going to allow corrupted, false certifications to prevail in terms of how we select our delegates’ … If one state is willing to do this, I think others will follow,’” she said.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 80–It’s everywhere in plain view, but the traditional media keeps censoring what you see and read:
Average of 2 to 3 Percent Shift for Biden in Counties That Use Dominion
BY PETR SVAB December 15, 2020
A man who’s made a living developing fraud detection algorithms has discovered a curious phenomenon: Counties that started using Dominion Voting Systems machines have on average moved by 2 to 3 points to the Democrat presidential candidate from the Republican compared to counties that didn’t adopt the machines.
The difference persisted even after he controlled for a number of factors, including county population and various demographic characteristics.
“I recommend we audit the machines,” he concluded.
The man is Ben Turner, who used to be the chief actuary at Texas Mutual Workers’ Compensation Insurance. He now runs Fraud Spotters, a consultancy specializing in detecting insurance fraud.
The Epoch Times replicated his initial analysis using the same data he used and arrived at the same results.
Dominion didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment. The company has for years been criticized over alleged vulnerabilities in its system. It has previously denied that its machines can be used to switch votes from one candidate to another.
Turner reached his conclusion despite being initially incredulous about claims that the Dominion machines affected the election outcome.
While a Republican himself, virtually all of his colleagues and peers are Democrats, he said in a phone call. The outrageousness of the election fraud allegations made him question whether he was on the “wrong team,” he said.
“I don’t know how to process these allegations,” he said in a recent blog post. “They sound so extreme and far-fetched that they are easy to blow off as ridiculous.”
But he also saw some very mainstream concerns about election systems security, pointing to an HBO documentary released earlier this year on the topic.
Given his expertise, he decided to look into the claims just to get some clarity for himself.
Eventually, however, he realized he needed to go public.
“I kind of was too afraid to go public because I knew that it won’t help me in terms of, you know, half the population now thinks that I’m a tin-foil-hat person. And I’m aware of that,” he said.
“But I just decided that if nobody can prove me wrong, it’s not fair for me to withhold this information, and that it belongs in the hands of the public.
“If I’ve done something wrong with the analysis, then maybe somebody out there will prove it wrong, and that’s fine with me. I’d rather get to the truth than be right. I felt like if I didn’t publish this, I’m a coward.”
He looked at how, county-by-county, election results changed between the 2008 and 2020 presidential races, measuring whether adoption of Dominion would have any overall effect on the changes. He picked the 2008 election because, at the time, only New York State had widely adopted Dominion, according to data from
VerifiedVoting.Org. He excluded New York from the analysis, leaving him 657 counties that have adopted Dominion and 2,388 that have not as of 2020.
He found that Dominion use was associated with a 1.55 percentage point decrease in the Republican vote and a 1.55 percentage point increase in the Democratic vote in the presidential race.
He controlled for the differences in county population, the number of votes cast, urban/rural population split, population growth, international immigration rate, low-education population, high “natural amenity” areas, high “creative class” population, and manufacturing dependency.
Later, he added seven more control factors to the analysis, including race, voter preference, and population. Not only did the “Dominion effect” persist, but the probability of his results being a fluke decreased.
The effect somewhat decreased, to a 2.84-point shift, when he also controlled for age.
The probability that the results occurred by chance or due to some unobserved factor was about 1 in 1,000, the analysis showed.
*********In his estimation, the results were significant enough to potentially flip elections in at least four states: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada.***********
Although his analysis indicated on average about a 3-point “Dominion effect,” it may be higher in some states and lower in others, he said.
“If you believe the Dominion effect is real, it is not hard to believe that this effect would be greater in swing states and could have swung these four states into Biden’s column, putting the electoral college in his favor,” he wrote.
The effect dropped to less than a 2-point blue shift when Georgia was excluded from the analysis.
“I believe this is indicating that Georgia is the strongest case for auditing,” he wrote in an FAQ article that addresses questions about his work.
He showed his findings to about 10 people with statistical expertise, two of whom provided him substantial feedback. Neither could find fault with his analysis, he said, and neither wanted their name associated with it.
The Epoch Times spoke to one of the two, who ran a slightly different statistical model on the same data arriving at nearly the same results. The expert concluded Turner’s model was “reasonable,” given the limitations of the data.
After he went public, more people contacted Turner with further questions, suggesting, for example, more extensive controls.
Ultimately, he ran the analysis with about 100 controls. The effect was reduced to about a 2-point shift toward Biden. He said that at this point, the statistical model started to suffer from “multicollinearity,” meaning many of the control factors were overlapping, which caused the model to provide less reliable results for any single variable, including the “Dominion effect.”
“Once we start to overfit the model, it gets complicated to decipher, and it would take some time to sort out the issues, and even then, it may become a matter of opinion,” he said via email.
He said the results would be safer to report as a range.
“I would say the national average effect appears to be somewhere between 1.0% and 1.6%,” he wrote.
Turner used prior election data from MIT Election Data Science Lab, current election data from Politico, Dominion adoption data from
VerifiedVoting.Org, and demographic data from the Department of Agriculture.
The data isn’t robust enough to narrow the analysis down to any particular state, he said.
The findings aren’t enough on their own to “win a court case,” he said. A statistical analysis, no matter how sophisticated, can be wrong. But he argued the four states should allow Republicans to audit the machines.
If this was a suspected insurance fraud case, the results would warrant a probe, he said.
“If this were an insurance company operation, we would have all these investigators investigating the people that we thought were behind the fraud.”
While Turner didn’t control for more specific demographic changes over time, such as by age and income, he did control for overall population change.
A researcher associated with The Epoch Times reached out to two statistics professors at two U.S. universities who both found Turner’s methodology sound, but neither agreed to have their name published.
Dominion has been under fire for years over alleged vulnerabilities in its system. A recent forensic audit in one Michigan county concluded the system is “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
A former military intelligence analyst alleged in a sworn affidavit that the Dominion software was accessed by agents of malicious actors, such as China and Iran, to monitor and manipulate the 2020 election.
The Epoch Times recently produced a documentary delving into Dominion’s complex ownership structure.
The company has denied that its software can be used to switch votes from one candidate to another or that it has foreign government ties.
One county election supervisor in Georgia demonstrated that the Dominion software allows changing votes through its “adjudication” feature.
A Georgia state election official said the adjudication creates a log through which it can be traced who made any changes to a ballot.
Turner called on Biden, local election officials, and Dominion to consider that so many people are already convinced fraud occurred.
“Future President Joe Biden: Do you want a significant portion of the population to believe your presidency was only won through Dominion voting systems?” he wrote.
“Dominion Corporation: Do you want a significant portion of the population to distrust you and demand that your machines are not used?”
“Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin election officials: Do you want a significant portion of your constituents to believe you are part of a conspiracy?”
The only solution now is transparency, he said.
And so they proceed, with eyes wide shut.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 79-The news media will try to tell you the election is over.
It is not….
Attorney Sidney Powell on Sunday alerted the U.S. Supreme Court to new evidence filed in her legal team’s Michigan lawsuit related to the state’s Dominion Voting Systems voting equipment as she called on the court to intervene in her cases challenging the integrity and outcome of the 2020 elections in four states.
Powell in a letter notified the court of two batches of recently obtained evidence, the first of which she said came from an initial forensic analysis of Dominion voting machines in Michigan’s Antrim County that was prepared under a protective order issued on Dec. 4 by Judge Kevin Elsenheimer, who is overseeing the case.
The former federal prosecutor said that the initial results of the ongoing expert analysis provide “new information and evidence” as it relates to the Nov. 3 election in Antrim County.
“By logical extrapolation, [the analysis] explains voting anomalies and evinces fraud throughout the Dominion Voting Systems,” Powell wrote. “The new evidence specifically provides additional and conclusive evidence of election fraud and irregularities pertaining to the Nov. 3, 2020 election.”
“The final ‘certified tally’ in Michigan reflected a slim margin of Mr. Biden’s vote count to be 146,000 over that of President Trump, with just under 10 million people living in Michigan,” she said.
Powell asserted that the newly obtained evidence “is directly relevant to Petitioners’ Emergency Petition Under Rule 20 for Extraordinary Writ of Mandamus” before the Supreme Court, as it corroborates and supports the existing record of evidence proving massive election fraud, multiple violations of the Michigan Election Code, federal statutes, and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
It came shortly after Powell announced Friday that she had filed emergency requests to the nation’s top court, asking the justices to order officials in Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona to immediately decertify their 2020 election results and to prevent the states’ presidential electors from casting votes in the electoral college.
An emergency filing is also anticipated for her Wisconsin case. The filings aim to maintain the status quo in the states in order to give the Supreme Court time to consider the allegations presented in her lawsuits.
Her letter outlines new affidavits from two forensic experts who allege that international interference took place in the 2020 election, and that Dominion systems were connected to foreign systems around the globe.
Powell said that two Military Intelligence analysts have signed sworn affidavits stating that the SSL certificates from
dominionvoting.com were used multiple times from Canada, Serbia, and the United States.
“Additionally, the affidavits detail evidence demonstrating that Sequoia Capital seeded or funded Dominion Voting Systems and HSBC Toronto acquired from Dominion Voting Systems 18 patents representing intellectual property of Dominion Voting Systems. These patents all pertain to direct interfaces with the U.S. election process by means of ballots, systems, and machines,” Powell wrote. HSBC is a British multinational that was first founded in Hong Kong.
The affidavit further reveals that the HSBC in Toronto “secures the intellectual patents pertaining to direct access to the U.S. election systems and equipment from Dominion Voting Systems,” Powell said in her letter, stating that the information contained in the affidavits further demonstrates foreign interference in the Nov. 3 election.
Powell last month said that prior analysis of server logs on Dominion’s machines in Georgia primary elections showed “remote access into those servers in the middle of the night when no election workers were around,” possibly by Dominion employees overseas or “on behalf of adverse nation-states such as Iran and China.”
The attorney told The Epoch Times last week that due to alleged foreign interference in the Nov. 3 election, “it’s more than sufficient to trigger” President Donald Trump’s executive order on foreign interference issued in 2018.
Powell asked that the latest evidence from the forensic examination be filed under seal, citing “significant implications for national security” and due to the protective order under which it was obtained. She noted that there is a hearing in the Michigan court scheduled for Monday morning on the plaintiffs’ motion to unseal the report.
“This evidence is crucial to a just resolution of the cases pending before this court,” Powell concluded.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part78-Sworn testimony Under Oath is “Evidence.”
And the evidence of election fraud is overwhelming. But somehow Big Tech and Corporate media won’t see it.
PENNSYLVANIA:
At a hearing in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 25, an expert testified to the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Committee that a batch of ballots recorded 570,000 votes for Joe Biden and only 3,200 votes for Donald. That would be 99.4 percent of the votes went to Biden, and with that batch he won the election. The batch came in, by the way, late at night
And how long did the batch take to be counted? According to the aforementioned “expert,” a former combat officer with a background in military information and electronic warfare named Ret. Col. Phil Waldron, the “spike anomaly” did not take very long to appear. He claims it took something like 90 minutes.
On November 4 in Michigan at roughly 6:30 a.m., 141,258 votes came in for Biden, and only 5,968 for Trump.
WISCONSIN:
At 3:42 a.m., also on November 4, 143,379 votes came in for Biden and a puny 25,163 for Trump.
GEORGIA:
Also on November 4th in Georgia at 1:34 a.m., 136,155 votes came in for Biden, and only 29,115 votes came in for Trump.
All of this information we have thanks to the diligence of Russell Ramsland of Allied Security Systems.
ARIZONA:
Jenna Ellis, another of the president’s personal attorneys, stressed they weren’t asking lawmakers to reverse the election, but to investigate fraud and determine if the results are legitimate before appointing electors for Biden.
“We are going to ask you, as legislators, to reclaim that authority and to make sure that the people of Arizona and indeed the people of the United States of America as a whole are not disenfranchised by corruption,” Ellis told the panel.
She quoted Founding Father Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 68 noting that state legislatures are the safeguard against corruption.
“You are the last step to make sure that this election is not corrupted,” Ellis said. “We are not asking you to step up and overturn an election. We are asking you to step in to make sure that the corruption that occurred here does not stand.”
4) Absentee Ballots, Duplicate Ballots, and 130%
The Trump legal team also presented information from the Voter Integrity Fund, playing audio of several calls to people recorded as having requested an absentee ballot. Each said they did not do so.
Another witness for the Trump team was Shiva Ayyadurai, a former Senate candidate from Massachusetts and entrepreneur and engineer offering expert testimony on technology and data. He presented data asserting the only way for Biden to have statistically caught up with Trump after trailing him early on was if the registered Democratic votes were 130% in favor of Biden and negative 30% for Trump. He showed a chart on a screen to explain the findings.
“What’s extraordinary about this graph is, again, we went through many, many iterations, it matches perfectly, near perfectly,” Ayyadurai told the Arizona state legislators. “The slopes match, the curves match. The shapes match. So, what this tells us is that this demographic distribution of allocation of party affiliations is what can generate this. “I find it highly implausible, because this means that Mr. Biden got 130% of Democrat voters, and Mr. Trump got negative 30%.”
Anna Orth, a Pima County resident and Republican election worker, testified to the committee that she was denied the chance to observe about 2,000 duplicate ballots. Duplicate ballots are usually ballots that are somehow unclearly marked and require further inspection, typically by observers from both parties. “I was specifically taken out of that room, ushered out, and brought into [another] room,” Orth told the state lawmakers.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 77-A Fraudulent Night in Georgia,
but corporate media still promotes the false narrative of no evidence of fraud) 21,000 anomalies!:
Matt Braynard, the head of the Voter Integrity Project, said on today that he’s delivered evidence of more than 21,000 election anomalies and irregularities to three top Georgia officials!
In a letter to Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and Attorney General Chris Carr, Braynard said he sent via FedEx an envelope with a USB drive “containing evidence of illegal ballots that were cast” in Georgia in the Nov. 3 election. Braynard said he obtained the evidence via the Voter Integrity Project, which, in turn, was “paid for with crowdfunded contributions from many of your residents.”
Braynard said his team reached out to voters who Georgia marked as having requested an absentee ballot, but not returning it. Braynard also made note of voters who told the call center that they didn’t request the ballot “despite the state marking them as having requested an absentee ballot,” as well as voters who told the Voter Integrity Project they did request a ballot and mailed it back, although Georgia didn’t record that it was received.
Other tables include evidence of voters who voted in two different states, including Georgia voters who were “registered” to vote with an address listed at a U.S. Postal Service facility and “disguised that address as an apartment” or P.O. box, the letter said. Braynard also highlighted other irregularities that occurred during the election in Georgia.
“I am well aware that examining this evidence may be a time consuming and complicated ordeal,” Braynard wrote. “To aide you in this endeavor, I am happy to make myself available to assist your staff in validating it.”
Last week, bought and paid for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had said there’s been no evidence of irregularities that would overturn the election results and has pushed for certification. On Dec. 7, he announced that Georgia re-certified its election results following a recount, although Coffee County said it wasn’t able to duplicate the results on voter machines.
How much smoke does there have to be before a judge or legislature declares, “Fire!”?
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 76-Facebook Fact-Checkers: The Chinese and CNN Connection
Facebook Fact Checker Funded by Chinese Money Through TikTok
BY PETR SVAB December 10, 2020
While Facebook portrays its army of fact-checkers as independent, the money behind at least one carries a distinct taint. One fact-checker, Lead Stories, is partly paid through its partnership with TikTok, a social media platform run by a Chinese company that owes its allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). TikTok is currently being probed by American authorities as a national security threat.
Moreover, the organization that’s supposed to oversee the quality of fact-checkers is run by Poynter Institute, another TikTok partner.
Lead Stories says it’s been contracted by ByteDance “for fact checking related work” referring to TikTok’s announcement earlier this year that it has partnered with several organizations “to further aid our efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation,” particularly regarding the CCP virus pandemic which originated in China and was exacerbated by the CCP regime’s coverup.
Lead Stories was started in 2015 by Belgian website developer Maarten Schenk, CNN veteran Alan Duke, and two lawyers from Florida and Colorado. It listed operating expenses of less than $50,000 in 2017, but had expanded seven-fold by 2019, largely thanks to the more than $460,000 Facebook paid it for fact-checking services in 2018 and 2019. The company took on more than a dozen staffers, about half of them CNN alumni, and became one of Facebook’s most prolific fact-checkers of American content.
This year, the funding sources included Google, Facebook, ByteDance, and several online advertising services.
Facebook’s fact-checking partnerships have drawn criticism as they facilitate censorship. A post flagged as false by the partners not only gets furnished with a warning label and a link to the fact check, but Facebook “significantly reduces the number of people who see it,” the company says on its website.
The fact-checkers themselves can choose what content to review and decide what is labeled as false and why. Any complaints about the verdict must be raised with the fact-checkers, who aren’t known to readily reverse themselves, even when their fact checks themselves require fact checking.
Lead Stories has recently focused on disputing claims about voter fraud, contributing to censorship of the topic on Facebook.
Chronicle fans: beware the military-industrial complex, which now includes big Tech.
THE FIX, Part 75-NEWSMAX Edition:
Newsmax TV scored its first ratings victory over rival Fox News Channel, eclipsing the Murdoch-owned outlet in a key demographic on Monday night.
“Greg Kelly Reports,” which airs 7-8 p.m. EST, beat “The Story with Martha McCallum” in the 25- to 54-year-old audience demographic. Kelly drew an average of 229,000 viewers for the hour while McCallum pulled in 203,000, CNN reported.
“We’re here to stay,” Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy said Tuesday evening to CNN. “The ratings are showing that.”
Newsmax TV has shown exponential growth in viewership since Nov. 3, a trend media outlets have attributed to resentment at Fox News for its coverage of the election. That included a decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden, a decision many Fox News devotees called extremely premature.
Wake up Fox News, you blew it.
THE FIX, Part 74-Texas Lawsuit Edition:
Seventeen states are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take up Texas’s request to challenge the 2020 election results in four battleground states.
The states, led by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Dec. 9, underscoring that the case filed by Texas is of great public importance and requires the attention of the nation’s top court.
Texas on Dec. 7 filed a motion asking for permission to sue Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin in an attempt to protect the integrity of the 2020 election.
The Lone Star state alleges that the four key battleground states unconstitutionally changed election laws, treated voters unequally, and triggered significant voting irregularities by relaxing ballot integrity measures.
The states said they have a strong interest in protecting the separation of powers in how elections are regulated. When election officials made changes to the rules governing elections, these non-legislative actors may have encroached on the power given to state legislatures by the Electors Clause in the U.S. Constitution, they assert.
Under the U.S. Constitution, the “times, places, and manner of holding elections” may only be prescribed by the state “legislature” and “Congress.”
“Encroachments on the authority of state Legislatures by other state actors violate the separation of powers and threaten individual liberty,” the states wrote.
In the brief, the 17 states argue that the Texas lawsuit warrants review by the high court as it presents important constitutional issues under the Electors Clause. It also raises concerns about election integrity and public confidence in the handling of elections, they added.
The states said they have a strong interest in protecting the separation of powers in how elections are regulated. When election officials made changes to the rules governing elections, these non-legislative actors may have encroached on the power given to state legislatures by the Electors Clause in the U.S. Constitution, they assert.
Under the U.S. Constitution, the “times, places, and manner of holding elections” may only be prescribed by the state “legislature” and “Congress.”
“Encroachments on the authority of state Legislatures by other state actors violate the separation of powers and threaten individual liberty,” the states wrote (pdf).
Meanwhile, the changes made by the defendant states to mail-in voting rules during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 17 states argued, would have likely enhanced the risk of election fraud, since they strip away safeguards protecting against fraudulent behavior.
They added that the relaxation of safeguards for mail-in ballots create “needless vulnerability to actual fraud and undermined public confidence in the election.”
Stay tuned, it ain’t over til it’s over!
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 73-The Anti-Trump Coup Never Ended:
45 years ago , as a political science major in college, I wrote my senior thesis on the assassination of President John Kennedy…
I began by quoting President Dwight Eisenhower who, in his farewell address to the nation, warned of the increasing power of the “military-industrial complex.”
Three years later, a young President was taken from us and there was evidence to show that forces within the U.S. government were complicit in the murder of our president, including elements within the CIA and willful negligence on the part of the FBI.
Today, we have seen our present-day military-intelligence-industrial (big tech) complex not only complicit, but actively trying to take down the president since 2016, including this election.
Sidney Powell, a well respected career trial attorney, both in and out of government, seems to agree: Powell said Saturday it is “extremely unsettling” to know that American elections are “just as rigged” as the elections in third world countries, she told the “Huckabee” show. Powell even suggested that the CIA might have been involved in creating the software used by Dominion, which she says is a company that should not be trusted with determining the election results, citing numerous witness statements from contractors and experts. “It may have been the CIA that created the software and programs to begin with, and then exported them for their own use only to have it come back to us,” she said.
Last month, Powell called on CIA Director Gina Haspel to be “fired immediately,” arguing that Dominion Voting Systems should not have been allowed to be used in the elections, while calling for an investigation of state officials who approved purchases of the machines. During the interview, Powell said that some very important, powerful, and extremely wealthy people might be involved in rigging the election because of “globalist interests.”
45 years later—could history be repeating itself?
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 72-Electoral College Edition
President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that the legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan might end up deciding what electors are sent to the Electoral College, suggesting it could end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Giuliani said that the GOP-controlled legislatures in the three states could vote on sending their own slate of electors, noting that such a move is supported in the U.S. Constitution. Both Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis have lobbied state legislatures in recent days to reaffirm their power to choose their own electors due to evidence of fraud during the Nov. 3 election.
The former New York mayor told Fox Business on Sunday that Georgia lawmakers “started a petition to hold their own session, which they’re allowed to do under the Constitution,” adding the GOP members are “disgusted” by the evidence that was shown during a hearing last week. On the program, Giuliani made reference to the State Farm Arena surveillance video in Atlanta that showed election officials pulling black containers on wheels from underneath a table after poll observers and election workers were sent home. While state elections officials have said the process was not unusual, they have not yet answered key questions raised by Trump’s team when presenting the video. “They’re the first legislature to do this now,” he said of Georgia. “This is a constitutional role that the founding fathers gave to our legislatures. They’re the ones who are supposed to select the president, not the governors, not the board of elections. They’re the ones who have the constitutional obligation to decide on the electors.”
“Michigan is considering the same thing,” Giuliani said. “They’re not quite as far along, but they are drafting something right now, and so is Arizona, so those three … could very well end up in front of the legislature to decide who the electors are.”
In the interview, Giuliani said that should even one “of these state legislatures change the electors based on their own analysis, of course that’ll be taken to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court will have to decide if it was done reasonably, rationally, or arbitrarily—that’s the standard.” “In each case, each one of these legislatures has more than enough of that to sustain the Supreme Court challenge,” Giuliani added.
Pennsylvania state lawmakers last week sent a letter to the Pennsylvania Congress members to object to the state’s Electoral College vote during the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, claiming that the state legislature does not have the power to choose electors in Pennsylvania.
Here we go. In the face of overwhelming evidence of fraud, will the Republican Legislatures have the political courage to do the right thing?
THE FIX, Part 71-Michigan Update
Circuit Judge Kevin Eisenheimer issued an order on Friday after a county resident challenged the election results based off a mishap that awarded Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden thousands of illegitimate votes. The challenge also cited a slim margin on a vote over a local marijuana ordinance, according to The Detroit News.
Antrim County election officials must “maintain, preserve and protect all records in its possession used to tabulate votes in Antrim County, to not turn on the Dominion tabulator in its possession and to not connect the Dominion tabulator in its possession to the internet,” the court order says. Eisenheimer also granted a request from the resident, William Bailey, to conduct a forensic exam of the county’s voting machines and other hardware and software involved in the voting and tabulating process. Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis said that a team would conduct a forensic audit of the machines on Sunday.
“A judge actually granted our team access to 22 of the Dominion voting machines for us to conduct a forensic audit. So if you remember this is the county that had the switch of 6,000 votes from President Trump to Joe Biden and that was an unexplained and so-called glitch, and so our team is going to go in this morning at about 8:30 and will be there about eight hours to conduct that forensic examination and we will have the results in about 48 hours, and that will tell us a lot about these machines,” Ellis claimed on Fox News.
THE FIX, Part 70-Tallahassee Edition:
Yesterday morning we met at the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee before the RPOF sent hundreds of volunteers off the Georgia for some door-to-door grass roots campaigning.
20 years after the debacle of 2000, “hanging chads” and other election embarrassments, Florida has become a model for the rest of the country on how to run an election. Credit goes to our Republican legislatures (past and present) , Governor Scott (who removed the corrupt Supervisor of Elections (SOE) in Broward County, Brenda Snipes, and Governor DeSantis, who likewise displayed great political courage in removing the Palm Beach County SOE, Susan Bucher.
And while the battle rages in other states to save our Republic, we in Florida are already looking ahead to 2022. Specifically, we must re-elect our great Governor DeSantis, (uniformly admired and respected by Republicans throughout the country) and to re-elect Marco Rubio, now the senior Senator from Florida.
Overlaying all of this, from the RNC’s point of view is to recapture control of the U.S. House of Representatives. With only a handful of seats needed to end the reign of terror of Nancy Pelosi, the RPOF and the RNC will do their part to see that happen.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 69-Georgia Update:
Hidden Suitcases Full of Ballots Counted after Observers were Evacuated in Atlanta
Yesterday, during a Senate committee hearing in Georgia, some of the most compelling evidence for voter fraud was exposed in one particularly explosive instance.
This was not witness testimony, or expert statisticians testifying to strange anomalies, but instead a video that clearly shows the most blatant and largest scale form of voter fraud documented in the US presidential election so far.
Attorney, Jackie Pick, narrated the events recorded on four CCTV security cameras from the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. In the footage, Pick explains and shows that during the day certain poll workers and or supervisors are seen moving a table which obscures suitcases full of ballots on the floor. Later in the footage observers, technical assistants, and most poll workers are evacuated from the arena with the excuse that a “pipe burst” when nothing more than a single toilet/urinal overflowed. This occurred around 10:25 pm. Ballot counting was to resume in the morning, but that did not happen.
After everyone was evacuated and only five poll workers remained. They proceeded to pull out full suitcases of ballots from underneath the table that were originally obscured and workers began counting those ballots without Republican or Democratic observers present. The workers stopped scanning ballots after a couple of hours five minutes before Republican observers showed back up to the State Farm Arena. They were counting the hidden ballots from around 11:00 pm to 12:55 am.
Since five machines were scanning ballots between that period and each was said to be able to scan 2,000 to 3,000 ballots per hour, more ballots than Biden’s current margin of victory could have been counted during this period between 11:00 pm and 1:00 am.
Since this evidence was released during the hearing it has caught fire on Twitter as it is one of few undeniable and blatant forms of voter fraud. Others have also been found, like the Nevada Native Vote Project where a Democratic biased organization was literally paying people to vote with prizes or raffle entries.
With enough of this type of evidence coming forward, some state legislatures may see no other choice but to block the appointment of presidential electors, potentially preventing either Trump or Biden from getting the required 270 votes to win and throwing the decision over to the state governments instead.
Although witness testimony and expert opinions are legitimate evidence, the video makes it extremely difficult for the mainstream media to continue not covering issues involving voter fraud, claiming there no proof.
But here is what corporate media says to the American people still dumb enough to get their news from them: Are you going to believe us or your lying eyes?
I did my college senior thesis on the John Kennedy assassination.
The Zapruder film clearly shows that Kennedy was shot from the front, not just from behind as the Warren Commission tried to tell us. Here we are, 57 years later and we are watching the assassination of another President, this time by ballot fraud rather than by guns.
The result is the same, the will of the American people taken from us.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 68-Nevada Update:
Voting Machine USB Drives Had Totals Altered Overnight, Witness in Nevada Election Contest Alleges
BY IVAN PENTCHOUKOV December 3, 2020
A witness brought forward by the Trump campaign in its election contest in Nevada alleged that the memory disks used to store vote totals from election machines during the early vote period had the vote tallies inexplicably changed overnight, according to a presentation at an evidentiary hearing in Carson City on Dec. 3.
According to Jesse Binnall, who presented the evidence on behalf of the Trump campaign, the witness, whose name is shielded by a protective order, said that the vote tallies were collected from the machine at the end of every voting day and stored on Universal Serial Bus (USB) drives overnight. “What they would do is they would log these disks in and out. Good practice. And the disks had a serial number on them. And numerous times that disk would be logged out with one vote total on it and logged back in the next morning during the early vote period with a different number on it. Sometimes more, sometimes less,” Binnall said. “What that means is that literally in the dead of night, votes were appearing, and books are disappearing on these machines.”
Binnall said that the USB drives were not encrypted and the voting machines were not password protected. “And they were hooked up with laptops, then where the laptops themselves could have been compromised,” he added. The allegation about the vote total alterations was one of several Binnall presented during an evidentiary hearing, the first of its kind for the Trump legal team’s six-state post-election effort.
Stay tuned and know corporate media and big tech are the enemy of We The People
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 67-Former CIA Officer Weighs in:
Gary Berntsen, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) career officer who worked on various counterterrorism deployments, worries that the irregularities that happened during the November election may be part of a larger scheme.
“If you want to steal an election of the United States, what do you do? You go into the swing states, your Democrats, you target the urban areas where you have the largest vote count,” Berntsen told The Epoch Times. “They need to produce a massive, significant, large number of votes—therefore they have to go to large Democratic cities.”
He went further to allege that the vote counting was stopped in some polling sites in big cities probably because the persons behind the scheme found out they needed to produce more ballots to fill a gap bigger than they expected.
It’s reported that several vote-counting sites stopped the tabulation or chased out Republican poll watchers during the election night or early morning of the next day.
Various alleged unusual ballots transportation activities were also reported in Pennsylvania and Michigan. During a hearing before the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee, Republican poll challenger Dr. Michael Dubio stated, UNDER OATH, that between 3:00 a.m. and 3:34 a.m. he witnessed a truck delivering ballots to the TCF Center, a conference center in downtown Detroit where Wayne County votes were being counted. Dubio alleged that “thousands of” ballots were moved into the TCF center during this event. He didn’t specify which day he saw the truck during his open remarks.
A USPS-contracted trucker also alleged on Tuesday that he transported about 144,000 to 288,000 completed ballots from New York to Pennsylvania on Oct. 21 and the trailer disappeared. He wasn’t given any notice about his trailer. “The next day, it just got weirder. As I arrived at the Lancaster USPS with my tractor, I went to hook up to my trailer and the trailer was gone,” Jesse Morgan said in a media statement.
Stay tuned. The largest election fraud in history must be revealed or we are done as a country.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 66-Nevada Edition:
An audit of 1,440 Nevada mail-ballots suggests that 2 percent of the ballots were cast on behalf of voters who never received a ballot in the mail and 1 percent of them were cast on behalf of voters who said did not vote at all.
Baselice and Associates conducted the audit for the legal team representing the Trump campaign in Nevada. The firm called up the voters identified on each mail ballot. The findings suggest that 3 percent of the ballots were cast by someone other than the person identified on the ballot. The legal team presented the findings during a call with reporters on Dec. 2 during which attorneys previewed the outlines of a lawsuit pending in Carson City, Nevada. A court hearing on the case is scheduled for today.
The judge in the case ordered on Dec. 3 that the Trump team be allowed to inspect election machines. The legal team said that while they requested to perform a forensic audit, Clark County officials merely provided “a guided tour.”
“Machines were not usable, and we were not able to make a determination about the accuracy and integrity of the election process based on this inspection,” a press briefing from the team states. “We are entitled to a computer forensic inspection in accordance with the judge’s order. We were prevented from doing one. This was a digital election and we were not allowed a digital inspection. The ‘inspection’ today was like trying to determine if a car had failed brakes without getting underneath the car.”
The lawsuit—Law v. Whitmer—was filed by the presidential electors for Trump against the presidential electors for former Vice President Joe Biden.
The central thrust of the election challenge focuses on ballots that the Trump team alleges were illegally cast. That includes 130,000 Clark County ballots, the signatures on which were verified solely by a machine that the plaintiffs allege was not operated properly. A data scientist working for the plaintiffs identified an additional 100,000 potentially illegal votes, including 20,000 out-of-state voters, 8,000 ballots cast from non-existent addresses and 15,000 ballots from voters registered at commercial addresses and vacant properties.
Today’s hearing on Dec. 3 will be the first time Trump’s legal team presents evidence before a judge in an election lawsuit.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 65-Detroit Update:
A Dominion Voting Systems contractor who worked at Detroit’s TCF Center on Election Day testified before the Michigan House Oversight Committee on Dec. 2 that she witnessed at least 30,000 ballots being counted numerous times in Dominion machines. Melissa Carone, a freelance IT worker who assisted Dominion at Detroit’s ballot-counting site from 6:15 a.m. on Nov. 3 to 4 a.m. the next day, before returning later for several more hours on Nov. 4, said in an affidavit on Nov. 10 that she “witnessed nothing but fraudulent actions take place.” The affidavit was submitted as a supplement to a lawsuit in Michigan.
“I observed numerous employees, city workers, running batches of ballots through the tabulators countless times, without discarding them first,” Carone said Wednesday, responding to a question from President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani about what she observed while working at the center.
Carone said that the tabulating machines would jam two to three times an hour. She explained that the proper way to scan ballots when there’s a paper jam is to reset the count on the machine, or in other words discard the count, and rescan all of them with the jammed paper on top. “Instead of discarding, they were just rescanning, rescanning, rescanning,” Carone said. “Counting ballots nine to 10 times.” Carone noted that there were approximately 22 to 24 tabulating machines where she was working, and that she observed the malpractice “thousands of times” while she was at the site.
Folks, this is direct admissible evidence of election fraud.
DO NOT be taken in by the fake news.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 64-Combatting Fake News
The Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a statement on Tuesday in response to the backlash from an article by The Associated Press which quoted Attorney General William Barr saying that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
“Some media outlets have incorrectly reported that the DOJ has concluded its investigation of election fraud and announced an affirmative finding of no fraud in the election. That is not what the Associated Press reported nor what the Attorney General stated,” a DOJ spokesperson said.
“The Department will continue to receive and vigorously pursue all specific and credible allegations of fraud as expeditiously as possible.”
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 63-Common Sense Edition:
Republicans almost took control of the U.S. House of Representatives in this election…gaining 14 seats…
In state legislatures across the country, Republicans now control over 4,000 seats. You read that right!
Republicans expanded their control of state legislatures in the 2020 election, flipping both chambers in one state while gaining more than 160 seats overall.
Their lead over Democrats thus increased to more than 700 seats (about 67 percent) from over 400, although that number can still change with some remaining contests still to be decided.
State politics had long been a domain of Democrats until the 1990s, when they still controlled the southern states, including Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Georgia, Arkansas, and Alabama. That began to change in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and particularly in the 2010 midterms, when the GOP swept the field and flipped 21 chambers across 15 states, according to data from the National Conference of state Legislatures, a bipartisan association of state legislators.
Republicans further solidified their lead in the 2014 and 2016 elections, reaching a high of more than 4,200 legislators out of a total of some 7,400. Then they started to lose ground. The 2020 gains bring the GOP to a total of more than 4,000 seats.
The largest boost for Republicans occurred in New Hampshire, where a gain of 61 seats flipped control of both chambers to their side, while a major gain of 21 seats in West Virginia ensured GOP supermajorities in both chambers. Another pair of supermajorities came as a benefit of 15 and 10 more seats in Kentucky and Montana, respectively. A gain of 10 seats in Maine, however, wasn’t enough to overcome a strong Democrat majority.
Democrats made some advances of their own. They achieved gains in Connecticut (8 seats), Massachusetts (3 seats), California (2 seats), as well as Colorado and Virginia (each 1 seat).
But they made no advance or even lost ground in other blue states, including New York (lost 2 seats), Illinois (lost 1), Oregon (lost 1), as well as Washington and New Mexico (both no gain).
So Chronicle fans—think about this—Republicans scored resounding victories up and down the ballot everywhere…but somehow the guy at the top lost his election?
That makes no (common) sense.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 62-Senator Rand Paul Weighs In:
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says he is highly skeptical about the 2020 presidential election and cited what he called overnight “data dumps” in four key battleground states.
“Interesting . . . Trump margin of “defeat” in 4 states occurred in 4 data dumps between 1:34-6:31 AM. Statistical anomaly? Fraud? Look at the evidence and decide for yourself,” Paul wrote on Twitter.
The social media giant immediately slapped the Republican senator’s Twitter post with a warning label. “This claim about election fraud is disputed,” Twitter wrote.
Paul linked to a report that investigated vote patterns in the presidential race. The report showed:
“An update in Michigan listed as of 6:31 a.m. Eastern Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 141,258 votes for Joe Biden and 5,968 votes for Donald Trump
An update in Wisconsin listed as 3:42 a.m. Central Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 143,379 votes for Joe Biden and 25,163 votes for Donald Trump
A vote update in Georgia listed at 1:34 a.m. Eastern Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 136,155 votes for Joe Biden and 29,115 votes for Donald Trump
An update in Michigan listed as of 3:50 a.m. Eastern Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 54,497 votes for Joe Biden and 4,718 votes for Donald Trump”
“In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major “vote spikes” that substantially — and decisively — improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia,” the report stated. “Much skepticism and uncertainty surrounds these “vote spikes.”
Critics point to suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates’ vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of some of these spikes. While data analysis cannot on its own demonstrate fraud or systemic issues, it can point us to statistically anomalous cases that invite further scrutiny.”
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 61-Arizona Edition:
Arizona Lawmakers Call for Resolution to Hold Back Electoral College Votes
BY BOWEN XIAO November 30, 2020:
At a public hearing in Arizona with select members of the state legislature and members of President Donald Trump’s legal team, lawmakers called for their colleagues to support an upcoming resolution that would delay the release of the state’s Electoral College votes. Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem told reporters during the Nov. 30 hearing that they hope to have a resolution “within the next 24 to 48 hours.” The state holds 11 Electoral College votes.
“We are clawing our Electoral College votes back, we will not release them,” Finchem said. “That’s what I’m calling on our colleagues in both the House and Senate to do—exercise our plenary authority under the U.S. Constitution.” “There is a legal brief out there that says we are not tethered to state statute when it comes to this one question.” According to Finchem, the move would be easy to make and would be legally binding. “A simple majority can call the House and Senate back, and in a day can pass a resolution and cause those electoral votes to basically be held,” he said. “And it is binding—I’ll see y’all in court.”
In total, nine Republican state lawmakers attended the meeting, which was held at a hotel in downtown Phoenix. Trump’s attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, alongside witnesses, appeared in front of members of the Arizona Legislature alleging that considerable voter fraud occurred in the state. They also pushed for the Republican-majority state House and Senate to hold a vote on the certification of the election.
——–DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET ALL OVER THE COUNTRY————
During the hearing, a cybersecurity expert said the user manual for Dominion Voting Systems machines guides users on how to connect to the internet, and that the machines, used by multiple states, were connected to the internet during the election.
“The Dominion suite user manual is about an inch and a half thick. My team went back through the user manual and looked at all the instances where in the user’s manual, it tells operators to connect the ethernet cords to the router, and it is, the systems are connected to the internet,” said Phil Waldron, a cybersecurity expert and retired Army colonel. “Our teams looked at spirographs on the Dominion network on Election Day and showed the increased web traffic, internet traffic on Election Day for Dominion servers. “In a nutshell, these systems are not what you’ve been told, if you’ve been told anything. “They are connected to the internet. There is no transparency of how the voter information is processed, moved, and stored. And, as a matter of fact, these companies have refused to allow any type of inspection into their code and they always decry, it’s our IP, it’s IP protection.”
In 2016, Trump won the state’s 11 electoral votes by less than 100,000 votes. In the 17 presidential elections between 1952 and 2016, only one Democratic candidate won Arizona—Bill Clinton in 1996.
Arizona’s secretary of state on Nov. 30 certified the state’s presidential election results. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said in a press conference that despite the pandemic and other complexities, “we had an extremely well-run election and saw historically high voter participation.”
During the hearing, a volunteer poll observer and worker in Arizona’s Pima County told Republican Arizona state legislators that she had been told by state election officials to allow people to vote who may not have been properly registered to vote in Arizona on Election Day. “I was having to allow people to vote who literally had just moved here. A large percentage had addresses from two apartment complexes,” poll observer Anna Orth said. Orth said “many” of these individuals were “residents for not more than a month,” adding that from her observations, she estimated that about 2,000 people appeared to be out-of-state voters.
According to Pima County’s elections website, people can vote if they have lived within Pima County “at least 29 days prior to the general election.” These people, she said, had out-of-state driver’s licenses but attempted to show proof they could vote by presenting a utility bill that suggested they lived in the precinct. Orth then alleged she had spoken to a poll observer who said he was from Los Angeles and told her “he was there to turn Arizona blue,” meaning Democratic. She said the man told her: “We’re here specifically to turn this precinct blue. This is one of our problem ones. I came from another precinct in Maricopa [County].” There was a group of them there, she added. The man’s job, Orth said, was to make sure that anyone who was turned away from voting could vote. When questioned further, the man allegedly said he is in contact with several lawyers to make sure of that, according to Orth, who said she submitted an affidavit about her claims under penalty of perjury.
Also, on Nov. 24, the head of the Arizona Republican Party filed a petition for early inspection of mail-in-ballot envelopes and signatures. The court petition against the 11 Arizona Democrat presidential electors also seeks inspection of duplicate ballots with their originals in Maricopa County. The petition was filed by Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward. “A formal legal elections challenge is expected to be filed soon alleging that the process used to validate ballots returned by mail was legally insufficient,” the Arizona Republican Party said in a statement. “The critical process of verifying a signature determines whether a vote is counted.”
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 60-Georgia Update:
The judge who ordered Georgia officials on Sunday not to wipe or reset voting machines has scheduled the next hearing in the case for Friday.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten Sr., a George W. Bush appointee, issued three emergency orders on Sunday, initially ordering officials to hold off on taking action regarding the machines before reversing his order and then re-establishing the first order.
In a Nov. 30 order, Batten said his final decision on Sunday partially granting the defendants’ motion “involves a controlling question of law as to which there is substantial ground for difference of opinion and that an immediate appeal from the order may materially advance the ultimate termination of the litigation.”
The order enables defendants to appeal the temporary ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Defendants were ordered to file their brief by Dec. 2 while any reply brief will be due Dec. 3.
In a third filing, defendants said Charlene McGowan, Georgia’s assistant attorney general, will be appearing on behalf of the defendants, which include Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and state Election Board members.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 59-Pennsylvania Edition:
I took some much needed down time over the Thanksgiving holiday, but I am back at it today…..
A growing body of evidence shows the presidential election in Pennsylvania was compromised, a state senator said Saturday. “There is mounting evidence that the PA presidential election was compromised. If this is the case, under Article II, Section 1.2 of the U.S. Constitution, the state legislature has the sole authority to direct the manner of selecting delegates to the Electoral College,” state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican, said on Twitter. “This power was given to the state legislature for the purpose of safeguarding the appointment of our president, specifically contemplating corruption and ensuring that the people are not disenfranchised through a corrupt election process,” he added. “Therefore, we are introducing a resolution to exercise our obligation and authority to appoint delegates to the Electoral College.”
Mastriano and other state lawmakers announced Friday they will soon introduce a resolution to dispute the results of the election, alleging that “documented irregularities and improprieties associated with mail-in balloting, pre-canvassing, and canvassing have undermined our elector process and as a result we cannot accept certification of the results in statewide races.”
The resolution calls on the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to recognize the alleged irregularities and improprieties and disapprove of what lawmakers describe as the infringement on the General Assembly’s authority to regulate elections.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar extended the mail ballot deadline without permission from the legislature. The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month ordered Pennsylvania election officials to separate ballots that arrived after the previously-scheduled deadline up to the extended one while justices weigh whether the action was legal.
THE ELECTION FIX-Stay Tuned for a blockbuster post tomorrow morning (Nov 30), but here is a teaser:
Thousands of people registered and voted in Georgia using addresses of postal facilities or businesses, but making it look like they were residential addresses, according to a former Trump campaign official whose team analyzed the states’ voter data.
The addresses listed on the voter rolls included information that didn’t make sense for the actual locations, but on paper made the addresses look like residential ones, according to information published by Matt Braynard, former data and strategy director for President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
“Georgia: We have identified over a thousand early/abs votes cast by individuals whose registered addresses are in fact at post offices, UPS, and FedEx locations, willfully disguising the box numbers as ‘Apt,’ ‘Unit,’ etc.,” he said in a Nov. 22 tweet.
He published a sample of 15 such address entries in a Nov. 24 tweet. “With just a partial review of the state,” he said, the team also discovered “a thousand votes cast by those registered in non-residential, purely commercial addresses also disguised with ‘Apt,’ etc.” He added that these were “the residential addresses, not mailing addresses” that the voters have listed. Nearly all those “who disguised a postal facility as their residential address” used an absentee ballot to vote, he said.
Georgia election law says that “the residence of any person shall be held to be in that place in which such person’s habitation is fixed, without any present intention of removing therefrom.” Anyone who “knowingly gives false information when registering as an elector” can be charged with a felony and put in prison for up to 10 years or fined up to $100,000, the law says.
Other Findings
Braynard’s team also found some 1,400 voters in Pennsylvania listing postal facility addresses as residential, he said. Braynard previously reported that large percentages of registered Republicans in several battleground states said they returned their absentee ballots, even though the states’ data indicated they didn’t. Of the 1,137 Pennsylvania GOP voters reached on the phone who did request a ballot, nearly 42 percent said they mailed the ballots back, but the state data shows the ballots weren’t received or counted, he said.
In Arizona, 50 percent of Republican voters reached over the phone had the same story, as well as 44 percent in Georgia, nearly 33 percent in Michigan, and 20 percent in Wisconsin.
In Pennsylvania, over 160,000 uncounted mail-in ballots were requested by or in the name of registered Republicans. If the voters the team reached in the state reflect the broader population of voters, it would mean nearly 40,000 of them returned their ballots, or at least believe they did, according to the sworn affidavit of Steven Miller, mathematics professor at Williams College.
Braynard said he’ll soon publish a white paper on his findings.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part58-Georgia Update:
Sidney Powell Files Lawsuit in Georgia Alleging ‘Massive Election Fraud’
BY MIMI NGUYEN LY November 26, 2020:
Attorney Sidney Powell filed a federal lawsuit late Wednesday alleging “massive election fraud” and multiple violations of the Constitution and Georgia’s state laws in the 2020 general election, as well as issues pertaining to Dominion Voting Systems. The civil action alleges that the purpose of the scheme was for “illegally and fraudulently manipulating the vote count to make certain the election of Joe Biden as president of the United States.” A similar separate suit was filed in Michigan. The Georgia suit was filed in the U.S. District Court Northern District of Georgia Atlanta Division against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and other election officials.
The suit seeks to compel the court to invalidate the election results in Georgia. It was filed on behalf of plaintiffs including Republican Party nominees for the electoral college, the chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party Jason Shepherd, and the Assistant Secretary of the Georgia Republican Party, Brian Jay Van Gundy.
The 104-page complaint argues that “incontrovertible evidence Board of Elections records demonstrates that at least 96,600 absentee ballots were requested and counted but were never recorded as being returned to county election boards by the voter. Thus, at a minimum, 96,600 votes must be disregarded.”
According to the suit, fraud was also allegedly “executed by many means” but the “most troubling, insidious, and egregious” way was the “systemic adaptation of old-fashioned ‘ballot-stuffing.’” It alleges computerized ballot-stuffing and manipulation by software created and run by domestic and foreign actors. The complaint cited affidavits from multiple witnesses, documentation, as well as expert testimony that raised “sheer mathematical impossibilities” in the election results supporting the claims.
“Especially egregious conduct arose in Forsyth, Paulding, Cherokee, Hall, and Barrow County,” the complaint reads. “This scheme and artifice to defraud affected tens of thousands of votes in Georgia alone and ‘rigged’ the election in Georgia for Joe Biden.”
In particular, the suit took issue with election software and hardware from Dominion Voting Systems, which it noted was recently purchased and “rushed into use” by Kemp, Raffensperger, and the Georgia Board of Elections.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 57-Breaking News, Pennsylvania:
A Pennsylvania judge today ordered state officials to NOT certify the results of the 2020 election until her court holds a hearing on an election contest on Nov. 27.
Commonwealth Judge Patricia McCullough ordered the state to not take any further steps to complete the certification of the presidential race, which the state announced on Nov. 24. She also blocked the certification of all the other election results.
“To the extent that there remains any further action to perfect the certification of the results of the 2020 General Election for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States of America, respondents are preliminarily enjoined from doing so, pending an evidentiary hearing to be held on Friday,” the judge wrote in her order.
“Respondents are preliminarily enjoined from certifying the remaining results of the election, pending the evidentiary hearing.”
McCullough is presiding over a lawsuit brought by Republican lawmakers and candidates against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, and the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
The plaintiffs allege that Pennsylvania’s vote-by-mail statute—Act 77—is in violation of the state’s constitution. “Act 77 is the most expansive and fundamental change to the Pennsylvania voting code, implemented illegally, to date,” the lawsuit, filed in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, states. “As with prior historical attempts to illegally expand mail-in voting by statute, which have been struck down going as far back as the Military Absentee Ballot Act of 1839, Act 77 is another illegal attempt to override the limitations on absentee voting prescribed in the Pennsylvania Constitution, without first following the necessary procedure to amend the constitution to allow for the expansion.”
The plaintiffs include Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), Republican congressional candidate Sean Parnell, and Pennsylvania House of Representatives candidate Wanda Logan.
After the Keystone State announced the certification of the presidential election results on Nov. 24, the plaintiffs filed an emergency request just before midnight, arguing that there was no need to act so fast.
In 2016, Pennsylvania certified the presidential election on Dec. 12!!!! So why the rush this time? We know the answer…..
The emergency request underlined that while Pennsylvania completed vote-counting and submitted the signed certification to the U.S. archivist, a number of steps still remain for the formal certification process to be completed.
“While Respondents may have proactively attempted to avoid potential injunctive relief granted by this Court, Respondents duties with regard to finalization of the full election results are far from complete,” the filing states.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 56-Wisconsin Edition:
Group Files Emergency Petition in Wisconsin After Identifying 144,000 Potentially Fraudulent Ballots
BY ZACHARY STIEBER November 24, 2020 Updated: November 25, 2020
A group on Tuesday filed an emergency petition with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, challenging the state’s unofficial election results.
The Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project said it found tens of thousands of ballots that may be fraudulent.
“We have identified over 150,000 potentially fraudulent ballots in Wisconsin, more than enough to call into question the validity of the state’s reported election results,” said Phill Kline, director of the project, in a statement. The count includes 144,000 fraudulent votes and over 12,000 legal votes not counted.
“Moreover, these discrepancies were a direct result of Wisconsin election officials’ willful violation of state law,” he added.
According to unofficial results in the state, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump by about 20,000 votes.
The group said it found that more than 10,000 Republican ballots weren’t counted; more than 10,000 GOP voters who had their ballots requested and filled in by another person; and around 100,000 illegal ballots that were counted anyway.
The 45-page filing asks the Wisconsin Supreme Court to block the certification of election results because of the alleged irregularities. The lawsuit details a series of alleged illegal actions taken by Wisconsin officials that led to significant numbers of improper votes being counted. One example is not enforcing state laws that require voters to present photo identification when requesting an absentee, or mail-in, ballot. The only exceptions are for voters who are hospitalized or “indefinitely confined because of age, physical illness, or infirmity.” The indefinite confinement exception was interpreted to apply to people with COVID-19. Statistical analysis shows nearly 100,000 exploited the exception, the project said.
The possibly fraudulent ballots were identified in a data analysis performed by statistician Matthew Braynard and mathematician Steven Miller.
The project announced last week it would be filing federal and state lawsuits challenging the presidential election results in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona.
Two Wisconsin counties are currently engaged in a recount initiated at the request of the Trump campaign.
The deadline for the partial recount is Dec. 1.
The Thomas More Society, based in Chicago, describes itself as a national public interest law firm dedicated to providing free legal services for clients all over the United States in defense of life, family, and religious liberty.
THE ELECTION FIX, Part 55-Newt Gingrich Edition, plus, watch what happens in Georgia today:
The Thieves Who Stole Our Election Got Sloppy
Newt Gingrich November 24, 2020 Updated: November 25, 2020
Laziness leads to sloppiness, and sloppiness is how the most brazen heist in American history is being exposed.
Stealing the 2020 election was a mammoth undertaking, involving widespread lawlessness and illicit partnerships between private actors and public officials. They’ve been working to cover their tracks since Election Day, but they didn’t work fast enough. Now, the courts need to stop them from destroying any more evidence so that the people of Pennsylvania—and the rest of the country—can accurately assess the ramifications of their wrongdoing.
Explosive new litigation filed in federal district court on Nov. 21 details and documents a wide variety of illegal practices that were used to inflate the number of votes received by Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, including disparate treatment of voters based on where they live and outright manipulation of Pennsylvania’s voter registration system by partisan activists.
An unprecedented number of mail-in and absentee ballots were cast this year, and practically everyone expected that this would result in a higher-than-usual rate of ballots being rejected for various flaws, such as lacking a secrecy envelope or missing information. In Pennsylvania, tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots were likely to be rejected, based on historical patterns. Instead, a mere 0.03 percent of mail-in ballots were ultimately rejected—somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1,000 votes!!!!! Let that sink in.
Considering that a significant majority of mail-in votes were cast for Biden, the Democrat candidate benefited handsomely from this discrepancy. But how did this anomaly happen?
It turns out that election officials in Democrat strongholds such as Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Philadelphia County, and Philadelphia’s collar counties—particularly Delaware County—exceeded their authority in order to give voters preferential treatment that wasn’t afforded to voters in Republican-leaning areas of the state.
Specifically, election workers illegally “pre-canvassed” mail-in ballots to determine whether they were missing a secrecy envelope or failed to include necessary information. When ballots were found to be flawed, voters were given an opportunity to correct, or “cure,” their ballots to make sure they counted. In at least some cases, Democrat Party officials were even given lists of voters to contact about curing their ballots.
Election officials in Republican-leaning counties rightly interpreted this as a violation of Pennsylvania’s election code, but Democrat Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar issued guidance authorizing the illegal practices despite lacking the statutory authority to do so.
That’s not the only way Democrats broke the law to give their candidate an unfair advantage, though. Extensive on-the-ground investigations conducted over the past year and a half by attorneys and investigators with the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society have uncovered another element of the plot that involved even more egregious behavior.
Boockvar also exceeded her authority by granting private, partisan organizations—including the notoriously pro-Democrat group “Rock the Vote”—access to the Commonwealth’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE).
“Rock the Vote’s web tool was connected to our system, making the process of registering voters through their online programs, and those of their partners, seamless for voters across Pennsylvania,” the lawsuit quotes Boockvar as saying. That’s not supposed to happen. It’s one thing for outside groups to submit registration applications to the state on behalf of would-be voters, but election clerks are the only ones who are supposed to enter this sort of information directly into the records.
It’s easy to see why by inspecting post-election voter lists, which contain names such as “Mary April Smith,” followed by “Mary May Smith,” “Mary June Smith,” “Mary July Smith,” and so forth through the rest of the calendar. When the same voter lists were purchased just a week later, however, those suspicious names had mysteriously disappeared from the rolls.
Under the circumstances, that’s direct evidence of a systematic effort to conceal wrongdoing. All further alterations to the SURE system should be immediately halted to allow a thorough investigation of the records before any more evidence can be destroyed. The thieves who attempted to hijack the 2020 presidential election were bound to slip up somewhere, and now they’re trying to clean up the glaring evidence of their wrongdoing before the full extent of their crimes can be exposed to the American public. We can’t allow that to happen, or we may never be able to trust the integrity of our elections again.
The Most Brazen Heist in the History of America.
THE FIX-Voting Machine Certifications: Not So Fast, Mister
Long but very important…..
The fallout of the Nov. 3 elections has put the spotlight on the integrity of electronic voting machines used in the United States. In response, authorities have pointed to certifications of the machines as a safeguard against potential systemic problems with the voting machines and their software.
A deeper look into the certification process used for the machines reveals that the main certification agency in the United States—the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC)—maintains an unexpectedly small staff, and one of its chief employees is a former executive of Dominion Voting Systems!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Furthermore, it appears the bulk—if not all—of the testing of the election equipment is conducted by only two companies, Pro V&V and SLI Compliance.
Lightly-staffed federal agencies that maintain overly close ties to the companies they are supposed to be monitoring raises additional questions about the thoroughness and integrity of the verification process.
Kathy Boockvar, just two weeks after she was appointed as Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, concluded in a Jan. 17, 2019, report (pdf) that Dominion’s “Democracy Suite 5.5A” voting machine “can be safely used by voters at elections,” and certified the Dominion voting systems in Pennsylvania.
Representing Dominion in that process was Jessica Bowers, director of certification for Dominion. In addition to Pennsylvania, Bowers appears to have been responsible for the implementation of Dominion systems into a number of other states, including California, Colorado, Nevada, and Tennessee.
However, after enjoying a 10-year career at Dominion, Bowers would find her way into a new career path at the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC)!!!!!!!!!!!
The EAC, which describes itself as “an independent bipartisan commission,” is responsible for adopting voluntary voting system guidelines and provides for the accreditation of manufacturers’ voting systems and voting system testing laboratories.
In May 2019, just as the agency was preparing for the 2020 election, it announced the departure of Ryan Macias, who had served as EAC’s acting director of testing and certification. Macias’s position was an important one—he was responsible for managing EAC’s program that “works with the country’s top voting equipment vendors to certify and decertify voting system hardware and software, and accredits labs for testing equipment,” according to the website CyberScoop. Additionally, Macias had been overseeing an “important update to voting system security guidelines.”
On May 9, 2019, the EAC announced that they had selected Jerome Lovato, who had worked at the EAC since September 2017, to replace Macias. The resignation of Macias and the subsequent appointment of Lovato raised some concerns in Congress, as noted in a letter sent to the EAC by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.). “Following the resignation of Ryan Macias, public reporting indicates that the EAC now employs only one full-time staff member dedicated to overseeing the certification process. While we understand that the Commission may be working to hire additional staff, we are concerned by the sudden appointment of Jerome Lovato to be the Director of Testing and Certification especially as reports indicating that Mr. Lovato will be working remotely, more than a thousand miles from EAC headquarters. As states continue to update their election equipment and vendors develop new machines, it is essential that Testing and Certification at the EAC be fully operational,” the senators wrote in their letter. “Given the length of time the certification process can take, we are concerned that the EAC will not be able to certify the machines that states intend to use as part of their modernization efforts ahead of the 2020 elections.”
The concern over the EAC having only “one full-time staff member dedicated to overseeing the certification process” seems understandable, given the potential importance of that duty. The senators asked the EAC what actions they would be taking to shore up personnel ahead of the 2020 election.
That question was answered on May 21, 2019, with the announcement that the EAC was adding two individuals to its voting certification program—Bowers, recently the director of certification for Dominion and a 10-year veteran with the firm!!!!!!!!!, and Paul Aumayr, a former Maryland election official.
An article describing the new hires noted, “It was not immediately clear how the EAC might mitigate any potential conflicts of interest that could arise with hiring Bowers, the former director of certification at Dominion Voting Systems, onto the EAC program.”
The EAC website describes Bowers as managing “voting system testing and certification projects as well as assisting the development of new Voluntary Voting System Guidelines” but fails to disclose any direct mention of her role at Dominion Voting Systems.
“Prior to joining the EAC, she was the Director of Certification for a voting system manufacturer (“a voting system manufacturer”, seriously?) and has worked in the election industry in software development and certification since 2008,” the website states.
Under EAC staff members, Bowers is listed as acting CIO/CISO, while Aumayr is listed as senior election technology specialist. Despite the important role the EAC plays in election integrity, they list only a total of 23 staff members, five executives (of which Lovato is one), and four commissioners. The EAC does have a large board of advisers comprised of 37 individuals.
Only 2 Certified Testers of Election Equipment:
On the EAC website, there are seven voting system test laboratories (VSTL) listed. However, only two of these testing labs, Pro V&V and SLI Compliance, are listed on the page as accredited, as the others are listed as having their accreditation expired.
From early 2017 on, these two companies are the only testing labs to have provided voting system certification, according to a listing of certifications by the EAC.
For one of the two companies used, Pro V&V, the EAC fails to publicly provide the accreditation certificate on its website, instead linking to a page giving a “page could not be found” warning.
The latest certificate listed for Pro V&V on the company’s profile overview on the EAC website has an issue date of Feb. 24, 2015, and is effective through Feb. 24, 2017. It’s unclear if the company’s accreditation is truly expired or if the fault lies with the EAC website.
Despite being responsible for the testing and data used in the certification of entire voting systems, including that of Dominion’s recently certified “Democracy Suite (D-Suite) 5.5-C Voting System (Pro V&V Test Report, June 16),” while simultaneously providing system testing across the nation, Pro V&V has only a single office listed, located in a business suite, that’s supported by a surprisingly crude and sparse website.
The website description of Pro V&V’s facilities omits the “Suite” portion of their address while claiming their “office and laboratory layouts allow ample space for test equipment, software, and hardware used in the testing process.” Their site also claims they have the option of expanding into additional space within the same complex.
Pro V&V, like Dominion Voting and Smartmatic, is a member of CISA’s Sector Coordinating Council, the same council that recently issued the joint statement on the 2020 presidential election. The other primary testing lab, SLI Compliance, also is a member of the same council.
In response to recent allegations of potential problems with the integrity of Dominion’s voting machines used in the Nov. 3 election, Pro V&V has been cited repeatedly as an authority in denying these allegations, including the recount in Georgia.
If this isn’t a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse, I don’t know what is.
In July 2019, despite existing legal challenges, Georgia purchased a $106 million election system from Dominion. In a lawsuit that originated in 2017, critics contended that the new system was subject to many of the same security vulnerabilities as the one it was replacing.
The issue most recently came to a head after credible accusations emerged of problems with voting machines.
Sworn affidavits, filed as part of an emergency motion on Nov. 17, detail allegations by poll observers of potential election fraud. Among other things, the poll workers recounted similar instances of pristine ballots that had similar characteristics: “They were all for Biden and had the same perfect black bubble.”
However, on that same day, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger issued a statement announcing the completion of the state’s voting machine audit, which claimed, “Pro V&V found no evidence of the machines being tampered.”
It’s all a little club and Trump is not a member.
The statement was widely cited by media organizations and others as evidence that claims of problems with voting machines in Georgia were meritless.
A closer examination of the statement, however, indicates that the only thing Pro V&V did was extract “the software or firmware from the components to check that the only software or firmware on the components was certified for use by the Secretary of State’s office.”
The headline of the release appears to have been more important than the scope of the actual functions performed by Pro V&V.
In an Aug. 24 sworn declaration, Harri Hursti, an acknowledged expert on electronic voting security, provided a first-hand description of problems he observed with Georgia’s new voting systems during the June 9 statewide primary election and the runoff elections on Aug. 11.
Hursti told the court of a series of problems, including the fact that “the scanner and tabulation software settings being employed to determine which votes to count on hand-marked paper ballots are likely causing clearly intentioned votes not to be counted.”
Hursti also said that “the voting system is being operated in Fulton County in a manner that escalates the security risk to an extreme level,” and that “voters are not reviewing their BMD [Ballot Marking Devices] printed ballots, which causes BMD-generated results to be un-auditable due to the untrustworthy audit trail.”
Separately, during pre-election testing of Dominion’s voting systems in Georgia in late September, election officials discovered a problem with the display for the U.S. Senate race, finding that under certain circumstances, not all of the candidates’ names fit on a single screen.
Lawyers for Dominion called the problem a “very minor issue” easily fixed with changes to the software. Lawyers for “voting integrity activists,” already involved in lawsuits over Georgia’s new Dominion system, voiced concerns over “the severity of the problem and the security of a last-minute fix.”
Dominion submitted the software fix to Pro V&V, for evaluation. Notably, Pro V&V had just recently provided certification testing for Dominion’s Democracy Suite 5.5-C on April 20 and June 16, leading to the July 9, EAC certification but had not caught the software problem at the time.
On Oct. 1, a Zoom court hearing took place and a transcript of that hearing was created. During the call, a Dr. Coomer from Dominion joined the Zoom meeting. Although no first name was provided, it appears to refer to Dr. Eric Coomer, director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems.
Coomer told the court it was his belief the software change “was de minimis,” but stated that Dominion didn’t make that determination but instead “submit that change to an accredited laboratory, in this case, Pro V&V. They analyze the change. They look at the code. And they determine whether it is de minimis or not.”
Later during the hearing, Coomer was asked if he knew whom at Pro V&V was performing the software testing. Coomer said he didn’t and noted, “I don’t know the makeup of Pro V&V’s employees.”
This statement from Coomer is simply bull…t. There are only three employees of Pro V&V!
—Jack Cobb, Michael Walker, and Wendy Owens—
It was Owens and Walker who performed the Nov. 26, 2019, testing for the certification of Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite 5.5-A and it was these same two individuals who provided the April 13 and June 16 testing of Dominion’s Democracy Suite 5.5-C. Additionally, Pro V&V and Dominion are both members of the same CISA council!!!!
Indeed, on Oct. 2, a letter from Wendy Owens of Pro V&V was sent, confirming “that this version of the ICX software corrected the issue with displaying of two column contests.” The letter concluded with a recommendation from Pro V&V that the software change to Dominion’s systems be “deemed as de minimis.”
On Oct. 3, a declaration from Dr. J. Alex Halderman was filed that refuted the procedures of Pro V&V’s testing, noting that the “report makes clear that Pro V&V performed only cursory testing of this new software. The company did not attempt to independently verify the cause of the ballot display problem, nor did it adequately verify that the changes are an effective solution. Pro V&V also appears to have made no effort to test whether the changes create new problems that impact the reliability, accuracy, or security of the BMD system.”
That is all I can report at this time.