 A forensic audit of voting equipment produced by Dominion Voting Systems and used in the State of Michigan for the 2020 election, ordered by the 13th Circuit Court for Michigan's Grand Traverse, Antrim and Leelanau counties, has found major irregularities in the tabulation of votes. Pictured: The Grand Traverse County Courthouse, seat of Michigan's 13th Circuit Court. (Image source: rossograph/Wikimedia Commons) |
A forensic audit of voting equipment produced by Dominion Voting Systems and used in the State of Michigan for the 2020 election has found major irregularities in the tabulation of votes. The audit found a 68% error rate in Antrim County, where thousands of votes for U.S. President Donald J. Trump were wrongly "flipped" to former Vice President Joe Biden on November 3, 2020.
The high error rate was, according to the auditors, due to an algorithm placed inside the Dominion software that assigned different weights to votes cast for different candidates at a 2/3 to 1/3 ratio. This allowed election officials to apply a weighted numerical value to candidates and change the overall result. The declaration of winners was done on a basis of points, not votes, according to the auditors.
The audit also found that all server security logs prior to 11:03 pm on November 4, 2020 were wiped clean. As a result, all security logs for the day after the election, on election day, and prior to election day are missing. In addition, all vote adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes, according to the auditors. Federal law requires that all election records must be preserved for a period of 22 months from the date of any general election.
The court-ordered audit, which was limited to 22 voting machines in one county, does not prove that fraud occurred in the other U.S. states that use Dominion voting software. It does, however, raise suspicions and will fuel demands for a full forensic audit of the 2020 election in six battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — where Biden leads Trump by relatively small margins.
The 23-page audit — ordered by Judge Kevin Elsenheimer of the 13th Circuit Court for Michigan's Grand Traverse, Antrim and Leelanau counties and carried out by Allied Security Operations Group, a team of military and intelligence professionals — effectively confirms the conclusions of other data scientists and expert witnesses who have warned that the equipment produced by Dominion is designed to produce fraudulent election results.
Key points of the audit include:
"We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that the Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified."
"The Antrim County Clerk and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson have stated that the election night error [the vote 'flip' from Trump to Biden] was the result of human error caused by the failure to update the Mancelona Township tabulator prior to election night for a down ballot race. We disagree and conclude that the vote flip occurred because of machine error built into the voting software designed to create error."
"The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity."
"The tabulation log for the forensic examination of the server for Antrim County from December 6, 2020 consists of 15,676 individual events, of which 10,667 or 68.05% of the events were recorded errors. These errors resulted in overall tabulation errors or ballots being sent to adjudication. This high error rates proves the Dominion Voting System is flawed and does not meet state or federal election laws."
"It is critical to understand that the Dominion system classifies ballots into two categories, 1) normal ballots and 2) adjudicated ballots. Ballots sent to adjudication can be altered by administrators, and adjudication files can be moved between different Results Tally and Reporting (RTR) terminals with no audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicates (i.e. votes) the ballot batch. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity because it provides no meaningful observation of the adjudication processor audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicated the ballots."
"A staggering number of votes required adjudication. This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles still stored on the server. This is caused by intentional errors in the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency or audit trail. Our examination of the server logs indicates that this high error rate was incongruent with patterns from previous years. The statement attributing these issues to human error is not consistent with the forensic evaluation, which points more correctly to systemic machine and/or software errors. The systemic errors are intentionally designed to create errors in order to push a high volume of ballots to bulk adjudication."
"Antrim County failed to properly update its system. A purposeful lack of providing basic computer security updates in the system software and hardware demonstrates incompetence, gross negligence, bad faith, and/or willful non-compliance in providing the fundamental system security required by federal and state law. There is no way this election management system could have passed tests or have been legally certified to conduct the 2020 elections in Michigan under the current laws."
"Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes. The lack of records prevents any form of audit accountability, and their conspicuous absence is extremely suspicious since the files exist for previous years using the same software. Removal of these files violates state law and prevents a meaningful audit, even if the Secretary wanted to conduct an audit. We must conclude that the 2020 election cycle records have been manually removed."
"Likewise, all server security logs prior to 11:03 pm on November 4, 2020 are missing. This means that all security logs for the day after the election, on election day, and prior to election day are gone. Security logs are very important to an audit trail, forensics, and for detecting advanced persistent threats and outside attacks, especially on systems with outdated system files. These logs would contain domain controls, authentication failures, error codes, times users logged on and off, network connections to file servers between file accesses, internet connections, times, and data transfers. Other server logs before November 4, 2020 are present; therefore, there is no reasonable explanation for the security logs to be missing."
"On November 21, 2020, an unauthorized user unsuccessfully attempted to zero out election results. This demonstrates additional tampering with data."
"Based on the preliminary results, we conclude that the errors are so significant that they call into question the integrity and legitimacy of the results in the Antrim County 2020 election to the point that the results are not certifiable. Because the same machines and software are used in 48 other counties in Michigan, this casts doubt on the integrity of the entire election in the state of Michigan."
"On Sunday December 6, 2020, our forensics team visited the Antrim County Clerk. There were two USB memory sticks used, one contained the software package used to tabulate election results on November 3, 2020, and the other was programmed on November 6, 2020 with a different software package which yielded significantly different voting outcomes."
"This software programming should be standard across all voting machines systems for the duration of the entire election if accurate tabulation is the expected outcome as required by US Election Law. This intentional difference in software programming is a design feature to alter election outcomes."
"The election day outcomes were calculated using the original software programming on November 3, 2020. On November 5, 2020 the township clerk was asked to re-run the Central Lake Township ballots and was given no explanation for this unusual request. On November 6, 2020 the Antrim County Clerk, Sheryl Guy, issued the second version of software to re-run the same Central Lake Township ballots and oversaw the process. This resulted in greater than a 60% change in voting results."
"As the tabulator tape totals prove, there were large numbers of votes switched from the November 3, 2020 tape to the November 6, 2020 tape. This was solely based on using different software versions of the operating program to calculate votes, not tabulate votes. This is evidenced by using same the Dominion System with two different software program versions contained on the two different USB Memory Devices."
"The Help America Vote Act, Safe Harbor provides a 90-day period prior to elections where no changes can be made to election systems. To make changes would require recertification of the entire system for use in the election."
"The November 6, 2020 note from The Office of the Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson states: 'The correct results always were and continue to be reflected on the tabulator totals tape and on the ballots themselves. Even if the error in the reported unofficial results had not been quickly noticed, it would have been identified during the county canvass. Boards of County Canvassers, which are composed of 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans, review the printed totals tape from each tabulator during the canvass to verify the reported vote totals are correct.'"
"Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's statement is false. Our findings show that the tabulator tape totals were significantly altered by utilization of two different program versions, and not just the Dominion Election Management System. This is the opposite of the claim that the Office of the Secretary of State made on its website. The fact that these significant errors were not caught in ballot testing and not caught by the local county clerk shows that there are major inherent built-in vulnerabilities and process flaws in the Dominion Election Management System, and that other townships/precincts and the entire election have been affected."
"A high 'error rate' in the election software (in this case 68.05%) reflects an algorithm used that will weight one candidate greater than another (for instance, weight a specific candidate at a 2/3 to approximately 1/3 ratio). In the logs we identified that the RCV or Ranked Choice Voting Algorithm was enabled. This allows the user to apply a weighted numerical value to candidates and change the overall result. The declaration of winners can be done on a basis of points, not votes."
"The Dominion software configuration logs in the Divert Options, shows that all write-in ballots were flagged to be diverted automatically for adjudication. This means that all write-in ballots were sent for 'adjudication' by a poll worker or election official to process the ballot based on voter 'intent'. Adjudication files allow a computer operator to decide to whom to award those votes (or to trash them)."
The audit corroborates testimony by numerous technology experts that Dominion voting machines are inherently insecure and vulnerable to manipulation.
In Georgia, for instance, an election supervisor in Coffee County demonstrated in a video how easily ballots can be altered with no trace.
In Pennsylvania, retired Army Colonel Phil Waldron, a cybersecurity expert, explained how Dominion voting systems were built to be manipulated:
"So, these systems, in a nutshell, allow authorized and unauthorized users to cancel votes, shift votes, pre-load votes, vote blank ballots, all in real-time, and in large numbers. Our experts and other academics believe that up to 1.2 million Pennsylvania votes could have been altered or fraudulent. Only a detailed forensic analysis of the actual machines and software will truly show how many Pennsylvania citizens have had their civil rights violated."
In Texas, election authorities rejected the use of Dominion hardware and software at least three times due to security concerns. A document dated January 24, 2020 from the Texas Secretary of State noted:
"The examiner reports identified multiple hardware and software issues that preclude the Office of the Texas Secretary of State from determining that the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system satisfies each of the voting-system requirements set forth in the Texas Election Code. Specifically, the examiner reports raise concerns about whether the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system is suitable for its intended purpose; operates efficiently and accurately; and is safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation. Therefore, the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system and corresponding hardware devices do not meet the standards for certification prescribed by Section 122.001 of the Texas Election Code."
In Arizona, legislators have called for an independent audit of the Dominion hardware and software used by Maricopa County in the 2020 general election.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Gary Miliefsky, a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security and publisher of Cyber Defense Magazine, said of the Michigan audit team:
"Looking at their team, their patents, their experience, we now have a credible analysis that, as I predicted, the Algorithms being used in the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed to create systematic fraud and influence election results and, in this case, not in the favor of President Trump."
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.
Richard Lane