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Reports are pouring in of massive corruption and fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. The allegations run the gamut from ballot harvesting to rigged software, from duplicate voting to voting by deceased people, from outdated voter rolls to failing to match signatures, and from voter intimidation to altering the vote count. Whistleblowers in several states have signed affidavits that allege criminal activity during the voting process.
Lawyers for U.S. President Donald J. Trump have filed more than 20 legal challenges in several states and have called for recounts in others. U.S. Attorney General William Barr has authorized federal prosecutors to probe alleged irregularities.
Arguably the most explosive fraud claims involve ballot tabulators manufactured by a Colorado-based company called Dominion Voting Systems that allegedly changed hundreds of thousands of votes from President Trump to Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Most of the allegations regarding Dominion, which controls more than a third of the voting-machine market, involve a half-dozen battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that mysteriously stopped counting votes after midnight on Election Day. President Trump was ahead in those states, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of votes, before the counting stopped. The next morning, after a series of pre-dawn "vote dumps" — that in some instances went 100% for Joe Biden — the former Vice President emerged seemingly victorious.
Forensic accountants, applying the so-called Benford's Law of statistical probability, have said that the election results, particularly in Pennsylvania, show clear signs of fraud.
On November 12, President Trump tweeted that as many as 2.7 million Trump votes had been deleted and switched to Biden in Pennsylvania and other battleground states using the software.
Dominion, whose voting systems are used in more than 2,000 jurisdictions in 30 states, has categorically denied the allegations, but former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, a member of President Trump's legal team, said that she will soon present overwhelming evidence that the machines fundamentally altered the outcome of the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden. In a November 12 interview with Lou Dobbs, she said:
"I can hardly wait to put forth all of the evidence we have collected on Dominion, starting with the fact that it was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chávez, and then shift internationally to manipulate votes for purchase in other countries, including this one. It was funded by money from Venezuela and Cuba and China has a role in it also. So, if you want to talk about foreign election interference, we certainly have it now.
"We have staggering statistical evidence, we have staggering testimony from witnesses, including one who was personally in briefings when all of this was discussed and planned, beginning with Hugo Chávez and how it was designed there and then saw it happening in this country.
"As soon as the states shut down on election night and stopped counting, those are the states where the most egregious problems occurred. We also need to look at, and we're beginning to collect evidence on, the financial interests of some of the governors and secretaries of state who actually bought into the Dominion systems — surprisingly enough, Hunter Biden-type graft — to line their own pockets by getting a voting machine in that would either make sure their election was successful, or they got money for their family from it.
"For fraud this serious, I think, even if the states are stupid enough to go ahead and certify the votes where we know the machines were operating and producing altered election results, if they are stupid enough to do that, then they will be set aside by the fraud also. I mean, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of votes. President Trump won this election in a landslide. It's going to be irrefutable. Patriots are coming forward every day all day faster than we can collect their information with testimony they are willing to give under oath about how their votes were stolen and how the machines operated. They were updated the night of the election, sometimes after the election. We've got statistical evidence that shows hundreds of thousands of votes being just put in and replicated. There needs to be a massive criminal investigation, and it's going to affect millions of voters.
"Democratic senators and congress people for years have reported problems with this system to the FBI and to the government and no one has done a blooming thing about it. The people in the election security part of the Department of Homeland Security need to be fired yesterday. They are absolutely ridiculous. Of course, Chris Wray needs to be fired too because the only FBI interview with any witness was to intimidate him and try to get him to change his truthful testimony for hours by an anti-Trump FBI agent. They still have politics infecting the FBI instead of just following the law.
"We're on the precipice. This is essentially a new American revolution and anyone who wants this country to remain free needs to step up right now. These are federal felonies. Altering a vote or changing a ballot is a federal felony. People need to come forward now and get on the right side of this issue and report the fraud they know existed in Dominion voting systems because that's what it was created to do. It was its sole original purpose. It has been used all over the world to defy the will of people who wanted freedom.
"It's been organized and conducted with the help from Silicon Valley people, the big tech companies, the social media companies, even the media companies. I'm going to release the Kraken [vengeance is coming].
"It is indeed a very foul mess. It is farther and wider and deeper than we ever thought but we are going to go after it and I am going to expose every one of them."
In a November 15 interview with Maria Bartiromo, Powell added:
"We're fixing to overturn the results of the elections in multiple states. President Trump won by not hundreds of thousands of votes but by millions of votes that were shifted by this software that was designed expressly for that purpose. We have sworn witness testimony of why the software was designed — it was designed to rig elections. He was fully briefed on it, he saw it happen in other countries, it was exported internationally for profit by the people who are behind Smartmatic and Dominion. They did this on purpose, it was calculated, they've done it before, we have evidence from 2016 in California, we have so much evidence that I feel like it's coming in through a fire hose.
"First, I never say anything I can't prove. Second, the evidence is coming in so fast I can't even process it all. Millions of Americans have written, definitely hundreds of thousands have stepped up with their different experiences of voter fraud. But this is a massive election fraud, and I'm very concerned it involved not only Dominion and its Smartmatic software, but that the software essentially was used by other election machines also. It's the software that was the problem. Even their own manual explains how votes can be wiped away, it's like drag and drop Trump votes into a separate folder and then delete that folder. It's absolutely brazen how people bought this system and why they bought this system. In fact, every state that bought Dominion should, for sure, have a criminal investigation or at least a serious investigation of the officers in the states who bought the software. We've even got evidence of kickbacks.
"We're collecting evidence now from various whistleblowers that are aware of substantial sums of money being given to family members of state officials who bought the software. We're talking about hundred-million-dollar packages for new voting machines suddenly in multiple states and benefits ranging from financial benefits for family members to what I would call election insurance, because they know that they can win the election if they are using that software.
"It's really an insidious, corrupt system and I can't tell you how livid I am with our government for not paying attention to complaints even brought by Democrats — Carolyn Maloney, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar — over the last several years in written letters with expert reports and some documentation of how corrupt this software is, and nobody in our government has paid any attention to it, which makes me wonder how much the CIA has used it for its own benefit in different places and why [CIA Director] Gina Haspel is still there in the CIA is beyond my comprehension. She should be fired immediately.
"The CIA, the FBI and other government organizations have received multiple reports of wrongdoing and failures and vulnerabilities in this company's product. Their [Dominion's] own manual, if you sat down and read it, would explain how and why no honest person would use this system. It's not just Dominion, other companies in the voting machine business in this country may very well be, and are likely using the same software.
"We've detected voting irregularities that are inexplicable and aligned with these problems in other states that think they have valid systems. But the people who bought the Dominion system, for sure, knew exactly what they were getting. It should never have been installed anywhere. We are going to show the public exactly how rotten the entire state is.
"They can stick a thumb drive in the machine or upload software to it, even from the internet, they can do it from Germany or Venezuela even. They can remote access anything, they can watch votes in real time, they can shift votes in real time. We've identified mathematically the exact algorithm they used and planned to use from the beginning to modify the votes — in this case to make sure Biden won. That's why he said he didn't need your votes now, he would need you later. He was right. In his demented state, he had no filter and he was speaking the truth more than once, including when he said he had the largest voter fraud organization ever. Well, it's massive election fraud, it's going to undo the entire election, and they can do anything they want with the votes. They can have the machines not read the signature. They can have the machines not read the down ballot. They can make the machines read and catalogue only the Biden votes. It's like drag and drop whatever you want wherever you want, upload votes. In fact, we've got math in Michigan and Pennsylvania that all of a sudden hundreds of thousands of votes at a 67% ratio for Biden and a 23% ratio for Trump were uploaded multiple times into the system.
"We have a sworn statement from a witness who knew exactly how it worked from the beginning, why it was designed to work that way, and saw when things started shutting down, and they stopped counting the votes here, it was the same play that had worked in other countries."
President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, in an interview with Bartiromo, said:
"It's way beyond what people think, including a very dangerous foreign company that did the votes in 27 states, a company that is not American, a company that is foreign, a company that has close, close ties with Venezuela and therefore China, and uses a Venezuelan company's software that's been used to steal elections in other countries. I don't think people have any idea of the dimension of the national security problem that Dominion creates.
"This Dominion company is a radical left company, one of the people there is a big supporter of Antifa and has written horrible things about the president for the last three or four years. The software that they use is done by a company called Smartmatic. It's a company that was founded by Hugo Chávez, and by his two allies who still own it. It's been used to cheat in elections in South America. It was banned by the United States about a decade ago. It's come back now as a subcontractor to other companies to sort of hide in the weeds, but Dominion sends everything to Smartmatic. Can you believe it, our votes are sent overseas? They are sent someplace else, to some other country. Why do they leave our country?
"This company has tried and true methods for fixing elections by calling a halt to the voting when you're running too far behind. They've done that in prior elections. Now, what happened on election night? He [Trump] was ahead by 800,000 votes in Pennsylvania, impossible [for Biden] to catch up, unless you are cheating. The same thing in Michigan, Wisconsin, he [Trump] was ahead in all those states, by numbers that in prior times networks would have called for him. But they did not call it for him. We were ahead in those states, for example, 800,000 votes ahead in Pennsylvania, 64% of the vote cast, he was outpolling every projection possible, so, right down to the rigged polls before, this is another attempt to try to defeat him by illegal means. It's no different than the impeachment, done by largely the same people who were involved in it.
"The chairman of Smartmatic is a close business associate of George Soros. I have to tell you more? Finally, if you want to get down to the votes, let's pick Pennsylvania. We have identified 632,000 illegal votes. It's enough to have the president win the state by 300,000, which is actually what he won it by, if you get that Smartmatic machine out. I mean this is unprecedented...."
Whistleblower Melissa Carone, an IT contractor for Dominion Software, described the massive fraud she witnessed on Election Day in Detroit, Michigan. In a sworn affidavit dated November 8, she stated:
"At approximately midnight I was called over to assist one of the counters with a paper jam and noticed his PC had a number of over 400 ballots scanned, which means one batch was counted over 8 times. This happened countless times while I was at the TCF Center. I confronted my manager, Nick Ikonomakis [former VP of Development at Dominion] saying how big of a problem this was, Nick told me he didn't want to hear that we have a big problem. He told me we are here to do assist with IT work, not to run their election.
"The adjudication process, from my understanding there's supposed to be a Republican and a Democrat judging these ballots. I overheard numerous workers talking during shift change in which over 20 machines had two Democrats judging the ballots-resulting in an unfair process....
"When a worker had a ballot that they either could not read, or it had something spilled on it, they would go to a table that had blank ballots on it and fill it out. They were supposed to be filling them out exactly like the one they had received but this was not the case at all. The workers would also sign the name of the person that the ballot belonged to-which is clearly illegal....
"I was the only Republican working for Dominion Voting, and on the stage there was many terrible comments being made by the city workers and Dominion workers about Republicans. I did not give out any indication that I was a Republican, I have a family at home and knew I was going to have to walk to my car at the end of my shift. If anyone had an American flag on their shirt or mask, they were automatically deemed to be Trump supporters.
"I called the FBI and made a report with them, I was told that I will be getting a call back."
In a November 12 interview with Eric Metaxas, Trump Campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis said:
"What we're uncovering is massive, massive fraud. There will be lawsuits that will be filed within the coming days. For all the American people who are saying, when are we going to see the evidence, when are we going to get to the bottom of this, investigations do take time. We're working as rapidly as possible. What we're discovering, the people who are coming forward as whistleblowers, to explain what they saw, not only at the polling locations, how they were denied access to the polling locations, but even more than that, what we're seeing with this Dominion voting system, this is huge.
"The president has tweeted about this today. Reports are coming out, and what we're seeing is that possibly up to 2.7 million votes were simply deleted, that were for President Trump. How their voting system was able to have users that would log in and see the votes as they were coming in. If it was a Trump vote they could manually change it to a Biden vote. They could duplicate the vote if it was a Biden vote, and have a person cast not one but six votes for Biden. All of this technology, we really need a forensic audit, we need to know exactly what happened.... There is no doubt in my mind that the president is absolutely right, this election was rigged. Now it's just a matter of gathering the evidence, filing the lawsuits and getting to the proof in court.
"This isn't just about the 2.7 million votes, which is an astounding number. The mainstream media is trying to use this term 'widespread fraud' to move the goalpost and to basically say 'this doesn't matter, this doesn't matter, Biden is the president-elect. We've coronated him. That's the end of the story.' But even more than that, when you have this amount of intentional malfeasance, when you have this much criminal activity, this is really a disenfranchisement of the entire nation at this point, because when you look at what's going on, this isn't just a mailman who takes a stack of votes...this is such sinister evil conduct that it's an intentionally designed system to have user manipulation so that they can disenfranchise the entire nation....
"If Joe Biden and the Democrats were really concerned about truth and fact-finding, and they actually want to know the truth and get to the bottom of this, they would be okay with that, they would say wait, this is not the American system, we agree that every legal vote should count, we want to make sure that if we win, we want to do so legitimately. But they're not saying that. They want to ignore what is rapidly becoming one of the greatest scandals in American history....
"You have such a systematic, widespread, intentional abuse of our election system because they want to control the system and then, ultimately, dismantle it."
Concerns about Dominion and Smartmatic are Not New
Lawmakers and regulators have long sounded warnings about Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. 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 January 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration held a hearing on "2020 Election Security-Perspectives from Voting System Vendors and Experts." The heads of all three of the largest U.S. voting system manufacturers hearing three companies — Election Systems and Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic — admitted that they relied on Chinese-made components for their voting machines:
"Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos and Hart InterCivic President Julie Mathis said their companies use Chinese-made LCD screen components, chip capacitors and resistors, and argued that in some cases there's no option for manufacturing them in the United States."
In December 2019, three Democrat senators warned about the vulnerabilities of voting machines produced by Dominion and two other manufacturers. In a December 2019 letter, they wrote:
"In 2018 alone 'voters in South Carolina [were] reporting machines that switched their votes after they'd inputted them, scanners [were] rejecting paper ballots in Missouri, and busted machines [were] causing long lines in Indiana.' In addition, researchers recently uncovered previously undisclosed vulnerabilities in 'nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states.' And, just this year, after the Democratic candidate's electronic tally showed he received an improbable 164 votes out of 55,000 cast in a Pennsylvania state judicial election in 2019, the county's Republican Chairwoman said, '[n]othing went right on Election Day. Everything went wrong. That's a problem.' These problems threaten the integrity of our elections and demonstrate the importance of election systems that are strong, durable, and not vulnerable to attack."
In September 2019, Susan Greenhalgh of the Election Defense Coalition called on Congress to regulate the voting machine industry:
"We have an industry that is unregulated, with little to no accountability for the voting system vendors. It's imperative that Congress include minimum security requirements that states must meet, attached to the federal funds."
In April 2019, amid election hacker concerns, Dominion hired its first-ever lobbying firm, Brownstein Farber Hyatt & Schreck. Nadeam Elshami, a longtime aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was one of the lobbyists on the account. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that Dominion Voting Systems donated up to $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Dominion has ties to the Clinton Global Initiative by means of the Delian Project.
In April 2018, the New York Times and computer scientist Alex Halderman staged a mock election to demonstrate the vulnerability of voting machines produced by Dominion. In a video titled, "I hacked an election. So can the Russians," Halderman said:
"After the chaos of the 2000 election, we were promised a modern and dependable way to vote. I'm here to tell you that the electronic voting machines Americans got to solve the problem of voting integrity, they turned out to be an awful idea. That's because people like me can hack them all too easily.
"Our highly computerized election infrastructure is vulnerable to sabotage and even to cyberattacks that could change votes."
In June 2017, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee held a hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Halderman testified:
"Ten years ago, I was part of the first academic team to conduct a comprehensive security analysis of a DRE [direct-recording electronic] voting machine. We examined what was at that time the most widely used touch-screen DRE in the country, and spent several months probing it for vulnerabilities. What we found was disturbing: we could reprogram the machine to invisibly cause any candidate to win. We also created malicious software — vote-stealing code — that could spread from machine-to-machine like a computer virus, and silently change the election outcome.
"Vulnerabilities like these are endemic throughout our election system. Cybersecurity experts have studied a wide range of U.S. voting machines — including both DREs and optical scanners — and in every single case, they've found severe vulnerabilities that would allow attackers to sabotage machines and to alter votes. That's why there is overwhelming consensus in the cybersecurity and election integrity research communities that our elections are at risk....
"An attacker can probe different areas of the most important 'swing states' for vulnerabilities, find the areas that have the weakest protection, and strike there. In a close election, changing a few votes may be enough to tip the result, and an attacker can choose where — and on which equipment — to steal those votes. State and local elections are also at risk.
In August 2016, during a meeting at the Illinois State Board of Elections, the Vice President of Engineering for Dominion Voting, Dr. Eric Coomer, was asked if it was possible to bypass election systems software and go directly to the data tables that manage systems running elections in Illinois. He responded: "Yes, if they have access." When asked who has access to these data tables, Coomer replied: "Vendors, election officials, and others who need to be granted access." Sharon Meroni of the Illinois-based "Defend the Vote" wrote:
"This is explosive information. Dr. Coomer's statement is an admission that various vendors, election officials, and others have access to the back-end data tables that permit bypassing the operating system's configuration. It is notable that when someone accesses these systems from a data table, their actions are not logged by the system; thereby making detection much more problematic. This contradicts Dr. Coomer's assurances that the system is secure."
In October 2006, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) launched an investigation into Smartmatic's ties to the Venezuelan government. At the time, the New York Times reported:
"But the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts.
"'The government should know who owns our voting machines; that is a national security concern,' said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who asked the Bush administration in May to review the Sequoia takeover.
"'There seems to have been an obvious effort to obscure the ownership of the company,' Ms. Maloney said of Smartmatic in a telephone interview yesterday. 'The CFIUS process, if it is moving forward, can determine that.' ....
"The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and the Chávez government have been well known to United States foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which Mr. Chávez, a strong ally of President Fidel Castro of Cuba, won by an official margin of nearly 20 percent....
"But after a municipal primary election in Chicago in March, Sequoia voting machines [owned by Smartmatic] were blamed for a series of delays and irregularities. Smartmatic's new president, Jack A. Blaine, acknowledged in a public hearing that Smartmatic workers had been flown up from Venezuela to help with the vote.
"Some problems with the election were later blamed on a software component, which transmits the voting results to a central computer, that was developed in Venezuela."
In December 2006, Smartmatic announced that it would sell its U.S. subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems, to end the CFIUS probe into its ties with the Venezuelan government. Maloney said:
"There clearly remained doubts surrounding this company, and as long as those doubts lingered, many people would have legitimate questions about the integrity of these voting machines. When I first raised this case with Treasury, I thought that it was ripe for a CFIUS investigation, because the integrity of our voting machines is vital to national security. At that time, Smartmatic flatly refused to undergo a CFIUS review. But now it seems the company could not overcome the cloud of doubt surrounding this deal..."
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.
Marcia