voting machine BS 2

PRIMARY 8 26 EZ BUT ALSO ZOMBIE RECURRING

this is /will be general category about manipulation eg cyber hack

see disenfranchise

SEE GOP STEAL ELECTION EMERGENCY XO. CISA

SEE SMARTMATIC see defam 2

SEE CONSPIRACY

see hand count lindell BS

SEE KRAKEN ITALYGATE

SEE HUGO CHAVEZ GHOST --> TULSI GABBARD 2 26 FULTON

gerrymander

votingmach218

1119 bak

see ossoff

voter ID

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an pp 10 26

A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.

The proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”

The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.

Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems.

In Trump’s second term, his administration has laid off or pushed out more than 1,000 CISA employees, shrinking the agency by about one-third. The president’s 2027 budget proposal would reduce funding for the agency by another $700 million, which could necessitate 900 additional layoffs.

In response, Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation into CISA’s ability to do its job and demanded answers as to why federal funds are not being used to support election security as directed by Congress.

Since Trump signed the CISA Act in 2018, the agency has worked with state authorities and voting machine vendors to help protect election infrastructure from cyberattacks. During Trump’s second term, though, CISA has abandoned much of this work. Several state election authorities said the agency provided them no assistance — and no explanation for its absence — during the most critical planning stages for the upcoming midterms.

“There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent,” said Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who has worked as a consultant for CISA. In 2025 and through mid-September 2026 — when the bulk of preparations for the election typically would have been completed — “they were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent.”

While Trump has repeatedly warned that America’s elections are vulnerable to hacking, in some cases repeating disproven claims, experts said his administration is undermining the federal government’s role in helping secure them.

Though CISA re-emerged in September with a last-minute security plan for the election, some state officials told ProPublica they fear that what is left of the agency has been compromised by a conspiracy-obsessed presidential administration. In recent months, in reviving debunked theories about the 2020 election, the Trump administration has declassified troves of records, including sensitive material that state officials provided to CISA. Some state authorities said they no longer trusted the administration enough to share information with CISA, a key to the agency’s success in past elections.

“They’ve violated the entire premise of that information-sharing relationship,” said one former high-ranking federal cybersecurity official who now advises state governments on national security. “There’s no fucking way they’re ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”

A spokesperson for the White House declined an interview request but defended Trump’s handling of election security in an emailed statement. “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections,” said Lauren Bis.

Bis referred specific questions about CISA’s handling of elections to DHS. DHS and CISA did not respond to interview requests or to a detailed list of questions.

“There’s no fucking way [state governments are] ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”

A former federal cybersecurity official who advises state governments

Current and former CISA employees and state election officials describe an agency that has become significantly less equipped to help states fight legitimate cyber threats. State leaders say they have used their own resources to shore up gaps left by CISA, such as paying for sensor technology that can detect unusual activity in election networks. But some services, like intel on foreign actors, can’t be replicated. Some people interviewed said they were worried that Trump and his allies continue to ratchet up rhetoric about voting security, particularly about threats to voting machines. Officials in one large voting jurisdiction said they have met privately with machine vendors to come up with a contingency plan if the federal government seizes their machines or declares them unusable.

“I don’t pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said. “And what they’ve done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.”

Defending elections from hackers wasn’t always part of DHS’s remit.

Throughout the mid-1990s and 2000s, a series of cyberattacks rocked the federal government, demonstrating the emerging threat. In 2007, hackers broke into the Pentagon and stole terabytes of sensitive data. The digital heist, by an unknown foreign adversary, was so damaging that one intelligence leader later described it as an “espionage Pearl Harbor.”

Under George W. Bush, DHS underwent a reorganization to more effectively combat terrorism and respond to disasters like Hurricane Katrina. The department dedicated resources under an office called the National Protection and Programs Directorate to help fortify advanced cyber defense systems and important infrastructure. The office’s work ranged from helping secure events like the Super Bowl to protecting chemical plants to issuing cybersecurity warnings to the private sector and the public. In 2018, Trump signed a bill making the office a stand-alone agency, allowing for more federal funding and transforming it into, essentially, the ultimate tech support desk for anything DHS designated “critical infrastructure.”

The bill renamed the agency CISA.

Though Trump helped create CISA, he didn’t much appreciate the work the agency did under its old name to expose the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Russian agents had unleashed a massive disinformation campaign, with a Kremlin-backed troll farm creating thousands of social media accounts posing as Americans and promoting Trump, according to bipartisan reports from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released before the 2020 election. A dozen Russian military agents were indicted for what the Justice Department described as “a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.”

Trump publicly downplayed this interference, but DHS leadership saw the Russia attack as an escalation. In January 2017, before Trump took office, DHS upgraded America’s elections to the status of critical infrastructure. This placed the polls and all voting technology used in federal elections under the watch of what would soon become CISA.

To carry out this function, CISA needed help. But states and voting machine vendors were wary about sharing data on weaknesses in voting systems, fearing it could be exploited if certain details were to become public. State officials were also reluctant to cede any role in election preparation to the federal government.

Gradually, though, CISA and state election officials negotiated a fragile trust. At its center was a commitment: The sensitive information states and vendors shared with CISA would be kept confidential.

“It took years and years of building trust, of talking to election officials, of hiring people with elections experience who could be validators for the work that CISA wanted to do, before they finally built strong working relationships,” said Derek Tisler, who specializes in election security as counsel for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan institute based out of New York University School of Law.

Under Director Chris Krebs, CISA hosted penetration testing in which its agents would try to hack into a state’s system to locate weaknesses that could then be patched, along with tabletop exercises simulating a series of potential catastrophes around elections. CISA also offered regular secret-level briefings to secretaries of state to share federal intelligence. And CISA paid for sensor technology that looked for potential malicious online activity on election networks, notifying officials about emerging threats.

“The staffing was there, the expertise was there, the visibility was there, the funding was there,” Macias said.

The consortium shared data as run of the mill as spambots as well as more serious threats. If Virginia caught unusual activity in its system, it could let other states know to be vigilant.

While CISA had prepared for attacks from the Chinese and Russian governments, or lone wolf hackers, few there had expected the threat to elections would come from inside the White House. But when Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden in 2020, claiming the vote had been rigged, CISA became a key component of the guardrails that ultimately led to the election results being certified.

The agency, in a statement co-signed by secretaries of state and voting machine vendors, vouched for the election’s integrity, calling it “the most secure in American history.” When Krebs publicly rebutted claims amplified by the White House as “unsubstantiated” or “technically incoherent,” Trump fired him over Twitter.

As Congress prepared to vote on certifying the election results, it was members of CISA, along with the FBI, who convinced then-Attorney General Bill Barr that the conspiracy theories embraced by the president could be explained by human error, not systemic fraud or hacking.

When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration immediately started to dismantle CISA. The administrative notices were sent out just a couple of weeks after the inauguration and included the team in charge of dispelling disinformation.

For the employees under the DOGE microscope, work became impossible, said one former senior CISA employee. “Those groups couldn’t even order a pizza.”

DOGE laid off people critical to the agency’s election work, including those who’d worked closely with states. The Trump administration cut funding for the technology that monitored web and election servers, blinding the federal government to breaches it had detected.

When it came time for states to prepare for the 2026 midterms, CISA had disappeared.

On the evening of July 16, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, dozens of election officials and their staffs gathered for a reception near Mount Rushmore. It was the third night of an annual conference for secretaries of state, drawing participants from red and blue states. They’d spent the week discussing state voter roll maintenance and voter ID — issues that at times made for disagreements.

At about 8 p.m., a wave of discomfort swept through the crowd, visible on attendees’ faces as they glanced frequently at their phones, according to people at the event. Any minute now, Trump was going to address the nation on election security. Some at the reception worried he would declare a national emergency, as his allies had urged him to do months earlier, and use it as a pretext to direct the government to seize voting machines.

Then reports on the speech began rolling in, and the mood shifted. The claims Trump was making were unsubstantiated and outlandish. Many had been examined ad nauseam, including by those at the reception, and roundly debunked. The collective anxiety that was palpable moments earlier melted away, as many saw the speech as another attempt to revive disproved theories unlikely to be taken seriously by most voters.

“Everyone just sort of guffawed and put their phones away and went to the bar,” recalled Quinn Raymond, co-founder of VoteShield, a nonprofit that works with states to help monitor voter registration data, who was at the event.

Still, if the speech made little impact, records published by the Trump administration to support the president’s claims damaged the already eroding relationship between CISA and state election officials. The material included raw information states had shared with the agency that was supposed to remain private, such as a log of communications from Election Day 2020 detailing activity being monitored in several states.

“It betrayed the trust of all partners who were willing to share information at the time,” said Geoff Hale, who worked on CISA’s elections team from the agency’s inception until last year. Now he specializes in election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital and civil rights.

Bis, the White House spokesperson, denied that the Trump administration broke any agreements in releasing the information. “The release of such information is exactly the sort of transparency news organizations should applaud,” she said. Bis also defended Trump’s speech, saying it had been fact-checked “by the agencies whose evidence was released and did not mischaracterize any information.”

Hale and others said the speech was one of several instances demonstrating the Trump administration’s reckless attitude toward sensitive data collected by CISA. Earlier this year, Politico reported that acting CISA Director Madhu Gottumukkala had uploaded records to ChatGPT, even though DHS had barred its employees from using the unsecure program. A CISA spokesperson told Politico that Gottumukkala had been permitted to use the technology for a “short-term and limited” basis.

Last May, an independent journalist named Brian Krebs exposed that CISA published private data, including passwords, cloud keys and other information, on its public GitHub page, in a folder labeled “Private-CISA.” A CISA spokesperson told the journalist there was no indication that sensitive data was compromised.

Some state election authorities were also alarmed to see the lengths to which the Trump administration went to legitimize the president’s fixation on the 2020 race.

In fall 2025, Missouri election officials produced a memo stating Andrew McCoy Warner, a Department of Justice official and prominent 2020 election conspiracy theorist, had called several clerks asking for access to voting machines. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, had also led an operation in Puerto Rico to seize election machines. When the private cybersecurity contractor hired to examine the machines, Mojave Research Inc., failed to find evidence supporting claims about 2020, the federal government became “dissastified” with its services and stopped renewing its contract, its CEO later told reporters.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters in August that Mojave’s work ceased because it had completed its contract. Testifying before Congress in March, Gabbard said the seizing of voting machines came at the request of an assistant U.S. attorney in Puerto Rico.

“What happened in the second Trump administration is from almost day one — I mean, literally the first two months — they took all that was built up by Trump 1 and just decimated it,” said David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that works with state election authorities. “Election officials lost trust in the federal government.”

It didn’t help that, in his speech, the president mocked CISA’s defense of the 2020 election, calling the statement about it being the most secure in history a “very pat line” concocted as part of a deep-state cover-up. One former career CISA employee described being crestfallen at the Trump administration’s erosion of all they’d accomplished.

“We worked so hard to build that trusted relationship,” said Caitlin Durkovich, former DHS assistant secretary for infrastructure protection and co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Civira Partners. “I don’t know how you put it back together.”

A few weeks after Trump’s speech, the state election officials gathered once more, this time for a video call with Nick Andersen, who had replaced Gottumukkala as CISA’s acting director.

Though the primaries were already under way, this was the first time many had met Andersen, a former cybersecurity adviser to Trump’s White House who had joined CISA a year earlier. Andersen is also a district representative for the Republican Party in Virginia, according to the party’s website. In March, he gave a speech to the Fairfax GOP chapter titled “Fighting Democrat Redistricting.”

Speaking over video in August, the boyish-faced former Marine Corps engineer announced that DHS was preparing to release a plan on how it would work together with state officials to secure the election, according to five people who were present at the video meeting, some of whom shared notes with ProPublica.

Many on the call were stunned at what they perceived as a lack of understanding of election planning. Early voting for the general election was just around the corner. They had spent over a year preparing for the midterms, and there was no more time for ambitious work.

Some peppered Andersen with questions: Where had CISA been when there was still time to make improvements?

Andersen blamed any lapses or perceived breaches in trust on the federal government shutdown in fall 2025, twirling his pen uncomfortably and sipping from a Monster energy drink.

Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, was blunt about his feelings regarding working with Andersen and CISA, according to several of the people on the call.

“I told him I didn’t trust him,” Fontes recalled in an interview. “I did raise my voice a little bit, because I’m frustrated — very frustrated — that they would have the temerity to come in, clear the entire deck of competent professionals, stop supporting the states, eviscerate the coordination efforts that they had and then suddenly come in and say: ‘Oh, we’re from the federal government. We’re here to help.’”

Indeed, one recently departed CISA official said attempting to do the agency’s typical election work now would be futile. In previous years, CISA had finished almost all its preparations with the states by Labor Day.

“That ship has sailed,” the official said.

CISA published its security plan for the 2026 election on Sept. 24. The 13-page document describes how, over the past two years, CISA has “recommitted to its statutory mission and remains resolute in strengthening the security of elections.”

State officials said their planning will ensure a secure election, even without help from CISA. Yet they and cybersecurity experts worry that Trump will say the election was hacked if Republicans don’t win in November.

The security plan calls for “leveraging collaborative partnerships” with states the agency has abandoned since Trump took office. Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said she’d welcome that but was skeptical of the agency’s motivations.

“For CISA to promise election officials now, at this point in time, that they are going to be a resource for the 2026 election is too little, too late,” she said.

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Guests on Steve Bannon’s podcast call for Commerce Secretary Lutnick to intervene in state elections

Guests Cleta Mitchell and Ed Martin, two lawyers involved in the election denial movement, argued that voting machines are not secure. Mitchell is already pointing at Georgia, a major hub of election denial in recent years.

Written by John Knefel

Published 10/07/26

Two guests on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast are calling for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to intervene in state election systems on the grounds that voting machines are not secure.

Cleta Mitchell and Ed Martin are both lawyers who have been involved in election denial efforts. Mitchell was on the January 2021 call when President Donald Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes for him to overturn the election. Martin is a former Trump Department of Justice official who claims to have worked on a “path” to get former Colorado county clerk and prominent election denial activist Tina Peters out of state prison.

Mitchell singled out Georgia’s election systems in her commentary, building on conspiracy theories that Trump concocted about vote tampering in that state following his loss in 2020. Trump’s administration has continued to pursue some of those theories, including federal agents seizing thousands of ballots and other voting records from Fulton County in January.

Appearing on Bannon’s October 6 show, Mitchell argued that the U.S. commerce secretary should intervene in state election administration, with Mitchell arguing that a 2019 national emergency declaration issued by Trump gives Lutnick “not only the authority but the duty to act” and calling for him “to order that the software in the Dominion systems in Georgia be replaced and upgraded.”

On October 1, Georgia State Election Board Executive Director James Mills sent letters to the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security asking the administration to make changes to the state’s voting machines just weeks before the upcoming midterm elections. (Mills has generally pursued aims that align with Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.)

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution explained that “there’s no indication the state’s voting machines have been tampered with during an election,” and a privacy concern raised in the letters “does not alter election results.” The only Democrat on the election board told the paper that Mills’ letters were “clearly a bad-faith attempt to set up a contest to election results that Republicans do not like.”

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From the October 6, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): Well I think that one of the things that's really important is that a lot of people have said, well, the president needs to declare a national emergency for elections. Well, guess what? He already did. He did that in May of 2019. He declared that there was an emergency because foreign-owned -- it's called information and communications technology and services, and that includes election infrastructure -- manufactured in whole or in part or controlled by companies that are foreign adversaries, which includes China. And there's not a voting system in America today, an electronic voting system in America today that is not manufactured in whole or in part in China.

So the president in May of 2019 issued this emergency -- relying on the National Emergencies Act of 1976 issued an executive order ordering the Department of Commerce to promulgate regulations, which they did. The Department of Commerce regulations took effect in February of 2024, and they are the law.

And it gives Howard Lutnick, as secretary, not only the authority but the duty to act. And so here are some of the things that Secretary Lutnick can do today. And that he needs to do today.

He needs to order that the software in the Dominion systems in Georgia be replaced and upgraded, as all the other jurisdictions have done since 2022 when it was determined by Dr. Halderman that Dominion systems have nine vulnerabilities. The software was upgraded. It was to correct all of those vulnerabilities. And guess what? Georgia has yet to install the upgrades to guard against the vulnerabilities.

Secretary Lutnick should oversee that today.

...

The other thing he needs to do is, the Department of Homeland Security sent him, along with a letter that Ed is referring to -- the Department of Homeland Security doesn't have authority to mandate that states get rid of these vulnerable voting systems. But the Department of Homeland Security has created this fund -- they've created grant-funds through FEMA, they've written a mitigation plan.

All Secretary Lutnick has to do is take it and implement it. He has the authority to mandate it.

Martin similarly claimed that “Lutnick has a chance to step up and also be a player” in efforts “for states to change their election systems,” warning of “a red-hot crisis” and “a five-alarm fire” for the upcoming midterms.

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From the October 6, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

ED MARTIN (GUEST): You mentioned the breaking news. There's a letter that came out a month ago and it didn't get much attention until yesterday when I was looking at it closely and I put it up. And it's a legal finding from Secretary Mullin of the DHS, a legal finding -- it's not Ed Martin's opinion, it's not Bannon's opinion, it's not Cleta's opinion, it's not a filing in a court -- it's a DHS finding that machines for election are using foreign parts and they cannot be secured.

And so much so that the letter from Mullin says, I've got a special fund -- it's a billion dollars, I went and found out, one billion with a B, dollars for states to change their election systems to protect themselves. So look, I think this is a red-hot crisis. I mentioned in an interview yesterday that Tina Peters was meeting with President Trump, and that happened. And I haven't talked to her since the meeting, but I know they didn't meet about the Colorado prison system.

We know we've got a five-alarm fire coming in less than four weeks, and all hands on deck.

...

I think Lutnick has a chance to step up and also be a player because of how the law is, but states are going to have to protect themselves too.

Questions about the security of Georgia’s elections have been a concern in the lead-up to the midterms. Local news station WTVM recently covered a town hall convened by former secretary of state chief operating officer Gabe Sterling to give Georgians confidence in the existing systems.

“Voting in this state, in your home county, and across the nation is safe, is run by professionals, they have redundancies, tons of safeguards, and it really is a secure, secure election,” said Sterling, who previously refuted Trump’s election conspiracy theories in 2020.

Georgia Public Radio also covered the subject, quoting an election system expert who agreed that the changes were not necessary and could be detrimental to a free and fair election.

Ben Adita, the executive director of Voting Works, a nonprofit that sells open-source voting systems, testified in front of the board Thursday. During the meeting, he told the committee that Raffensperger has already taken steps to mitigate the privacy flaw, and warned about changes close to the election.

"The proposal to upgrade software with two weeks to go is really fraught and risky," Adita said. "The proposal to alter the vote casting process statewide is fraught whether you have two weeks — or two or six months, frankly — of lead time."

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Tina Peters allegedly met with Trump to discuss election plans. Here's what that could mean for the midterms.

Written by Kayla Gogarty & John Whitehouse

Research contributions from Alex Kaplan & John Knefel

Published 10/06/26

Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters, who was released from prison on June 1 after being sentenced to nearly nine years for actions related to tampering with voting machines following the 2020 election, allegedly met with President Donald Trump on October 5 to discuss the midterm elections.

Tina Peters allegedly met with President Trump – again.

Speaking on Eric Bolling’s Real America’s Voice show, former Trump Justice Department official Ed Martin said that Peters was “in the Oval Office meeting with the president on election integrity” hours earlier.
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From the October 5, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's Bolling!

ED MARTIN (GUEST): Well, let me break some news. This is a big deal, Eric, and I'm — you're the first person that knows. I'm going to say something — just hours ago, maybe two hours ago. Tina Peters, you know, from Colorado, was in the Oval Office meeting with the president on election integrity, and they were talking about the plans.

And the one thing that they know is that Secretary Mullin of the Department of Homeland Security came out in late August and conceded and said, as a matter of law, a finding that there is — the machines for voting, the election voting machines use parts from China and Russia and foreign places and are therefore compromised. That's what Mullin said. That finding, when he finished that finding, he then said, and I have a billion dollars to help you states to do something other than use machines that are compromised. And, again, my point is this.

You talk about local. It is a local election. I ran the election board in St. Louis. There is local control. However, the laws that govern the system, like safety and national security, are federal laws.

And so when Tina Peters, you know, famous Colorado clerk, was in the Oval Office today just two hours ago talking about this question, the president's taking it seriously. If the Congress won't pass the SAVE America Act, and they won't, then the president's going to have to do what he's going to do. And it is not a local issue when it's national security, and it's clearly national security. So we'll see how it plays out.

Peters has claimed to regularly be in contact with Trump administration officials, including by text, and said in late August that she has been to the White House six times. She also has thanked White House staff for facilitating her release from prison. In July, Peters claimed that Trump ordered his staff to do what she recommended, saying on a livestream, “Yesterday, when I was with the president, he talked — and I can’t get into the plan — but we talked, he basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking.”

Peters has also recently claimed to have been in contact with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Attorney General Todd Blanche’s deputy chief of staff Shane Hedges, and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon.

Martin recently left Trump’s DOJ to — at least according to the president in a Truth Social post — “fight Legal Battles” related to the midterms. Martin and Peters have a history together. In 2025, Martin told Steve Bannon that he had been working for two months to find “a path” to her release. He also reportedly “discussed election security issues last year” with Peters’ associates and forwarded their pitch for a ban on voting machines to another senior Justice Department official.

What is Tina Peters’ plan for the election?

Peters has been vocal in far-right circles about her election plan. As Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan documented in late July:

The new proposal, dated July 22 and called the “100-Day Risk Mitigation Election Plan” and “Operational Guidance for the November Federal Election – 2026,” urges the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — an agency housed under the Department of Homeland Security that is “one of the main federal partners for states on election security, sharing intelligence on potential threats to voting infrastructure and providing quick regional support,” per MS NOW — to “concentrate on six achievable measures,” including “transition[ing] the general electorate away from ballot-marking devices (BMD) to hand-marked paper ballots” and “insisting that the official count can only be certified after a full hand-count of every ballot.”

It also lays out an implementation framework that would involve classifying all counties based on current election processes and their ability to transition ahead of the midterms and then providing each county with implementation plans. During a podcast interview discussing the plan, Peters acknowledged that “CISA is not a forceful body that they can make people do things, but they can actually make recommendations,” and suggested that DHS could use a recently announced grant for states “that comply with certain things like paper ballots and so on and so forth” as an “incentive.”
…
Peters released the new proposal, which she called a “practical election-security plan,” on her website along with a July 24 letter to the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency thanking him “for meeting with us … and for giving us the opportunity to present our concerns and proposed path forward for the 2026 federal election.”

Peters’ plan also requires that jurisdictions must “apply the ‘Bank-Teller Method’: independently hand-count every ballot for federal contests before certification and reconcile that count with the tabulator result.”

As the midterms approach, Peters has continued to promote versions of her plan and give additional details, such as arguing that Trump already has the power to involve DHS and the Commerce Department through an executive order on critical infrastructure. Election deniers like Peter Ticktin, Jerome Corsi, Cleta Mitchell, and Wayne Allyn Root have made similar arguments about Trump already having authority.

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From a video uploaded on Tina Peters' website on August 26, 2026
TINA PETERS: Mr. President, it is time to treat America’s elections like the critical infrastructure that they are. We do not have months. We have days. Mr. President, our own government and your administration has documented vulnerabilities in election systems and identified foreign adversary threats. Voter databases, poll books, election networks, and voting technology are all at risk.

The authority already exists. The national emergency under Executive Order 13873 is already in place. What is needed now is cabinet-level direction, direction of DHS, CISA, the EAC, FEMA, the intelligence community, and Commerce to immediately execute the 2026 mitigation plan.
...
The goal is simple and absolutely achievable, Mr. President: Secure and reduce electronic dependence, wherever possible, preserve physical paper evidence, and independently verify electronic results before certification. CISA should issue immediate cybersecurity guidance and assistance to transition all counties to handmark paper ballots, and make sure every electronic tabulation is human verified. FEMA should identify available funding for securing the elections.
High-risk jurisdictions should receive rapid technical assistance, and Commerce should begin a foreign adversary election technology review. Please, Mr. President, set September 8 as the first deadline and make every electronic result independently checkable.

This is a known national security issue. The complete risk mitigation plan is available.
...
We still have time to act, but the clock is running. Please direct your cabinet to move now. Our team stands ready to help.
God bless you, Mr. President. This plan — I’m confident — will save our country.

What has Peters said about the president having authority to intervene in the midterms?

Peters has been vocal that the president has the power to intervene in the midterms through executive power. (Experts have harshly criticized this analysis.)

Peters said during a June 14 stream following her release from prison that she had spoken with the president and she believes “Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines and say that they are — that a vendor cannot have that much influence over our elections.” She also said on June 25 that “we’ve got to get rid of the machines” and “mail-in ballots,” and Trump “needs to sign an executive order ... saying it’s unconstitutional that these things are allowed to be done.” Election denial activist Jerome Corsi has claimed that Peters will “play a major role in one of the key factors in Trump ultimately declaring the need for the elections to be supervised by the federal government.”

Similar to what Martin told Eric Bolling on October 5, Peters has grounded her election rhetoric in terms of foreign interference and national security, saying, “There’s no security threshold when you have foreign agents that have proprietary authority, power, over the things that are used for our most sacred right, which is to vote who we want to represent us.”
She has also claimed that Trump should take action against voting machines because some of the parts are “made in China.” Notably, Peters has also urged the military to get involved, saying: “It's very important to — for the Department of War — now I'm saying the Department of War because this is an international event that is going on with stealing our elections. Pete Hegseth needs to go in and demand to have these machines in their custody, and also the Mesa County machines. They're still out there.”

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MS NOW explores the relationship between election denier Tina Peters and the Trump administration and her calls to “get rid of voting machines”

Peter Baker: President Trump has “expressed a willingness to do things that we’ve never seen in this country be done before in order to alter the results of an election”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 10/06/26

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From the October 6, 2026, edition of MS NOW's On the Line With Alicia Menendez

ALICIA MENENDEZ (MS NOW ANCHOR): I have a million questions, Let's start with this one. Peter, Why won't the White House just say that they didn't meet with Tina Peters?

PETER BAKER (NEW YORK TIMES CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT): It's a really good question. When they say they don't confirm private meetings, of course they confirm private meetings when it suits their interests. It's in this case, obviously, they feel some degree of concern that it will cause, you know, backlash, right? I mean, to Laura's point, you know, it's remarkable that the people who manage to use these machines to rig the 2020 election forgot to do it in 2024, right? This is an election that the president won, doesn't complain that that one was rigged, same machines, same voting structures, same, you know, system that he is now saying is unfair and was unfair in 2020, perfectly fair two years ago when he happened to win.

So, you know, we'll see. But I think the point of the machines is really interesting because remember back in 2020, after the election, before January 6 in the Oval Office, the president of the United States, hosted a number of advisers, outside advisers, including Mike Flynn, who had been his national security advisor and later convicted, and eventually pardoned. Mike Flynn, a retired three star general, told the president of the United States at that point, that he should order the National Guard to seize voting machines in six states that Trump lost and then rerun the election so that therefore he could theoretically win, again.

The president didn't do it that time. But when my colleagues went and interviewed President Trump in January of this year, he said he regretted not taking that advice. He regretted not using the military to seize voting machines and rerunning elections with no legal basis whatsoever until he could get a win. And so, when we say, you know, what's she doing there? I think it's reasonable to ask that question, given that he himself has expressed a willingness to do things that we've never seen in this country be done before in order to alter the results of an election.

Tina Peters allegedly met with Trump to discuss election plans. Here's what that could mean for the midterms.

10/06/26 11:43 AM EDT

Right-wing media figures urge immediate purges of voter rolls following Supreme Court’s election database decision

10/01/26 9:33 AM EDT

On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses what election deniers are planning for the midterms: “Maximum destruction in as many places as possible to weaken and put as much sand in the gears”

09/30/26

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REBOOT 8 26 GOP STEal cleta

AN 8 26

Cleta Mitchell: “We had three networks that didn't cover the president's speech. I want to know what their relationship is with China.”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 08/28/26

Video

Citation

From the August 27, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's Just the News No Noise

JOHN SOLOMON (HOST): I want to turn to something that is now sort of a repeat theme and just what the White House Transparency Task Force is getting out there. We knew in 2020 that Venezuela hacked the machine. We knew that there were five foreign powers who could hack our machines, that had the capability in 2020. We knew that China took 220 million of our voter files, and we knew that illegal aliens were getting on the voter rolls. And we knew now, in 2020 we knew that these foreign-made parts were there. That's the first time that the intelligence community learned that there were foreign parts, the Chinese parts, in our machines. Six years passed with almost no action until President Trump jumps into the breach this last month. How did we go six years with an intelligence community knowing all these threats and almost no action?

CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): You know, John, that is such a good question, because let me add to that. And you referenced it today in the Just the News article. In 2019, Sen. Wyden and Sen. Klobuchar introduced a bill. They had 40 co-sponsors and many of the — most Democrats — and that would have strengthened the oversight of the voting machines, the voting technology. And Sen. Wyden gave a floor speech on the Senate floor in July 2019, where he was castigating his Republican colleagues for not paying attention to the intelligence reports and the threats that had been conveyed to the intelligence committee, to the Senate Intelligence Committee, about the vulnerability of the voting systems.

Now, as soon as Biden gets elected, and when President Trump, who is looking at the 2020 election and saying, gee, there seems to be a lot wrong here, the Democrats completely went silent. Not only that, they wanted to silence anyone who was criticizing the voting technology. Don't forget all the things that they have done, that they did, and continue to try to silence those of us who ask questions.

So my question is, how is it that the Democrats were so concerned about it? Look at the videos of Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. The movie that they made, Kill Chain, about the vulnerabilities of the voting machines.

Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections - Wikipedia

And suddenly after 2020, they forgot all of that. And now they say that we're crazy people because now we see that the intelligence community knew things and they didn't tell anybody. And they particularly kept it from President Trump and then subsequently President Biden. I mean, John, we wouldn't know any of this if you hadn't gone into the administration temporarily as a special government employee to get all of this out in the public. But my question is, it's still going on, this gaslighting, this disregarding.

We had three networks that didn't cover the president's speech. I want to know what their relationship is with China, why they wouldn't want to have covered the president's speech in which he told the truth about China's interference. And I want to know where those Democrats are today who were so concerned in 2019. Now we have the proof of it, and there's nowhere to be heard. And in fact, all they want to do is tell us to be quiet.

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AN 8 26

Last year, the Trump administration hired a cybersecurity firm to investigate White House claims that voting equipment in Puerto Rico had been “compromised” in the 2020 election, but after the company found no evidence to support voter fraud, it has gone on to become the target of a smear campaign by the president’s loyalists.

According to new reporting by CNN, “After hearing that the firm had found no evidence of vote tampering, allies of President Donald Trump derailed the cybersecurity firm’s work with the government in part by spreading false claims that the firm was funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, according to the firm’s executives and documents they provided to CNN.” Jason Wareham, CEO of the firm, called Mojave Research, has revealed that a group of “White House-adjacent” Trump allies was “dissatisfied” that he “was not willing to name and shame at that moment and to say, ‘Turns out 2020 was a landslide for Trump. Nobody knew.’”

CNN notes that “Mojave Research had no prior experience in testing election systems when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence contacted them in the spring of 2025 as part of the agency’s broader probe into voting equipment. ODNI hired the firm to analyze a specific voting machine made by Liberty Vote (formerly Dominion Voting Systems) that the agency acquired from Puerto Rico. Mojave did the work in six weeks in Wareham’s basement in Reston, Virginia, according to Wareham.”

While Mojave submitted its report in July 2025, Wareham says that it has still not been made public. The company’s Chief Technology Officer Manbir Gulati, however, spoke about it at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas last week, saying, “We found extensive and largely unacceptable weaknesses, but we did not find evidence that those weaknesses were actively exploited or that votes were altered.”

“After the company made clear what it had found, multiple figures aligned with Trump began to cast doubt on the integrity of Mojave.” According to CNN, “What Wareham’s team found — and didn’t find — in his basement would become a Rorschach test for Trump administration officials focused on election issues. It’s a cautionary tale of how a company that says it wanted to provide the administration with unbiased election security analysis was rejected by a group of officials who still dispute the results of the 2020 election and have Trump’s ear. The Trump administration’s revisiting of the 2020 election has extended to Arizona, where the FBI has obtained records of an audit that confirmed Joe Biden won the state.”

“I lost count of the number of times I heard ‘Maricopa County is a crime scene,’” Wareham said. As CNN explains, “Maricopa County is Arizona’s largest county and has been at the center of Trump allies’ false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.”

According to Gulati, “What we encountered [were] a lot of competing factions within the government — people who want the boogeyman to be out there and are willing to do anything to find it and then people who actually do genuinely care about the issue [of election security]. There was a huge faction that was like, ‘Mojave doesn’t know what they’re doing.' They’re dummies and that’s why they can’t find evidence of compromise.”

CNN reports that “Wareham, a Republican, submitted a declaration in September under the penalty of perjury to the Trump administration to refute the notion that his company was ‘some form of deep plant meant to ensure the suppression of truth around compromised elections or election systems,’ the declaration says. Wareham submitted his declaration and financial statements to ODNI to prove he was not affiliated with Soros, who has long been the subject of antisemitic conspiracy theories about secret levers of power. The next month, Wareham said he received an email, reviewed by CNN, which said that ODNI had issued a ‘stop-work order’ on the contract.”

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MMA

Election deniers push conspiracy theories about primaries in GOP-run Texas

QAnon figure Juan O. Savin: “People were just floored by what was going on” in Texas with the “massive cheating”

Written by Alex Kaplan

:{Published 04/20/26

Election deniers have been targeting this year’s primary and special elections in Texas, claiming there has been “massive” fraud and cheating.

Attorney Peter Ticktin, activist Linda Szynkowicz, QAnon influencer Wayne Willott, and others who promoted false claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential contest are now claiming on social media and on podcasts that in Texas, votes “got switched,” people used “ghost voting IDs,” and they found “cloned voters.”

For years, right-wing media and politicians have been pushing conspiracy theories about supposed election fraud across the country, and recent claims seem to be part of an apparent effort to undermine the 2026 midterm elections.

Election deniers are now targeting elections in GOP-run Texas}:

On March 3, the Republican and Democratic parties in Texas held primary elections for various elected offices throughout the state. Among the notable primary wins were Republican Gov. Greg Abbott defeating challenger Pete “Doc” Chambers for the GOP gubernatorial nomination and Democratic state Rep. James Talarico besting U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination. Texas also held a special election in January for what The Texas Tribune reported was a “solidly red Texas Senate seat,” with Democrat Taylor Rehmet winning the seat in a “stunning special election upset.”

Republicans have full control of the Texas government, and a Republican-appointed secretary of state serves as the state's chief election officer.

## Election deniers claimed “massive fraud” happened during the recent Texas primary and special elections

Multiple prominent election deniers have claimed that there was “massive fraud” and “massive cheating” that tainted the Texas primary and special elections and that they “should not be certified.” They pushed a variety of conspiracy theories, claiming votes “got switched,” that there were “ghost voting IDs,” and that they found “cloned voters”:

- During several podcast appearances, Peter Ticktin, an attorney and commentator with a history of promoting election fraud claims, said that “we better start investigating what happened in the Texas primaries.” He invoked a longstanding conspiracy theory that Venezuela is connected to supposed election fraud, saying voting machines somehow controlled by Venezuela switch votes and “this is how they have control of the outcome of the elections.” He also alleged that 21st Congressional District candidate Weston Martinez found “modified duplicates” in the voter rolls after the first day of voting during this year’s GOP primary and later found that the duplicates in the rolls had been “changed to other names” or “they got rid of them because he was on to it.” Ticktin continued, “One way or the other, these machines are now in play picking the candidates … which we are going to be voting for come November.”

A show host asked if the Texas gubernatorial primary was “an Antrim County situation,” referring to a Michigan county where some falsely claimed that machines changed votes in 2020, and asked if votes for Chambers and Abbott “got switched.”

“Our election system is entirely compromised,” Ticktin replied. “The same voter base, the same voter rolls, the same machines can operate on any election in the United States.”

- Fight Voter Fraud Inc. founder Linda Szynkowicz said on her streaming show that in Texas, “they were manipulating the votes as they were coming in the system.”

- Kris Jurski, whom NBC describes as “a Florida activist who has promoted election conspiracy theories,” suggested on social media that his tool to supposedly detect election fraud also found “cloned voters … in Texas’s latest election.”

- Wayne Willott, a QAnon influencer who goes by “Juan O. Savin,” said during a streaming conversation that “people were just floored by what was going on” in Texas with the “massive cheating.” Willott, who has tried to recruit election denial candidates for positions administering elections, suggested “a restart” for Texas’ primaries, pointing in a separate conversation to “massive fraud.”

:{Video

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From the March 18, 2026, edition of Nino's Corner, streamed on YouTube

- Harry Haury, whom the LA Times described as a “self-proclaimed cybersecurity expert” with “deep ties to the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement,” said during right-wing podcast Stern American’s“election integrity call” that Texas’ primaries were “a large mess,” with “hundreds of thousands of votes that are attributed to an individual, and then that individual is deleted from the record.”

He said the elections “appear[ed] to be tampered with,” and the state had “not produced an honest or transparent result,” and therefore it “should not be certified.”

:{Video

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From the March 18, 2026, edition of Stern American, streamed on Rumble

- On his podcast, election denier Joe Oltmann read a social media post from Chambers alleging fraud in his race and other races in the state, both Democratic and Republican, and Oltmann said that it was evidence of “election fraud” and that “everywhere you turn elections are being stolen.”

- John Case — an attorney for former Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted for allowing unauthorized access to county voting equipment over election fraud claims — claimed during another Stern American “election integrity call” that “Bexar County in the Texas primary” featured “some kind of illegal interference in the list of people who voted.” Case, whom Colorado's The Daily Sentinel described as an “election conspiracy theorist,” has previously claimed that there was a supposed witness who claimed “the software used on Dominion Voting Systems in Colorado has the same basic structure as the Smartmatic software that was used to rig elections in Venezuela.” According to Case, this witness “was a government official in Venezuela whose job was to create the war rooms and situation rooms that were used to monitor the election results and then, when the time was ripe, to inject fake votes into the system so that the government candidate would always win.”

- Additionally, John Eastman, a Claremont Institute senior fellow who crafted a plan for Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election results, claimed on Stern American that a January special election for a Texas state Senate seat featured “ghost voting IDs based on actual voter IDs.”

## Yes, this probably sounds very familiar

Right-wing figures and social media users have cried fraud about other recent elections as well. That includes the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, where Republican Kari Lake lost to now-Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs; the 2021 New Jersey gubernatorial election, where then-Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli; and the 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial election, where now-Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill defeated Ciattarelli.

## Why do they keep claiming fraud?

Some right-wing media figures are calling for new policies and efforts to prevent supposed election fraud ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The Trump administration has pushed the SAVE America Act, which would curtail voting access, and right-wing media claim Democrats oppose it because they are “cheating.”

Trump’s FBI also raided the Fulton County, Georgia, election center as part of a Justice Department probe of the 2020 election, and Trump released an executive order seeking to limit who is eligible for mail-in voting, drawing praise from election deniers. Some of these activists have also drafted and advocated for a “national emergency” executive order to allow a federal takeover of election processes.

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In his top post at the Department of Homeland Security, David Harvilicz sets policy on protecting the nation’s elections infrastructure, including voting machines.

He’s also the co-founder of a company with James Penrose, who helped hatch debunked conspiracy theories blaming hacked voting machines for Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. Penrose assisted in a push to seize voting machines to overturn Trump’s defeat.

On social media, Harvilicz has called for doing away with voting machines, saying they are “eminently vulnerable to exploitation.” In a March post, he wrote that “DHS needs to ban voting machines for all federal elections. The time is now.” He also has repeatedly questioned the validity of Democratic electoral victories and pushed for Republicans to overhaul electoral systems to their advantage.

Election experts as well as current and former DHS officials say Harvilicz’s central role in overseeing the security of electoral systems and voting machines is especially concerning at a time when the administration is taking unprecedented steps to relitigate Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen. That includes the FBI’s seizure of 2020 voting records from Fulton County, Georgia, and having a team working for Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, take custody of voting machines used in Puerto Rico in 2020.

“The security of our election infrastructure depends on leadership that is trusted, impartial and grounded in evidence — not individuals who have promoted conspiracy theories about the very systems they are now responsible for protecting,” said Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights and the rule of law at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. “Placing someone with that background in charge of policies affecting election security can undermine public confidence in our elections at a time when trust is already fragile.”

DHS didn’t answer detailed questions about Harvilicz or his team, providing a more general statement about the work done by the agency. “DHS and its employees are focused on keeping our elections safe, secure, and free,” it said. “Every single day appointees at the Department of Homeland Security work to implement the President’s policies and keep our Homeland safe.”

Harvilicz didn’t respond to questions about his DHS role. Harvilicz’s X account notes his post as DHS’ assistant secretary for cyber, infrastructure, risk and resilience policy but says he’s been detailed to the Defense Department. (Such temporary assignments are typically done in 120-day increments.)

Harvilicz was appointed to the DHS job around July, taking on a role that in the past has largely focused on shaping policy to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure, including its election systems.

But current and former DHS officials say Harvilicz and his team have transformed their functions to become more hands-on. They’ve been deeply engaged with facilitating multiple administration data-gathering efforts aimed at scouring voter rolls for noncitizens, the officials said. ProPublica has reported on one such effort, which has led to hundreds of citizens being incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens.

Harvilicz’s team includes Heather Honey, the deputy assistant secretary of election integrity. ProPublica has reported that Honey was previously a leader in the Election Integrity Network, a conservative group that has challenged the legitimacy of American election systems. Honey worked closely with Cleta Mitchell, the network’s leader, who played a prominent role in helping Trump try to overturn his 2020 loss.

[VID]

Also reporting directly to Harvilicz is Samantha Anderson, who through the advocacy arm of the America First Policy Institute, a think tank closely associated with the president.

Multiple officials and elections experts said they were worried that Harvilicz and Honey would have prominent parts in assessing and describing the cybersecurity of the coming election, both to the public and to administration leaders. They also expressed concern that if Trump again wanted to get control of voting machines after the election, perhaps if Republicans lose seats in the midterms, that Harvilicz is ideally positioned to help them do so.

“It would be super easy for them to get the voting machines,” a current DHS official said, adding they can “describe it as they want, if they don’t like the results.”

Harvilicz co-founded Tranquility AI, which has developed an artificial intelligence tool for law enforcement, with Penrose, and they are listed on its 2025 patents as developing its systems together.

Penrose, a former intelligence officer, played a leading role in the campaign to help Trump in his failed bid to overturn the 2020 election, ProPublica has reported. Penrose also participated in multiple attempts to clandestinely seize voting machines, including in Michigan, where prosecutors accused him of breaking into some of the machines. (Penrose wasn’t charged in the case.) He appeared to be an unindicted co-conspirator in the failed Georgia prosecution in which Trump was accused of conspiring to overturn the election results, according to The Washington Post.

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President Donald Trump's administration seems very confused as to why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was in Georgia for the FBI's raid on the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center late last month. The story has now changed four times, and twice in the past 24 hours.

The first to comment on Gabbard was Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who claimed that Gabbard just happened to be in Atlanta when the raid happened. Gabbard then said that Trump asked her personally to go to Atlanta for the raid.

In a letter she sent to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), Gabbard wrote, "My presence was requested by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate and analyze intelligence related to election security, including counter-intelligence, foreign and other malign influence and cybersecurity."

By Wednesday, Trump appeared to forget about it.

In a conversation with "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Llamas, Trump spoke about his conspiracy theory that he lost the 2020 election. Llamas asked Trump point-blank, “Why is Tulsi Gabbard there?”

“I don’t know,” Trump answered. “But a lot of the cheating comes from, it’s international cheating.”

Less than 24 hours later, Trump's story changed again.

While he was speaking to the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump gushed over Gabbard for attending the raid.

“She took a lot of heat two days ago because she went in at Pam’s insistence,” the president said, referring to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“They say, ‘why is she doing it’… because Pam wanted her to do it. And you know why? Because she’s smart," Trump added, relayed The Guardian.

Georgia lawmakers are concerned about Trump's spreading of conspiracy theories and the purpose of the Fulton County raid. Georgia’s Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Bondi on Thursday morning, asking for specifics.

“We are deeply concerned that President Trump’s consistent spreading of misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories about the 2020 election fundamentally undermines the electoral process, endangers election workers, and erodes public trust in our democracy,” the lawmakers wrote. “This unprecedented seizure only heightens those concerns.”

If "the Trump administration is investigating a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus," it would legally require "an immediate congressional briefing," said Sen. Raphael Warnock and Reps. Lucy McBath and Nikema Williams all Democrats from Georgia.

The search warrant that demanded "copies" of the necessary documents didn't come from a local judge. According to the lawmakers, “unusually, the warrant was filed by the U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Missouri and follows the reported firing of the Atlanta FBI special agent in charge Paul Brown after expressing concern about this search."

The Associated Press reported that Brown was ousted the week before the raid. He was overseeing the Atlanta office. MS NOW confirmed in the days that followed that the Brown was pushed out because he refused to cooperate.

The group requested a briefing from the Department of Justice “concerning this activity and its related investigation by February 13, 2026."

The statute of limitations on the case has long expired. So, the only way the administration would be able to do anything about it is if there was some kind of ongoing conspiracy, said Georgia lawyer Michael J. Moore when speaking to CNN.

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return of hugo chavez ghost!

MMA

Benny Johnson: “I have that from the highest possible sources that Venezuela runs election-rigging operations in our country and in others through their electronic voting machines”}:

12/18/25

December 17, 2025, edition of The Benny Show, posted to YouTube

BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): So that's Tucker saying we are going to war tonight. That's what he's saying.

Now the administration has been ramping up a war on the narco-state Venezuela. I didn't vote for a new war. I don't want a new forever war. However, Venezuela is a very bad actor.

As we have said, the number one precursor to, well, punishing Venezuela would be the fact that they rig our elections. That is a matter of fact. I have that from the highest possible sources that Venezuela runs election-rigging operations in our country and in others through their electronic voting machines. I'm telling you, these are extremely serious people who have told me that because they've done the investigations themselves, and they were on Trump's team that hacked the election in 2024.

So did President Trump — is President Trump going to announce that he is going to war with Venezuela tonight? They've obviously been ratcheting up their activity in and around Venezuela, closing down the airspace, seizing tankers. I don't think that America has really, quite frankly, the stomach or appetite for a new war. It was bad enough, the bombing of Iran. And so, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to pray that that doesn't happen. I don't think this is the time for that. What do you think? I mean, I was like — I like — I'm not — I don't think that anybody in MAGA voted for new forever wars or regime change. Nonetheless, Venezuela is a very, very bad actor. You can see, sort of, the drums of war approaching. So we'll hope that there are ways to do this where it doesn't actually lead to boots on the ground. Nonetheless, it is important for us to dominate our own hemisphere, for us to not have bad actors that are poisoning Americans, rigging our elections, and engaging in terrorism across our borders. So this, ladies and gentlemen, is a positive — the collapse of the Venezuelan regime, just I don't want to do it with boots on the ground. Plus I hate communists.

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BIG LIE GASLIGHT REVISION?

AN 11 25

President Donald Trump's Department of Justice has dispatched federal investigators to question "multiple people" who have been spreading conspiracy theories that Venezuela stole the 2020 election, the Guardian reports.

According to the report, the "discredited election-rigging conspiracy theory could strengthen Trump’s military action against [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro."

"Two promoters of the conspiracy theory have repeatedly briefed the U.S. attorney for the district of Puerto Rico, W. Stephen Muldrow, and have shared witnesses and documents with officials," the report said, citing four sources.

Muldrow refused to comment.

Other conspiracy theorists in Tampa, Florida, have also been interviewed, the report said.

The Guardian said, "an investigation of this sort underscores how Trump’s justice department is becoming a major weapon in the president’s efforts to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss – while potentially strengthening the administration’s case for military action against Venezuela."

Among the lies spread about the 2020 elections was that deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez somehow founded the electronic voting machine and software companies to change the election seven years after his death. Other conspiracy theories claimed that the impoverished regime of Venezuela was outright controlling electronic voting machines.

Read the full report here.

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mma

Right-wing media amplify baseless claims that touch screen voting machines in Kentucky are flipping votes

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams dispelled the claim: “There is no ‘vote-switching.’ The voter confirmed that her ballot was correctly printed as marked for the candidate of her choice. Get your voting information from legitimate sources.”

Written by Jack Winstanley

Research contributions from Alex Kaplan & Shelby Jamerson

Published 11/01/24 mma

Right-wing and far-right media have amplified a baseless claim that touch screen voting machines in Kentucky are flipping votes from former President Donald Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris, with similar claims emerging from Texas. Local election officials in each state have rebutted the claims, with one Kentucky official saying, “There is no scenario in which a voter would be forced to cast a ballot that they believe did not reflect their intentions.”

Election officials in several states have rebutted social media posts claiming that voting machines are flipping votes

- Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams debunked a widespread TikTok video that purports to show a voter in Laurel County, Kentucky, unable to select Trump on a touch screen voting machine. The video, which also showed the machine selecting Harris, has received 6.1 million views, with right-wing figures sharing it across other social media platforms as well. According to Adams, “There is no ‘vote-switching.’ The voter confirmed that her ballot was correctly printed as marked for the candidate of her choice. Get your voting information from legitimate sources.” The Dispatch, [10/31/24; TikTok, 10/21/24, 10/21/24; Louisville Courier Journal, 10/31/24; PolitiFact, 11/1/24]

- Kentucky election officials suggested that the video showed an isolated incident, with one Laurel County official stating, “Nobody complained before her, nobody complained after her.” Laurel County officials reported the issue to the attorney general’s office “just to cover all our bases,” and took their own video “showing that the machine is working and it is not flipping votes,” but were ultimately “unable to replicate the woman’s issue.” A spokesperson for the company that provides voting equipment for Laurel County confirmed that the touch screen devices print paper ballots that can be reviewed by voters prior to submission, adding, “There is no scenario in which a voter would be forced to cast a ballot that they believe did not reflect their intentions.” The Dispatch, [10/31/24]

- The Tarrant County, Texas, elections office stated that it has “no reason to believe that votes are being switched by the voting system,” after a right-wing X (formerly Twitter) influencer claimed that machines were switching votes. Right-wing commentator George Behizy claimed that “Voters in Tarrant County, Texas are reporting that the voting machines are flipping their votes from Trump to Kamala Harris.” Local officials confirmed, however, that the voter who believed his vote had been miscast “was issued a new ballot and able to vote." PolitiFact, [10/24/24; Twitter/X, 10/21/24]

- In the run-up to Election Day, right-wing and far-right media figures have been pushing baseless claims and conspiracy theories, seemingly attempting to undermine the election results. Several of these claims have involved voting machines, but experts say that voting machines are safe and difficult to hack or interfere with, and that errors are generally remedied by poll workers and local officials who have backup systems to ensure accurate votes are cast. Bloomberg, [10/30/24; ABC News, 10/31/24; CBS News, 10/24/24; Brennan Center for Justice, 3/1/24, 10/25/24; Media Matters, 10/24/24, 10/30/24]

## Right-wing and far-right media figures are elevating the video that purports to show a voting machine in Kentucky, with some suggesting it could be “election fraud” or part of “election theft”

- On X, podcaster Joe Rogan shared the Kentucky video, adding, “What do you think? Broken machine or election fraud?” Twitter/X, [11/1/24]

- Right-wing social media figure Nick Sortor stated on X that “voting machines in Kentucky are NOT ALLOWING voters to select President Trump.” He added, “Why does this always seem happen in one direction and not the other?” Twitter/X, [10/31/24]

- An article for The Gateway Pundit promoted the video, claiming in a headline that a “Kentucky Touch Screen Repeatedly Won’t Allow Voter To Select Trump.” The article ends with a plea for voters to “remain vigilant,” and speculates, “How many other machines had the same thing happen to voters before this one voter who was aware enough to notice the mistake and smart enough to pull out his phone and record what happened?” The Gateway Pundit, [11/1/24]

- On Truth Social, election denial organization True the Vote shared the Kentucky video, claiming that the machine “automatically selected Harris/Walz” and that voters were supposedly “unable to select Trump/Vance.” Truth Social, [10/31/24; Media Matters, 8/6/24]

- Right-wing conspiracy theorist Tara Bull shared the Kentucky video on X, claiming that “Kentucky voting machines are REFUSING to let voters select Donald Trump’s name.” Twitter/X, [10/31/24; Media Matters, 8/23/23]

- QAnon account MJTruthUltra posted videos of voting machines allegedly in Kentucky and Arkansas, adding in one post, “Why do these “glitches” always favor democrats?” Twitter/X, [10/31/24, 10/31/24]

- QAnon influencer Jeffrey Pedersen (known online as “intheMatrixxx”) shared the Kentucky video, claiming a “voter in Kentucky cannot choose @realDonaldTrump for President.” Twitter/X, [10/31/24; Media Matters, 12/18/23]

- QAnon account Shadow of Ezra shared the Kentucky video on Telegram, adding, “Voting machines are preventing you to select Donald Trump as your president.” Telegram, [10/31/24, Media Matters, 5/6/24]

- An article posted on Alex Jones’ InfoWars site claimed that the Kentucky video “appears to show a voter being prevented from selecting Donald Trump as his presidential pick.” The article also speculated about “the threat of another election theft on the horizon,” and encouraged voters to “remain vigilant at the polls and re-check their ballots.” InfoWars, [10/31/24]

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Potential Trump administration official Mike Flynn suggests destroying Dominion voting machines like the Boston Tea Party

10/31/24 mma

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hey sis did they see missing ballots?

On Tuesday, October 29, Indiana Republican Larry L. Savage Jr. was arrested on theft charges for allegedly stealing or destroying voting ballots.

Savage, now 51, was among the Republicans who, earlier this year, sought the GOP nomination in his U.S. House district.

The alleged theft, according to Kansas City Star reporter Mike Stunson, occurred during a test of voting equipment in Madison Country, Indiana on October 3.

"The charges follow the testing of election equipment in Madison County as part of the Voting System Technical Oversight Program, according to an October 29 state police news release," Stunson reports. "People invited to attend the public test, which included Savage, a precinct committeeman, run pre-marked ballots through the machines to make sure they are properly working and counting votes correctly….. The testing was livestreamed online, and the footage showed Savage fold up two of the ballots and put them in his pocket, authorities said."

Savage, according to Stunson, "is also heard whispering to a Republican auditor candidate about the count of the ballots being wrong, according to court documents obtained by the Indianapolis Star."

"State police said they later found the missing ballots in Savage's vehicle," Stunson reports. "Savage told an investigator he took the ballots because he was told they weren't real, but the surveillance footage showed a woman overseeing the test telling attendees that they were 'live election ballots,' according to the Indianapolis Star."

Madison County prosecutor Rodney Cummings told Indianapolis' WISH-TV, "The ballots weren't there because he took them himself. He creates a controversy that never existed in an effort to undermine confidence in our election process.”

*Read the Kansas City Star's full report at this link.

an 10 24

===

Special counsel Jack Smith reveals new evidence against Trump in 2020 election case • Michigan Advance

Michigan voting machines

Smith will argue that Trump, outside his official presidential duties, tried to persuade political allies in Michigan to sway the election in his favor.

Among the evidence he will introduce: The former president held a meeting, “private in nature,” with Michigan legislators at the White House.

Smith also wrote that “In mid-December, the defendant spoke with RNC Chairwoman [Ronna McDaniel] and asked her to publicize and promote a private report that had been related on December 13 that purported to identify flaws in the use of [redacted] machines in Antrim County, Michigan. [Redacted] refused, telling the defendant that she already had discussed this report with [redacted] Michigan’s Speaker of the House [Chatfield], who had told her that the report was inaccurate. [Redacted] conveyed to the defendant [redacted] exact assessment: the report was ‘f—— nuts.’”

Nevada

===

trump lawyer tossed from dominion defam case

an 8 24

===

August 13, 2024 mma

Alan Feuer and Nick Corasaniti @ The New York Times: Former Pro-Trump County Clerk Is Found Guilty of Tampering With Voting Machines

Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., was convicted on Monday of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against former President Donald J. Trump.

Anna Merlin @ Mother Jones: Elon Musk’s Twitter Space With Donald Trump Was a Dumpster Fire

A heavily publicized Twitter conversation between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on Monday night began with an immediate bed-shitting technical crash. When things finally kicked off 42 minutes later with a much smaller audience, Musk blamed a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which did not appear to be true, as the rest of his site continued to function as normal.

Jesse Valentine @ American Journal News: Far-right extremist Jack Posobiec to speak at event for North Carolina Trump supporters

The campaign to reelect former President Donald Trump will host a virtual training event that features Jack Posobiec, a purveyor of far-right conspiracy theories.

Zack Beauchamp @ Vox: The right’s plan to fix America: Patriarchy 2.0

JD Vance and like-minded conservatives are theorizing a kind of “neopatriarchy.”

Media Matters: Roger Stone uses anti-LGBTQ slur to describe Tim Walz

“Now she’s picked, this guy, Tim Walz. Saw him at a rally. I mean, I hate to quote, Mel Brooks, in Blazing Saddles, but he was jumping around like a Kansas City f—–. This guy — really, really weird.”

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an 6 24

under renewed pressure from right-wing election deniers, the Louisiana Legislature abandoned its attempt to repeal a 2021 law that has made the task of buying voting machines overly burdensome.

House Bill 856, sponsored by Rep. Mike Johnson, R-Pineville, died just one step shy of final passage during the closing days of the 2024 legislative session after Johnson ended conference committee negotiations.

The proposal would have repealed parts of a 2021 law that added multiple layers of bureaucracy to the Louisiana Department of State’s process to purchase new voting systems. The most significant parts of the bill were created through a late-stage amendment adopted on the Senate floor last week.

In an interview Sunday, Johnson said he decided to sideline the bill after some constituents and other lawmakers expressed concerns with the “process” used to amend the bill into its final version.

Typically, most scrutiny and vetting of legislation occurs during committee hearings before a bill reaches the floor of a chamber, so late-stage floor amendments that make big changes to a bill can sometimes generate pushback from other lawmakers or constituents.

Johnson’s legislation began as a simple one-page bill to add a short clause to an existing statute, making the secretary of state responsible for all “voting system maintenance and repair.” That version of the bill sailed through both chambers without opposition. It wasn’t until a May 8 Senate & Governmental Affairs Committee hearing when lawmakers first hinted at the possibility of an amendment.

At the hearing, lawmakers asked Secretary of State Nancy Landry for an update on the purchase of new voting machines. Landry, a Republican, said it was her “number one priority” but that the 2021 law had turned the acquisition into a “long and drawn out process.”

In a later interview, Landry’s spokesperson, Joel Watson, said the process involves multiple layers of bureaucratic red tape that will delay the purchase of new voting machines an additional two years.

The 2021 law created the Voting System Commission within the Louisiana Department of State. Composed of government officials who serve without compensation, the commission is charged with analyzing any available voting systems and recommending a specific type to the secretary of state. It also created a separate Voting System Proposal Evaluation Committee to independently review vendors that submitted bids before making a final recommendation.

Senate & Governmental Affairs Committee members only briefly discussed the bureaucratic issues at the May 8 hearing and advanced the original version of Johnson’s bill without amendments. It wasn’t until May 29 when the bill came up for a Senate floor vote that the public and most lawmakers saw the extent of the changes Landry was requesting through an amendment from Sen. Mike Reese, R-Leesville. Still, the new amended version of the bill cleared the chamber with unanimous support.

The amended version proposed to keep both the Voting System Commission and the Voting System Proposal Evaluation Committee with some small changes. It would have repealed requirements that the secretary of state create rules for the purchase of voting machines and hire at least three independent experts to certify them.

===

tEMPE, Ariz. — At the local discount cinema in this Phoenix suburb this winter, a crowd of about 100 took their seats for something different from the typical Sunday matinee.

The man standing in front of the big screen, Mark Cook, packed up his life months ago to drive around in an RV for a mission he said he was called to by God. Their elections had been stolen from them, he told the crowd, and it was time to take them back. He dubbed his cross-country venture the “hand count road show.”

“Elections belong to us,” he said, emphatically. “Say it!” a woman in the front of the theater yelled out.

00:26

03:41

The ultimate solution he offered the crowd: Eliminating mail-in voting, counting all ballots cast at polling places on the night of the election, and, most importantly, doing the counting by hand.

Cook is one of several quasi-disciples of Mike Lindell and other big-name election influencers who have been spreading the hand-count gospel around the country since 2020, when Donald Trump began claiming without evidence that ballot tabulating machines were rigged against him.

The push to hand-count ballots is ramping up, albeit with spotty success, as the 2024 election nears, according to a review by The Guardian and Votebeat. If more localities decide to try hand-counting in the November election, results could be inaccurate, untrustworthy, or delayed, fostering more distrust in elections. In places that opt not to hand count, supporters of the practice could use this choice as a reason to question or refuse to sign off on certification.

Either way, it raises the risk of throwing the 2024 election into chaos.

“It just gives additional grounds for calling into question the results of elections when there are no valid grounds,” said Heather Sawyer, executive director at American Oversight. “There’s no good reason to do it. And there’s lots of room for mischief and problems.”

The push hasn’t gained much ground in the large swing counties where Trump claimed votes were stolen from him. It’s been more effective in small or rural counties that voted heavily for Trump, where conservative activists havelined up at public meetings to repeat the conspiracies of Cook, Lindell, and others. There — in Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — local officials voted to give hand-counting ballots a try in either their midterm or presidential primary elections.

These attempts have proven what election experts have long understood: Ditching machines and exclusively hand-counting ballots is time-consuming, expensive, and more prone to human error. It’s also unnecessary. Election officials routinely verify that machines are counting votes properly by hand-counting the results on a portion of ballots after each election.

Most recently, in Gillespie County, Texas,errors were discovered in nearly all precincts after the county tried to hand-count its Republican presidential primary election.

Nevertheless, Gillespie County still plans to hand-count its local runoff election in May. In South Dakota, there are efforts to get hand-counting through local initiatives. And in New Hampshire, one town voted to count ballots by hand after a concerted push by local activists.

This seemingly grassroots effort has sometimes been backed by outside funding and promises of financial support, some from Lindell and others from unknown sources, according to public records and statements reviewed by The Guardian and Votebeat.

Before a California county voted to get rid of its tabulation machines, Lindell wrote to a supervisor that if they “have any pushback, including lawsuits against you or your county, I will provide all of the resources necessary (including both financial and legal) for this fight,” according todocuments obtained by American Oversight, a watchdog group that has tracked the hand count movement across the country, and shared with The Guardian and Votebeat.

Lindell told The Guardian he has contributed money to efforts in South Dakota and New Hampshire, but he wasn’t sure how much or how exactly the funds were used. He also features hand-count activists on his online video programs and helps them find donations that way. “Any way I can to get the word out,” he said.

Money wouldn’t come from him personally, but from an affiliated fundraising outfit, the Lindell Offense Fund, he said. His personal financial issues, stemming from lawsuits he faces, are well documented: He couldn’t pay his lawyers in defamation cases brought by voting machine companies.

“I don’t have money to stick in there myself. I’m reaching out to the public. … I’m not a grifter. I’d be the worst grifter that ever lived,” he said.

In Arizona, the push to hand-count ballots has mysterious benefactors, with an unknown source offering money for the legal defense of county supervisors who take on the fight to hand-count ballots, defying state law. Most recently, an elected official in rural Mohave County sued the attorney general, an effort to obtain a court ruling saying that hand-counting ballots is legal. The supervisor, Ron Gould, said in an interview he doesn’t “have permission” to disclose who is paying his legal costs — but so far, it isn’t him.

Mike Lindell influences hand-count push

Inside Pollack Cinemas in Tempe, road show attendees munched on popcorn and sipped sodas as Cook told them about a story he heard from a Texas poll worker. The poll worker told him they watched as a ballot counter on a tabulation machine ticked up one by one, but no one was inserting ballots at the time.

Many in the crowd gasped. “Oh my gosh,” one said.

This claim could have been referencing a viral video which showed an electronic pollbook in Dallas County adding voters after polls closed, which county officials have explained was simply a delay in the system.

Like many who promote hand-counting ballots, Cook subscribes to wide-ranging conspiracy theories about voting, and he told the crowd all about them. Their election officials in Maricopa County, he told them without offering proof, had caused problems during the midterm election so they could “pepper in ballots.” Election officials across the country used messy voter rolls to “inject” “phantom” voters, he said, again without evidence. And COVID-19 was born as a way to increase vote-by-mail across the country, he said falsely, just so the 2020 election could be stolen from Donald Trump.

The solutions he offers are familiar talking points among the Republican leaders who promote hand-counting ballots. They would restrict voting access, such as ending all early and mail-in voting, and purging voter rolls.

Cook credits Lindell with influencing his beliefs. He attended Lindell’s infamous “cyber symposium” in 2021, where Lindell said the “seeds were planted” for people to go back to their states to advocate against machines.

With Lindell’s assistance and coordination, the hand-count pushes have become more systematic.

He tried to rally the troops at a summit in Missouri last August, where he detailed “The Plan,” his step-by-step guide for grassroots groups and activists to convince their local elected officials to ditch machines. He advises them to talk about machine vulnerabilities, voter roll issues, internet connections, and other frequent talking points of the far-right election activist movement. Then, “call for the implementation of hand counts” and prepare to respond to objections.

Cause of America, one of several organizations affiliated with Lindell, says it has “over 300,000 volunteers on the ground going county by county to change laws, remove machines, teach hand count voting and more.” Lindell said he hosts a weekly call with activists across the country to talk about the plan.

Lindell held the 2021 cyber symposium in South Dakota, where activists are now working on gathering petition signatures to put the idea of getting rid of voting machines before voters in two dozen counties. Proponents have so far convinced two counties, Fall River and Gregory, to adopt full hand counts.

Some counties have objected to the petitions, saying the change could violate state and federal law.

“If the voters vote for this ordinance, we will have lawsuits,” McPherson County Auditor Lindley Howard told South Dakota News Watch. “If we illegally deny the petition, then the petitioners will file a lawsuit. I feel like counties were left swimming in an ocean without a lifejacket.”

In New Hampshire, a group used many towns’ “warrant articles” process to try to get rid of machines, filing petitions in nearly two dozen towns to call for a vote on machine tabulation. Activists in the state tried a similar push in 2022, but didn’t get much traction.

Lindell and New Hampshire organizers hoped for a landslide of towns moving to hand counts.

“Imagine the impact for the rest of the state.... Imagine the impact on the rest of our country! God willing, this will be our generation’s ‘shot heard around the world,’” a crowdfunding site for the New Hampshire push says. The crowdfunding page notes that Lindell funded a “digital mobile truck” to advertise for the campaign for six days at $20,000.

But so far just one town, Danville, has approved the petition to hand-count ballots in presidential elections. The town’s attorney told the Associated Press he doesn’t believe the change will stand because it may violate state law.

New Hampshire organizers didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Lindell has featured both the South Dakota and New Hampshire efforts on his online show.

‘No upside’ to hand-counting ballots

There’s a side benefit to the hand count fervor for the broader rightwing election movement: It serves to keep local activists engaged in the leadup to the 2024 election, notes Emma Steiner, who has followed the hand count push for Common Cause.

“It’s basically an objective that they can organize around, that they can lobby their local legislators and officials about, and something that keeps them motivated and their eye on the ball so that they will be available in the game for November,” Steiner said.

In Arizona, far-right lawmakers Sonny Borrelli and Wendy Rogers have traveled the state to spread the word about hand counts. The anti-machine sentiment is still running strong in the swing state, which could decide the 2024 election.

Before Borrelli and Rogers’ tour, Cochise County notably attempted to move to a full hand count, despite a warning from the secretary of state at the time that the move would be illegal. An unnamed source paid a $10,000 legal retainer for two Republican supervisors who had voted for the hand count to happen, according to their statements at public meetings.

Those two supervisors, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, then later refused to certify the election, which required court intervention. Crosby and Judd were recently charged by the state for their role in delaying certification.

Judd said in an interview that she wanted to hand count ballots only to appease the crowds that had been showing up to board meetings.

“It was just to show them we have good machines, we have a good elections director, we have a good system here, you don’t have to be worried about Cochise county,” she said.

Judd said she didn’t know who paid the $10,000 legal retainer for the related case.

When asked if he paid the Cochise retainer, Lindell said, “I don’t believe so.”

In Cochise and elsewhere, the hand count push has driven out some elections officials, who have found themselves at odds with their county boards over the practice. Cochise’s seasoned elections director, Lisa Marra, left her job after suing the county for harassment. She eventually received a $130,000 settlement.

When Mohave County, a heavily Republican part of the state, was considering a full hand count of ballots cast in 2024 elections, Borrelli told the local supervisors that unnamed hand count supporters had promised him they’d financially support the county if there was any legal pushback.

Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, sent a letter warning the supervisors they could be prosecuted for hand-counting all ballots, and the supervisors voted not to move forward. That spurred Gould’s lawsuit against Mayes, asking the court to rule on whether hand counting is legal in the state. In the suit, Gould says that he faced “potentially losing his liberty and being jailed as a criminal, if Defendant Mayes is correct, for voting according to his conscience.”

Gould said in an interview that he sued so that the state would “stop threatening him.” He believes hand counting ballots is legal and would improve voter confidence.

Supervisor Buster Johnson voted “no” to stop the switch to hand counting. Borrelli is now challenging Johnson for his seat on the board in the July primary election, which could change the makeup of the board. Borrelli said in a text message that his run for the seat has “nothing to do with elections.”

In a phone interview, Johnson said he voted no on hand counting because, along with the legal reasons, he said, it would be expensive and error-prone, and it attempts to fix a non-existent problem.

“There is no upside to it.”

Borrelli didn’t respond to a question about the identity of the unnamed supporter who had promised to pay legal costs in Mohave County. Judd said that Borrelli has not offered to pay legal costs for her pending criminal case.

Beyond Arizona, places that recently tried hand counting have found out the hard way about its challenges.

Osage County, a small Missouri county outside Jefferson City, hand-counted a local election in April 2023 as a test of the practice, spurred by activists who convinced the county clerk to try it. Lindell and other activists now cite the Osage count as one of their successes.

But, County Clerk Nicci Kammerich wrote in a local newspaper, the process took longer and cost more in the end, even with a group of mostly volunteers who helped hand count.

Kammerich sent the article to The Guardian after an interview request, saying the hand count issue has consumed her office: “I do not have the time to talk. I get calls and email requests on the daily about this hand count and it has been really interfering with my day to day tasks.”

After the hand count, Kammerich heard from election judges who said they wouldn’t work again if they had to hand count.

“After considering all factors of this election and comparing it to other elections that are similar, I fear that if we were to continue hand counting it would cost us more in time, money, losing volunteers, and accuracy of votes,” Kammerich wrote, adding that her office intends to go back to tabulation machines for future elections.

How the U.S. counts votes

Most of the U.S. votes on paper ballots, which then are fed into machines that tabulate the results. Some places use touch screens, where people vote by selecting options on a screen and then cast printed receipts of their votes into machines. Machine-tabulated results are then verified with a hand count of a small percentage of ballots, with only tight races receiving a full hand recount. Some jurisdictions, typically very small, still hand count paper ballots, though these instances are rare.

The widespread use of machines is relatively recent: the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, allowed many smaller areas to afford tabulation machines, said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some of the proponents of hand counting may remember when their local elections were counted by hand.

Proponents of the practice often point to other countries, like France, where hand-counting paper ballots is the norm. But local ballots in the U.S. are often much longer and more complex than those in European countries: Americans vote on far more offices, and elections are frequently consolidated, so a voter will weigh in on federal, state, and local elected officials and ballot questions at the same time. Some of these countries don’t use mail-in voting, a more common voting method in the U.S., and they are smaller than the U.S.

“A voter in San Francisco in the presidential election is going to vote on more things in that one election than a citizen of Great Britain will vote on in a lifetime,” Stewart said.

Moving to hand counts brings not only financial and accuracy questions, but also logistical ones: it takes far more people and space than machine counting. In some counties that discussed the idea of hand counts, finding a place to house a big operation to count ballots presented obstacles.

Cook shrugs off these points. If we found a way to do it in years past, he said, we can do it now.

Lindell’s response to the pushback from elections officials: “They’re all wrong. They’re all wrong. … These election officials, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They absolutely don’t. They’re just putting it out there and you media people put it out there as gospel. It’s not true.”

Proponents of hand counting say it’s one way to restore faith in elections, especially among those who don’t trust the results. But whenever people claim an election reform will restore confidence in the process, the evidence typically shows it doesn’t, Stewart, of MIT, said.

“I don’t see any evidence that something like this would be the silver bullet that would restore confidence among the mass public,” Stewart said.

Correction: This story originally misstated who warned Cochise County officials in 2022 that their hand count plan would be illegal. It was the Arizona secretary of state, not the attorney general.

Votebeat reporter Natalia Contreras contributed to this report.

Rachel Leingang is a democracy reporter at The Guardian. Contact Rachel atrachel.leingang@theguardian.com. Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen atjfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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mma 11 23

After Northampton County, Pennsylvania, officials released a statement on November 7 saying that a voting machine company's clerical error caused votes on a ballot question to appear to be changed, right-wing figures and social media users immediately cited the error as evidence that Democrats were using voting machines to rig elections and claimed that paper ballots were the only way to ensure a secure election. In reality, though the votes appeared to be flipped due to a glitch, officials confirmed that they were tabulated correctly.

## Votes in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, were tallied accurately — despite claims from right-wing outlets
- Although votes appeared to be flipped due to a glitch on printed ballot summaries for one county in a state-wide ballot question, officials confirmed that votes were tabulated correctly. The AP reported that a voting machine company’s “clerical error” caused votes in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, to “appear to be flipped on a ballot question that asked whether a pair of incumbent state appeals judges should be retained.” The story added, “Despite the glitch on the printed summary, voters’ actual choices were properly recorded by the machines’ backend system, and their votes will be tabulated accurately.” The Associated Press, [11/7/23]
- Nevertheless, a number of right-wing outlets amplified claims that votes had been “flipped” in articles that spread widely on social media.The Gateway Pundit, an outlet known for using Facebook to spread and profit from election misinformation, published several articles that users shared in private right-wing Facebook groups. Another article about the error from American Military News, which claimed that “machines experienced programming errors that caused votes to flip,” also made its way around Facebook. Right-wing site The Western Journal shared an article about the “glitch” across its network of Facebook pages. Forbes, [7/29/21; The Gateway Pundit, accessed 11/9/23; Media Matters, 3/25/20; Facebook, accessed 11/9/23, 11/9/23]
- On November 8, Fox host Jesse Watters called this year’s election a “test run for election security” and suggested that voter fraud occurred, listing Pennsylvania as an example.Watters also claimed, “A little fraud goes a long way.” Fox News, [11/8/23]
## Right-wing figures claimed that the election was rigged, suggesting the clerical error was intentional and politically motivated
- Conservative commentator Rogan O'Handley, also known as DC Draino, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “Democrats run [Pennsylvania] and will cheat in *any* way possible.”Linking to a Gateway Pundit story about the glitch, O’Handley wrote: “BREAKING: Voting machines in Pennsylvania shut down after getting caught flipping votes. Democrats run that state and will cheat in *any* way possible. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH - Get rid of these damn rigged machines!” Twitter/X, [11/7/23]
- Far-right personality and self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer claimed that the error was “proof” that voting machines “flip votes.” She posted, “BREAKING: Voting machines in Pennsylvania flipped votes for judges in a tabulation error! Proof the machines flip votes. Election machines cannot be trusted!” Twitter/X, [11/7/23]
- ”Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec cited the glitch as evidence that election denialist and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell had been “proven right” about voting machines. Lindell reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money to spread false election claims in his quest to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Twitter/X, [11/8/23; CNBC, 12/16/21]
- Conservative commentator Benny Johnson cited the voting machine error as an example in his “list” of supposed “election fraud cases we’ve recently learned about.” He posted, “Voting machines in Pennsylvania are now being shut down after reports of machines ‘flipping votes’. And this is why Americans have lost all faith in our electoral process. … When will America acknowledge that our election system has been compromised?” Twitter/X, [11/7/23]
- Right-wing internet personality Wall Street Apes claimed that “voting machines” had been “caught switching votes.” “America will NEVER have another fair election,” the post claimed. Truth Social, [11/7/23]
:{#:{# Users in right-wing Facebook groups also amplified false claims of voter fraud}:
}:
- Users in private right-wing Facebook groups amplified articles about the error and claimed that it was indicative of fraud.For instance, one user in a private pro-Trump group with nearly 7,000 members shared a Newsweek article headlined “Pennsylvania Voting Machines Changing Votes Sparks Outrage,” and said that they’d “be willing to bet that this is what happened in the 2020 election in many Democratic ran cities and states.” Another user in a private group amplified an ABC News article about the error, asking, “Remember when all the kooks said voter fraud was improbable and very rare?!” The user added, “Just wait til next year - you ain’t seen nothing yet … Disgusting that we keep allowing this shit to continue.” Facebook, [11/7/23, 11/8/23; Newsweek, 11/7/23; ABC News, 11/7/23]
- A user in a private pro-Trump Facebook group told nearly 9,000 members: “They want voters to trust the machines that are publishing the opposite results of the voters! There is no way of knowing which is actually accurate.”The user also falsely claimed, “The voting machines ONLY flipped votes in the race between Judge Jack Panella (Democrat) and Judge Victor Stabile (Republican) for the Pennsylvania Superior Court. The concerned voters said the machines were flipping votes FROM THE REPUBLICAN TO THE DEMOCRAT.” Election officials said the error showed voters the opposite of what they entered into the voting machine in a visual display. Facebook, [11/7/23; The Associated Press, 11/7/23]
## Far-right figures and users in right-wing Facebook groups falsely claimed that the only way for elections to be secure is through the use of paper ballots
- QAnon-connected election denial activist Seth Keshel wrote on Telegram, “Programming errors don’t happen on paper ballots.”Keshel shared an article from The Gateway Pundit claiming that the “VP of Customer Operations” of the voting machine company used in Pennsylvania said, “It was a human error, based on someone from our team that programmed the election.” Telegram, [11/8/23; The Gateway Pundit, 11/8/23]
- QAnon influencer ULTRA Pepe Lives Matter wrote, “Imagine if we just went to paper ballots and voter ID but apparently it's a conspiracy theory to think our elections are not riddled with fraud.” Telegram, [11/7/23]
- Users in private right-wing and pro-Trump Facebook groups expressed distrust in voting machines, falsely accused Democrats of cheating, claimed that “massive errors” didn’t happen before 2020, and called for the use of paper ballots.One user wrote, “Human error … You mean trying to cheat again! Until 2020 we didn't have all these massive errors and jaming up!” They added, “Go back to paper ballots and fair elections! Elections now days are compromised.” Another user shared an article from The Gateway Pundit and wrote that there is “no proof that touchscreen voting can be verified,” claiming that the votes “can still be flipped internally, by design.” They added, “WE MUST DEMAND HAND MARKED HAND COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS AT THE PRECINCTS!” Facebook, [11/8/23, 11/7/23, 11/7/23]
- One user in a private right-wing Facebook group with over 193,000 members wrote, “Voting machines will have to be outlawed before the Presidential Election.”They added, “Corruption is massive,” and shared a link to an article from The Gateway Pundit claiming that votes were “getting flipped” in Pennsylvania. Facebook, [11/9/23; The Gateway Pundit, 11/7/23]

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an 12 22

When the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down its unanimous decision in New York Times v. Sullivan back in 1964, it established a tough standard that plaintiffs have to meet in defamation lawsuits. Plaintiffs, according to the Warren Court, have to prove “actual malice.” And that is what Dominion Voting Systems is trying to prove in the defamation lawsuits it filed against Fox News, Newsmax TV, One America News (OAN) and others in response to the false claims they promoted about the 2020 presidential election.

After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes, many far-right MAGA Republicans at Fox News, Newsmax and OAN promoted the false claim that Dominion’s voting equipment was used to help Democrats steal the election — a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked. Fox News, in response to Dominion’s defamation lawsuit, has maintained that its hosts weren’t saying the claims about Dominion were true, and that they were just asking questions.

Dominion, meanwhile, is trying to show, in its $1.6 billion lawsuit, that hosts at Fox News acted with actual malice and promoted claims they knew were nonsense. And on Wednesday, December 21, attorneys for Dominion pointed to Fox News host Sean Hannity as an example of someone who knew that the Big Lie was a lie but promoted the claims of Trump attorney Sidney Powell anyway. Powell, who is also facing a defamation lawsuit from Dominion, falsely accused Dominion of helping Democrats steal the election from Trump. Another MAGA Republican who made that false claim and is being sued by Dominion is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Dominion has sued former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as well.

Reporting for the New York Times on December 21, journalist Jeremy Peters explains, “On November 30, 2020, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell on his prime-time Fox News program. As she had in many other interviews around that time — on Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media — Ms. Powell, a former federal prosecutor, spun wild conspiracy theories about what she said was ‘corruption all across the country, in countless districts,’ in a plot to steal reelection from the president, Donald J. Trump. At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dominion machines, she insisted, were being used ‘to trash large batches of votes.’”

But when Hannity gave a deposition two years later on Wednesday, December 21, 2022 and was under oath, he admitted, “I did not believe it for one second.”

According to Peters, “The hearing was called to address several issues that need to be resolved before the case heads for a jury trial, which the judge has scheduled to begin in April. Mr. Hannity’s disclosure — along with others that emerged from court on Wednesday about what Fox News executives and hosts really believed as their network became one of the loudest megaphones for lies about the 2020 election — is among the strongest evidence yet to emerge publicly that some Fox employees knew that what they were broadcasting was false.”

Under the New York Times v. Sullivan standard established by the Warren Court 58 years ago, defamation is very difficult to prove. An honest mistake doesn’t fit the definition of defamation — the plaintiff has to show actual malice. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin filed a defamation lawsuit against the Times and lost because Palin and her attorneys couldn’t prove actual malice.

“The high legal standard of proof in defamation cases makes it difficult for a company like Dominion to prevail against a media organization like Fox News,” Peters notes. “Dominion has to persuade a jury that people at Fox were, in effect, saying one thing in private while telling their audience exactly the opposite.And that requires showing a jury convincing evidence that speaks to the state of mind of those who were making the decisions at the network. In Delaware Superior Court on Wednesday, Dominion’s lawyers argued that they had obtained ample evidence to make that case.”

Peters adds, “One lawyer for Dominion said that ‘not a single Fox witness’ so far had produced anything supporting the various false claims about the company that were uttered repeatedly on the network. And in some cases, other high-profile hosts and senior executives echoed Mr. Hannity’s doubts about what Mr. Trump and his allies like Ms. Powell were saying, according to theDominion lawyer, Stephen Shackelford. This included Meade Cooper, who oversees prime-time programming for Fox News, and the prime-time star Tucker Carlson, Mr. Shackelford said.”

Citing Cooper and Carlson as examples, Shackleford told the court, “Many of the highest-ranking Fox people have admitted under oath that they never believed the Dominion lies.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/12/federal-judge-orders-sanctions-for-kari-lakes-legal-team-in-voting-equipment-lawsuit/

After Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs defeated far-right MAGA Republican Kari Lake in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election, conservative Republican Gov. Doug Ducey congratulated her and said he looked forward to helping with the transition from a Ducey Administration to a Hobbs Administration. But Lake, a conspiracy theorist and Big Lie promoter who falsely claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, has refused to concede to Hobbs. And her campaign, in a lawsuit, questioned “the validity of the election results.”

Lake has also been in court attacking the electronic vote-counting equipment used in Arizona. But a federal judge, John J. Tuchi, disagrees with Lake’s claim that the equipment is problematic. And on Thursday, December 1, Tuchi ordered sanctions against Lake’s legal team.

Attorney/journalist Aaron Keller, reporting for Law & Crime on December 1, explains, “The attorneys being sanctioned are not directly named in Thursday’s order, but according to the court docket, Harvard Law School Prof. Alan Dershowitz is Lake’s lead attorney in the matter. Also on her legal team are co-lead attorneys Andrew D. Parker, Jesse Hersch Kibort, and Joseph Alan Pull of Minneapolis. Further listed as a member of her legal team is attorney Kurt B. Olsen of Washington, D.C.Parker, Olsen, and Dershowitz signed the original complaint, an amended complaint, and (an) opposition to a request for sanctions.”

Another far-right MAGA Republican who lost an election in Arizona, State Rep. Mark Finchem, joined Lake as a plaintiff in her lawsuit attacking Arizona’s voting equipment.In the 2022 midterms, Finchem ran for the position that Hobbs presently holds: Arizona secretary of state. And like Lake, he has aggressively promoted the Big Lie and Trump’s debunked voter fraud conspiracy theories. But Finchem lost to Democrat Adrian Fontes. Arizona was once a deep red state, but in 2023, it will have a Democratic governor (Hobbs), a Democratic secretary of state (Fontes) and two Democratic U.S. senators: Mark Kelly (who was reelected in November) and Kyrsten Sinema.

Dershowitz, however, stressed to Law & Crime that he is not questioning the election results in Arizona. And Keller points out that Lake and Finchem’s initial lawsuit questioning Arizona’s electronic voting machines goes back to April.

Dershowitz told Law & Crime, “I have not challenged the results of any Arizona elections. I have given legal advice about the future use of machine counting by companies that refuse to disclose the inner workings of their machines. I support transparency in elections.”

Keller explains, “The Lake/Finchem lawsuit as a whole, according to its opening salvo, sought to question the Grand Canyon State’s use of electronic ballot-counting devices. The case was filed in April, and — as Dershowitz noted — that was long before the results of the November 2022 midterms…. The lawsuit elsewhere bemoaned what it called ‘glaring failures with electronic voting systems’….U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi rubbished the lawsuit in August— again, before the midterms — and on Thursday ascertained that sanctions were appropriate. Tuchi, a Barack Obama appointee, noted in August that Arizona election equipment is rigorously tested before it is used to count votes.”

Tuchi laid out the ways in which Arizona’s voting equipment undergoes extensive testing.

Tuchi wrote, “Before a single vote is cast, Arizona’s election equipment undergoes thorough testing by independent, neutral experts. Electronic voting equipment must be tested by both the Secretary’s Certification Committee and an Election Assistance Commission (“EAC”) accredited testing laboratory before it may be used in an Arizona election…. In addition to the equipment certification process, Arizona’s vote tabulation results are subject to four independent audits — two audits occur before the election, and two audits after.”

The judge continued, “The first of these audits is a logic and accuracy test, which is performed by the Arizona Secretary of State on a sample of the tabulation equipment…. The second required audit also takes place before election day. For the second audit, Arizona counties must perform a logic and accuracy test on all of their tabulation equipment.”

Tuchi wrote that Lake’s claims were “too speculative to establish an injury in fact.” Keller notes that the sanctions Tuchi has ordered only apply to the attorneys, not to plaintiffs Lake and Finchem.

The judge also wrote, “The Court shares the concerns expressed by other federal courts about misuse of the judicial system to baselessly cast doubt on the electoral process in a manner that is conspicuously consistent with the plaintiffs’ political ends.”

an 9 22 colo

...Tina Peters, Mesa County’s Clerk, was not a cultish election denier immediately before or after 2020’s presidential election. She did not make any accusations that her voting system’s computers had been secretly sabotaged when Sandra Brown, Mesa County’s back-office election manager, mistakenly double-counted 20,000 ballots in late October 2020—a procedural error during preprocessing ballots that Brown repeated in Mesa County’s municipal elections in April 2021.

But soon after April 2021’s elections, where a slate of conservatives who skipped a candidate forum all lost, the first of what became a parade of pro-Donald Trump, self-proclaimed election IT experts began telling Peters about anomalies with her county’s voting system computers. The anomalies were the same clichés about illegal voters and forged totals that had been put forth by Trump diehards in other states. Except the allegations were dressed up as statistics and technicalities. Peters, a businesswoman turned public official, was more than impressed.

As March 2022 indictments by Mesa County District Attorney Daniel Rubenstein, a Republican, and a recent New Yorker profile recount, Peters used a standard update of election software in late April 2021 to make unauthorized copies of her election system’s hard drives, software, and data. The apparent goal was gathering intelligence to show that the technology—made by Dominion Voting Systems—could not be trusted to produce accurate vote counts.

Trump’s lawyers and partisan IT specialists had made copies of computer drives, software and data in December 2020 in Antrim County, Michigan, after a former state GOP leader turned state judge allowed it. The copies, of another Dominion system, were not to be shared. But they were soon leaked in Trump circles.

That effort, nonetheless, produced no evidence for any of Trump’s failed post-election lawsuits. Still, one day after January 6, 2021’s pro-Trump insurrection, some of the same data miners went to Coffee County, Georgia. There, an election official let them copy their Dominion system’s drives, software and 2020 data. Members of this loose cadre of IT experts showed up in Mesa County in late April—several weeks after back-office manager Brown again erred in using a computer as it was compiling vote subtotals in its municipal elections.

What happened next in Mesa County gets complex. It also reveals how a rare but recurring trend among a handful of local election officials—mistakes with setting up or using their system’s computers—can be exploited by partisans who claim that invisible forces are secretly stealing votes if their candidates lose.

In every cycle, there are some election officials who do not properly set up or use these computers—errors that usually are caught and corrected, but initially produce incorrect election results. This trend has been overlooked in the press coverage of the interstate plot by Trump’s IT gurus to steal election software and 2020 data.

The operational problems, however, are among the findings by the Independent Media Institute’s Voting Booth project, which has co-written a forthcoming guide about how election systems work. The co-author is Duncan Buell, a computer scientist who has studied voting systems, software, and data for more than a decade, and was an election official in Richland County, South Carolina, home to the state’s capital, Columbia. These errors recurred in each cycle that he studied.

In 2020’s general election, the programming, and operational mistakes were few and far between. Nonetheless, the errors that Trump’s IT squads seized upon—errors that were corroborated by post-election inquiries by other government bodies—helped fuel the lie that the presidential election was stolen.

Moreover, some of the election workers who made these mistakes—such as Mesa County’s Brown—and their elected superior—such as Peters—then fell under the spell of Trump’s conspiratorial IT squad—producing fodder for more false claims.

These trends—mistakes with programming or using election computers and rogue officials who abuse the public trust by making unfounded claims—offer warnings before 2022’s general election. Many 2020 election-deniers are candidates seeking state and federal office this fall. A few already have shown in their primaries that they will attack the process and technology if they fear they may lose.

Before 2020’s election, virtually all of the members of Trump’s IT squads did not know much about voting system computers or election administration safeguards. But they eagerly presented their credentials and claimed, that election computers had been hijacked, and, moreover, that no Dominion system should be trusted. Their unproven accusations became, and remain, fixtures in Trump circles.

“It wasn’t just Colorado,” said Walter Daugherity, a recently retired University of Texas lecturer in computer science and engineering, on an August 22 televised panel sponsored and hosted by Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has spent millions to promote the stolen election fiction and whose actions are under investigation by federal authorities. “Everywhere across the country that had a Dominion trusted build [software] upgrade had the same thing happen.”

Daugherity was one analyst who received Mesa County’s pilfered data. He and Jeff O’Donnell, an IT analyst whose moniker in Trump circles is “the Lone Raccoon,” co-wrote a series of reports concluding that Mesa County’s computers mysteriously allowed 20,346 presidential ballots to be counted twice. The double counting was not the fault of election officials, specifically back-office election manager Brown, they wrote, positing that an “external trigger,” “signal,” “software algorithm” or “pre-programming” had caused “unexpected voting patterns.”

Their speculation was one of many similar pronouncements in Trump circles. They accused Dominion of complicity in a scheme that would be illegal, if it were true.

“The report made claims which, if true, would indicate a crime was committed related to election fraud,” Mesa County District Attorney Rubenstein said via email on August 25. “I stand by the investigation that we conducted and am confident that there is no evidence of a crime being committed.”

Inside One Disinformation Bubble

Mesa County was among a handful of counties across America’s 8,000-plus election jurisdictions where Trump allies discovered glitches in administering the 2020 election. The glitches, which produced incorrect initial vote counts, were signs that Trump lost due to a vast conspiracy, they asserted.

That narrative, which continues today, ignores the banalest explanation of what happened in Mesa County and in jurisdictions such as Antrim County, Michigan. In both locales, county election officials erred with setting up or using their voting system’s computers, mistakes that initially were not noticed but were later caught and corrected.

The operational errors were recorded by the system’s computers, which keeps logs of every action—from ballot paper jams to vote counts. The errors were confirmed by other evidence, such as, in Mesa County, police investigators reconstructing the mistakes on the same equipment, parsing video footage from security cameras in the room where they occurred and interviewing witnesses. But conspiracy-minded Trumpers, including O’Donnell and Daugherity, went looking for incongruities in computer logs and vote count databases, which, they said, masked programming that reassigned votes from Trump to other presidential candidates.

“The findings in this report were prepared by the authors as consultants to the legal team representing Tina Peters, the Mesa County Clerk,” the executive summary of their March 19, 2022 report said. “The findings provide evidence of unauthorized and illegal manipulation of tabulated vote data during the 2020 General Election and 2021 Grand Junction Municipal Election. Because of this evidence, which led to the vote totals for those elections being impossible to verify, the results and integrity of Mesa County’s 2020 General Election and the 2021 Grand Junction Municipal Election are in question.”

Among the incongruities they cited are batches of ballots that were not sequentially numbered in a results database. That can occur, several election experts explained, when batches of ballots with sloppy ink marks (made by voters) are detected by the software and set aside until the voter’s intent is determined. That process, called adjudication, is done in Colorado in the presence of political party observers. The batches are added to the database after the voter intent issues are resolved. (It was at this step where Brown failed to correctly use the system’s computers).

The Mesa County prosecutor took the duo’s report seriously and investigated. On May 19, 2022, Rubenstein sent a 24-page letter to Mesa County Commissioners and the Grand Junction City Council summarizing the investigation and debunking the vote-padding claims in the most pedestrian way. Two initial miscounts had occurred. The first was in 2020’s general election. The second was in municipal elections in April 2021. Both were “caused by direct action of the former Back Office Election Manager Sandra Brown.”

Investigators found that Brown had stopped and then restarted the computer during the adjudication process, including replacing one computer—without resetting the system. Brown did not call the vendor for assistance, the county prosecutor’s letter said. She was confused, tried to fix things, and erred—essentially double-counting votes at this stage in the process. Election judges from political parties witnessed this, as did an overhead video camera.

“No evidence exists that would indicate that Ms. Brown had any nefarious or criminal motive in those actions, but rather appears to have been trouble-shooting problems in the flow of the adjudication process,” Rubenstein wrote.

Human error in configuring and running election computers also sparked stolen election allegations in Antrim County, Michigan. There, the initial results in the conservative northern Michigan county were incorrect because one contest had been omitted on the ballots when configuring the system’s computers. Nobody caught the error until suspicious vote totals surfaced on Election Night. (Because one race was left out, votes were assigned to the wrong candidate in a tabulation spreadsheet, essentially bumping Trump votes down one line, where they were assigned to Joe Biden.)

In both counties, Trump supporters said that the entire state’s election apparatus was corrupt and demanded that the state’s certified results be thrown out. Beyond such hyperbole, a key observation emerges. Trump’s self-declared election experts were not looking at, nor may not even be aware of, the array of data sets, election records and administrative protocols that catch and correct the errors that occur. In Mesa County, for example, the district attorney’s report made this point.

“These actions were verified to have been done by her [Brown] through video evidence, corroboration of records, audit of randomly selected ballot images [created by ballot scanners], interviews with witnesses and experts, and recreation of certain scenarios using a test environment and prove that the conclusions of Report 3 [O’Donnell’s and Daugherity’s report] are incorrect claims of what may have occurred,” Rubenstein said. “At this time, no evidence suggests that these actions negatively impacted the election.”

In contrast, what the pro-Trump duo used as the basis for their inquiry—analyses built on Peters’ pilfered computer drives—is a thinner evidence base.

The pair, who were reached by email after their August 22 presentation at Mike Lindell’s “Moment of Truth Summit,” sent a rebuttal to Rubenstein’s summary where they rejected numerous assertions and questioned the district attorney’s expertise, evidence, and methods. (Rubenstein also noted they had lied about interviewing 11 people who had been in the room when Brown messed up.)

When asked by this reporter why they did not mention the DA’s review in their presentation at Lindell’s August 2022 forum—where O’Donnell said, “There is still no evidence that this was ever or even could have been something that was done by the clerk at the time”—O’Donnell replied that the DA’s investigation was a sham and said that my questions were “insulting.”

“We did not mention the DA’s report because it is such a sloppy ‘investigation’ that it deserves no recognition other than derision,” the “Lone Raccoon” said. “It is sad to me that somebody who is a ‘national political reporter’ would blindly fall fort the propaganda put by a small-time DA instead of actually doing their own research. However, that seems to be the rule these days.”

“Doing Their Own Research”

Perhaps my e-mail was too blunt when asking the pair if they were aware of other evidence that explained Brown’s incompetence (she was fired and faces charges related to the data breach); and what was their response to the D.A. saying they lied when they said they had talked to the party observers present (who spoke to police investigators) when Brown erred?

But I had done my “own research.” When reporting on the Cyber Ninjas’ review in Arizona in 2021, I had repeatedly seen the disinformation dynamic that I saw here. Partisans with forgone conclusions started to parse election records. Lacking prior experience in studying election systems, they did not understand where what they were seeing in the electronic records related to wider contexts and protocols. That didn’t stop them from putting forth doubts about the results. And I’d also heard about the duo’s missteps from a lifelong Republican and credible election data analyst.

Benny White, a former fighter pilot and lawyer who lives in Tucson, Arizona, has been an election observer and data analyst for the Arizona Republican party for years. He became a persona non-grata in Trump circles for analyses in early 2021 that found tens of thousands of ballots cast by otherwise loyal Republicans in the greater Phoenix area had not voted to re-elect Trump. (The voting patterns were found in the final spreadsheet of every vote cast in every race.)

Reached by phone, White said that the duo called him as they were parsing Mesa County’s tabulation-related databases. White recalled that he told them where their assumptions were mistaken, and what they were not considering because they were not familiar with election administration and safeguards that find and fix errors.

“These folks have no understanding or appreciation of election administration,” he said. “They’re looking at everything from a sterile, mechanistic perspective. There are problems that can be caused because of human interface in the system design where operators can make mistakes. And for that reason, I am always an advocate of having an independent body, whether it’s a knowledgeable person or a bipartisan group of overseers, that is present at all times to watch what’s going on and ask, ‘Why are you doing that?’”

For example, White recalled that the duo claimed that the county’s voting system “had done something nefarious because these ballots [during adjudication] weren’t all tabulated in sequence.” But that circumstance occurs if the voter’s intent on a ballot is in question, White said, in which case Dominion’s software “will hold that batch [of 1,000 ballots from] being included in the aggregate results… That was another thing that it seemed to me that Daugherity failed to understand.”

“He bases a lot of his conclusions on statistics, statistical analysis,” White said of Daugherity. “There have been single instances where he would tell me something, and I would say, ‘Walter, you’re not considering this other facet of what was going on in that particular election… You have to know more before you reach these conclusions.’”

Election administration is not simple. It takes years to understand election law, varieties in state rules and procedures, the voting system technology and all of the subsets of data created and compiled that add up to winners and losers. Trump’s IT squad might be forgiven for misunderstanding and misinterpreting what they saw, if they had been more humble and fair-minded. But they weren’t.

Their mindset is to create chaos and doubt, while claiming they are seeking the truth. The clearest evidence of that mindset is how they exploited human errors by election officials by not accurately contextualizing those mistakes, but repeatedly overclaiming that an entire jurisdiction’s votes were suspect, and that the same election technology deployed nationwide must be rejected.

With scores of 2020 election-denying candidates running for state and federal office in 2022’s general election, this deceitful pattern is likely to recur.

Author Bio: Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

an 9 22

Longtime Republican disruptor **Newt Gingrich**, Senior Advisor to then-President Donald Trump **Jared Kushner**, and longtime campaign advisor Jason Miller conducted an email discussion about posting ads falsely disputing the results of the 2020 election, according to a letter sent to Gingrich by the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.

“The goal is to arouse the country’s anger,” Gingrich said in one email, the Committee states in its letter which asks him to testify voluntarily and preserve all related documents.

The Committee says it also has evidence Gingrich was “involved in the fake elector scheme.”

Even in the hours after the violent but failed January 6 coup, the Committee says Gingrich “continued to push efforts to overturn te election results,” and emailed Mark Meadows at 10:42 PM.

Attorney and Professor of Law Anthony Michael Kreis says it “sounds like the January 6th Committee may have the goods on Newt Gingrich orchestrating part of a broader conspiring to solicit election fraud and/or commit unlawful interference with election administration under Georgia law.”

In its letter the Committee writes it “has obtained information indicating that you have knowledge about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and we write to seek your voluntary cooperation.Some of the information that we have obtained includes email messages that you exchanged with senior advisors to President Trump and others, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, in which you provided detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.”

“These advertising efforts were not designed to encourage voting for a particular candidate. Instead, these efforts attempted to cast doubt on the outcome of the election after voting had already taken place.,” the Committee’s letter to Gingrich reads. “They encouraged members of the public to contact their state officials and pressure them to challenge and overturn the results of the election. To that end, these advertisements were intentionally aired in the days leading up to December 14, 2020, the day electors from each state met to cast their votes for president and vice president,” the Committee adds.

“Among the numerous emails you exchanged regarding purported election fraud, you wrote on December 8, 2020, urging Donald Trump’s campaign to air advertisements promoting the false narrative that election workers had smuggled suitcases containing fake ballots at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia.This email shows that you provided line edits to the scripts used to produce television advertisements andsuggested that the advertisements include a ‘call-to-action’ of pressuring state officials. You specifically pushed for national advertisements to include false allegations about what you called the ‘suitcase scandal.'”

mma 9 22

The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection sent a letter on Thursday to Fox contributor and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich seeking his testimony. The committee says he advised former President Donald Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election. Gingrich also frequently pushed conspiracy theories about what he described as a “stolen election” during his media appearances, according to a Media Matters review.

Gingrich’s role, the committee wrote, included providing Trump’s senior advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Miller with “detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims of fraud.” Those ads ran in the days leading up to December 14, 2020, the day the Electoral College convened. In a December 8, 2020, email obtained by the committee, Gingrich wrote:

The goal is to arouse the country’s anger through new verifiable information the American people have never seen before[.] . . . If we inform the American people in a way they find convincing and it arouses their anger[,] they will then bring pressure on legislators and governors.

The letter further stated: “Information we have obtained also suggests you were involved in the fake elector scheme,” a Trumpist plot to create a dueling slate of electors pledged to the defeated president in states won by Joe Biden.

Gingrich similarly used his media appearances to “arouse the country’s anger” with false claims of voter fraud and to try to encourage Trump supporters to “bring pressure on legislators and governors.”

“I would say to every person in Georgia who favors Donald J. Trump: Go to the governor's mansion, physically. Go to the Capitol, physically,” Gingrich said during a November 18, 2020, interview on Fox host Sean Hannity’s nationally syndicated radio show. “Communicate that you're prepared to stand up for America and you're prepared to stand up for an honest election and that you are sick of politicians selling you out.”

On January 5, 2021 — less than 24 hours before a violent mob breached the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election — Gingrich told Hannity’s radio audience that “Biden may at some place get sworn in. But I think for 40 or 45% of the American people, he will never be seen as a legitimate president, because the very process that put him there is so totally corrupted.”

He added, “I think this is the most dangerous assault on the very nature of America, certainly in our lifetime, and maybe since the previous Civil War.”

Gingrich joined Fox as a contributor in 1999 and is known for his demagogic commentary. In recent weeks, he has warned that “a cult of anti-white racism” is attempting to “impose itself on the country” and alleged that the FBI, which “could actually be called the American Stasi,” had “declared war on the American people” by executing a judge-approved search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.A close Trump ally, he was considered for the vice president slot in 2016, and the pair were reportedly working together to craft a GOP platform for the 2022 midterm elections.

Gingrich made at least 24 appearances on Fox weekday programming between Election Day 2020 and January 6, 2021, according to Media Matters' internal database. Fox personalities constantly alleged during that period that the election had been rigged, often promoting conspiracy theories that have led to multiple lawsuits against the network.

The former speaker repeatedly argued that Democrats had used systemic voter fraud to steal several states from Trump.

On November 4, 2020, the day after Election Day, Gingrich suggested that Democrats had “a setup to steal the presidency by the Democrats” and specifically may have stolen votes in Pennsylvania and Nevada, which Biden won. He urged Trump to get Senate Republicans to “open up investigations on all these different states” and to “be prepared to file suit in every single state.”
That night, he claimed that Democrats “are breaking the law in every possible way. And the correct answer is fine, none of those votes count. If you are going to be corrupt and illegal, we don’t have to count your votes. That means automatically in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Georgia, that Trump will carry every single state by a surprising margin.” He added that Trump “either has to fight and protect America, or he has to surrender to corrupt forces.”
The next night, Gingrich claimed that Democrats are “trying to steal the presidency, and we should not allow them to do that.” He described the situation as a “crisis” comparable to “Washington on Christmas Eve” and “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” and urged then-Attorney General Bill Barr to arrest election workers who he baselessly claimed “are breaking the law.”
On November 8, 2020, the day after Fox and other news outlets called the election for Biden, Gingrich claimed Democrats stole “five or six states” in a “corrupt, stolen election.” He added that “these people are thieves” and cited a pollster to claim that “this clearly was a stolen election,” a remark Trump live-tweeted.
On December 7, 2020, Gingrich said, “The objective fact isI believe Trump probably did actually carry Georgia,” adding that in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections, “Republicans simply have to turn out more votes than Stacey Abrams can steal.”
He pushed several conspiracy theories in a second interview the same day, including one in which he suggested voting machinesmay have been “rigged” because results supposedly “went through Barcelona, Spain, to Frankfurt, Germany to be counted.”

Since the January 6 insurrection, Gingrich has continued to use his Fox platform to allege that elections Republicans lose are implicitly the result of fraud; that the 2020 election in particular was stolen; and that the goal of Democratic voting reform measures is to “steal elections on a grand scale.”

mma 8 22 no vid

two additional right-wing activists who have been implicated in a wide-ranging scheme to breach election data appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast from late 2020 to mid-2021 to discuss their efforts to overturn the results of the election. The resurfaced video provides a contemporary account of what the two men were saying in their own words during the period now under scrutiny.

The two right-wing figures are former Michigan state senator and election fraud conspiracy theorist Patrick Colbeck and Matthew DePerno, a conservative Michigan lawyer and Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for state attorney general. Both have been active in efforts in Michigan to overturn the results of the election, often describing their work in real time on Bannon’s podcast. A new investigation from The Washington Post partially reveals each of their roles in accessing sensitive electoral data.

DePerno is a frequent guest on War Room – a supposed authority on purported security flaws in Dominion voting systems and other discredited election denialism. Following former President Donald Trump’s loss, DePerno hired a forensics firm called SullivanStrickler to obtain election data from Dominion Voting Systems as part of a lawsuit he had brought seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to the Post. After a judge granted DePerno limited access to the machines in December 2020, he and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell instructed SullivanStrickler to carry out a forensic examination of Dominion’s voting systems, which was successful in gaining access to the data.

Colbeck appears to have downloaded some of data that SullivanStrickler collected as part of the DePerno investigation. An account tied to Colbeck “downloaded six files from the same folder on Jan. 5, 2021, according to the records, including files labeled ‘election management server’ and ‘ThumbDrives,’” according to the Post. The Post also reported that DePerno couldn’t remember if he’d given access to the files to Colbeck and the other election denialists who accessed the data.

Colbeck and DePerno – who is now facing criminal investigation for conspiracy to tamper with voting machines across three counties in Michigan – are two of several election denial activists who have appeared on War Room and subsequently been implicated in the data breach scheme. Brian Kennedy, a senior fellow at a Trump-aligned think tank, also appeared on War Room in late 2020 to discuss his involvement in the failed recount campaign following Trump’s loss, as previously reported by Media Matters. Kennedy was named in an earlier Post investigation as having been in communication with the forensics firm that obtained the data for DePerno. The latest Post story says former War Room guest and right-wing commentator Joe Oltmann also accessed the data.

Matthew DePerno on War Room

On May 5, 2021, DePerno appeared on Bannon’s show to talk about his ongoing lawsuit in Antrim Countyand what he claimed were Dominion security flaws. (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.) In that interview, he referenced Dominion’s “election management system,” a phrase very similar to the name of one of the files Colbeck allegedly downloaded.

[vid]

We’re the only case in the country that’s been able to look at actual forensic images,” DePerno said. “December 6, 2020, we went into Antrim County and actually collected forensic images of their election management system.” DePerno then claimed that through this work, his team had been able to “just manipulate any database we want.”

Earlier in the interview, he’d claimed that his access to Dominion systems had given his team the capacity, in general, to change the outcome of any election on a hypothetical ballot.

“Looking at this data, looking at the forensic images and conducting our own tests with ballots and the Dominion system, we put out a video this week that shows that we can flip votes in any race, in any election, up ballot, down ballot, from the president's race, all the way down to any school board race,” DePerno said. “We can select certain races to keep clean. We can select certain races to flip votes in from one candidate to another.”

In June, DePerno again referenced Dominion’s election management system on War Room.

“We’ve proved now that there was direct access to the Antrim County election management system,” DePerno said. “We show that on November 5, we can see it in the forensic images, that an anonymous user logged onto the EMS remotely with escalated privileges and made changes to the database when they were trying to retabulate the election.”

Colbeck’s interest in the “election management server” file may have been tied to DePerno’s repeated claims about what access to that system allowed a user to do.

There is no evidence that any votes tabulated by Dominion were changed in the 2020 election. Still, cybersecurity researchers have warned that distributing the kind of data that DePerno and Colbeck had access to could potentially be used in the future to exploit security flaws and engage in precisely the type of activities that Trump supporters are falsely alleging happened in 2020.

Patrick Colbeck on War Room

Colbeck made several appearances on Bannon’s show immediately after Trump’s loss to discuss his efforts to challenge the Michigan election results.

On November 19, 2020, Colbeck described himself as a “bit of a tech geek,” and explained that he wanted to get involved in the recount effort so he could investigate the system’s software.

“I went in there wanting to understand the stuff that people weren't physically seeing or on the ballot,” Colbeck said. “So I wanted to understand the electronic chain of command between vote tallies and and the communications of vote tallies.”

Later the same day, Colbeck again appeared on War Room and falsely claimed that vote counts were not reliable because tabulators had been connected to the internet.

“Then you get to the basics of a vote tally, which is not – there's no chain of custody around that, particularly around paper chain of custody and electronic chain of custody,” Colbeck said. “When you've got the tabulator, it's connected to the internet, there is zero chain of custody around the vote tally.”

“So is it any wonder why we had strange vote flipping happening in the middle of the night?” he added.

[vid]

the following week, Colbeck returned to War Room to again claim, incorrectly, that “the tabulator computers and the adjudicator computers and the local data center … were all networked to each other” and connected to “a cable that connected to the internet.”

“And you could see the proof that they were all connected to the internet,” Colbeck continued. “If you go look in the bottom right hand corner of all your Windows 10-based PCs and you see the little window on the bottom, there is a little icon that if you roll the mouse over there, it says, connected to the internet. But all the Detroit elected officials that I contacted that night refused – they said specifically that it was not connected to the internet. And from my background, I know differently.”

In fact, an audit and report from Michigan Republicans in 2021 found that although some of the machines had been connected to a local area network (LAN), there is no evidence that the tabulators were connected to any outside networks or that any purported internet connection had been exploited to alter any votes. The LAN connection, “which would create the same icon on a computer screen indicating a network connection as is shown by an internet accessible network,” may have accounted for Colbeck’s confusion.

Tracy Wimmer of the Michigan Department of State had previously debunked Colbeck’s false claims as well.

“No ballot tabulation machines were connected to the internet at Detroit’s counting board,” Wimmer told The Associated Press in December 2020. “The machines were networked locally to each other and the adjudication machines by ethernet cable, and so some people suggested they were online. They were not.”

Although it’s not publicly known precisely what information the account linked to Colbeck downloaded, the name of one of the other files he allegedly accessed – “ThumbDrives” – offers a possible clue. In Michigan, when voting is over, officials transfer the final tally generated by the tabulators, which Colbeck incorrectly said were connected to the internet, to the clerk’s office via flash drives. The data Colbeck received could be related to those final vote tallies or other information related to transferring the vote totals.

It’s not clear from the Post’s reporting whether Colbeck or any of the other election deniers who downloaded the Michigan data could face legal exposure. In general, breaching an election system and distributing the data is a serious crime. Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, a hero and repeat guest on War Room: Pandemic, is facing felony charges for allegedly tampering with election equipment and for obstruction following Trump’s loss.

an 8 22

MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace confessed that one of the stories she was covering was "the scariest thing I’ve heard on this program in a long time."

In a recent report by *Washington Post*reporter Aaron Davis, it was revealed thatallies of former President Donald Trump copied files from Georgia's electronic voting systems and then shared them with Trump's lawyers and other election deniers.

Wallace asked if that meant that people like Sidney Powell had her hands on such data. Davis said that they've made inquiries about whether Powell is one of those who has the data, but they haven't heard back yet.

"One interesting thing that you can tell, because of the detail of this particular computer data, is that while it was being taken from Georgia and used and shared among people in Georgia, it was also being shared among, say, Doug Kogan with the Cyber Ninjas working in the Arizona case and being shared with lawyers working on the Antrim, Michigan case," David explained. "So, there was multistate sharing of this data by attorneys who were trying to maintain some kind of arm's length from the Trump campaign itself and make it appear as if these were individual efforts."

He said that it's clear that all of it was being organized by the same pro-Trump sources.

"There are contracts that show — signed by Sidney Powell, signed by Jesse Banal, attorney and outside counsel for the Trump campaign, authorizing this forensic work, and one of the almost laughable parts of the contracts that have turned up now is that the computer forensics firm said, 'We trust that all of this information and stuff is stuff that you're licensed to use,'" Davis cited.

It turns out the info they were evaluating and doing forensic work on belonged to the government.

So, "it is a national issue," Davis continued. "And to your lead-in, you're right. So much of the post-2020 time period was people trying to look back and say, 'what happened before,' and 'was there problems about how the election was taking place?' Here, we're starting years before the next presidential election with a certain segment of the population bent on proving that there are problems with this software, and now have it. And we don't know how they could untangle and use it to manipulate or sabotage future elections."

"That is the scariest thing I've heard said on this program in a long time," Wallace confessed. She then turned to former CIA officer Tracy Walder and asked, "what do you need Russian election meddlers for when you have Sidney Powell?"

Watch the video below or at this link.

EASTMAN justifies election fuckery b/c deep state , also says secret compartment of bogus votes in machines GUK jan 6 right before trump send mob to capitol

ninja BS spreads to pa (subcontractor trms) MI, GA? machines must be tossed/tainted

In Stark County, Ohio, a continuation of the fight over the 2020 presidential election is in full swing although the right-wing arguments are founded on a Big Lie. According to Talking Points Memo, :{former Trump campaign staffers have filed a new lawsuit focused on allegations of "misconduct by the county board of elections.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{":(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

The problems began back in December when the Stark County Board of Elections voted in favor of investing $1.5 million for the purchase of new voting equipment from Dominion Voting Systems. However, in March the Republican-led Stark County Board of Commissioners pushed back with a vote opposing the purchase of 1,450 machines after received an influx of complaints from Trump supporters.

"They believe the election was stolen from Trump and we should stand by Trump and the Dominion machines have been known to be hacked," Commissioner Richard Regula said to the Canton Repository. "It's been the most calls I've ever received as a county commissioner. … I had 17 voicemails in one day."

In addition to their arguments, the commissioners released a statement explaining their decision to block the county's purchase of the machines as they raised questions about the cost of voting machines.

"Whenever there exists a potential cloud (as acknowledged by the Dominion representative at the February 2, 2021 work session) or public perception or concern regarding a vendor's long-term viability, regardless of the cause or reason, the County must take a vendor's long-term viability into account," they wrote.

Now, the county board of elections has filed a lawsuit against the commissions. The lawsuit, filed in Ohio Supreme Court, is reportedly pleading for "justices to force the commissioners to cough up the money — and fast." With a special election in August and another election set for November, officials worry they may not have an adequate number of machines.

Per Talking Points Memo, the lawsuit states:

"To have the new ICX voting machines in place for the November 2, 2021, General Election, Stark County must sign a contract with Dominion by June 15, 2021, but this deadline will not be met absent an Order, Judgment, and/or Writ from this Court before then directing the County Commissioners to acquire the ICX voting machines," adding: "Although this is the last date possible, allowing additional time is highly advisable to guarantee a smooth 2021 General Election for the Stark County voters and Board of Elections personnel."

As this lawsuit presses forward, Trump is also joining the Big Lie bandwagon as far-right news outlets are attempting yet again to perpetuate the Big Lie. "The Mainstream Media and Radical Left Democrats want to stay as far away as possible from the Presidential Election Fraud, which should be one of the biggest stories of our time," Trump wrote in a statement over the weekend, following up with a warning about the nonexistent fraud on OAN this week: "It's being uncovered now."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Voting system CEOs agree to work with government, not independent analysts

Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/russian-owned-company-caught-trying-to-hack-ohio-voting-systems-on-election-day/

an 1219

...The House of Representatives approved a bill over the summer that would provide $600 million for states to buy new voting machines that would not connect to the internet and would provide paper backups. The bill was blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had also blocked multiple Senate election security bills before agreeing to back a bill that would provide $250 million — less than half the amount budgeted in the House version — to improve states’ election security.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called McConnell’s announcement a “start” but added that the bill doesn’t provide “all the money we requested” and “doesn’t include a single solitary reform that virtually everyone knows we need.”

“If Americans don’t believe their elections are on the up-and-up,” he said, “woe is us as a country and as a democracy.”

...

an 1119

There are concerns for 2020’: Voting machine problems in a key swing state have officials panicked about upcoming election

Matthew Chapman / Raw Story

Market for Voting Machines Is Broken. This Company Has Thrived in It.

Half the country votes on machines made by ES&S. Many experts and election officials say the manufacturer remains dominant because there’s little government regulation and almost no oversight.

by Jessica Huseman

View Story

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/why-a-local-showdown-over-voting-technology-in-north-carolina-is-a-harbinger-for-elections-across-america/

...

The scene unfolding on September 17 in a drab conference room in Greensboro was a microcosm of the ongoing struggle for voting rights in America. Some issues brought up by Brown and others were descendants of the civil rights struggle that, in part, had begun two blocks away at an F.W. Woolworth lunch counter, where a historic sit-in unfolded in 1960. But other issues before its county BOE concerned the near future of what ballots and counting votes will be in their city and politically divided purple state.

“It’s become more and more frequent for voters to ask, ‘How do I know that the machines have my vote correct?’” Donna Peterson, a middle-aged white resident of nearby Jamestown, asked, turning to an immediate decision facing 23 North Carolina counties. What voting system will they buy and use for the 2020 presidential primaries and in the next dozen or so years?

“I understand that [with] the ones that I think Guilford County is looking at right now, there’s a bar code that’s going to be there that people can see,” Peterson continued, referring to a new form of ballot that presents votes in bar codes and text below. “There is no way that they know that the information in the bar code is indicative of the votes that have been cast.”

Those packing the courthouse hearing and spilling into the hallway demanded, pleaded and even prayed that their county BOE would “do the right thing” surrounding voting. They wanted student disenfranchisement to stop, but the chairman delayed that discussion for two weeks. And they wanted a voting system they could trust: one where voters, not printers, marked ballots.

“Please, please don’t manipulate the process,” implored Rev. Dr. Cardes H. Brown Jr. “Please don’t try to covertly keep people from exercising their constitutional right. I beg of you. Do the right thing. Let’s have a tracking mechanism by which we can see how people have voted, so we can have confidence in our system.”

Reinventing Ballots?

Across North Carolina and in many swing counties in swing states, locales like Guilford are racing to select and deploy new voting systems before 2020. Many are replacing the paperless voting systems that were acquired 15 years ago after Florida’s fraught presidential election and recount in 2000.

Ironically, as was the case then, the most critical and controversial issues revolve around the extent to which human actions and human judgments will be preserved and made more accountable—or will be replaced and masked by computer-driven automation.

Most of the new voting systems share comparable electronics that count votes, but there is one critical variable. Some allow voters to hand-mark a paper ballot, while others use software to mark their ballots for them. This decision point has serious repercussions.

This choice affects two key areas where human acts and judgments have been cornerstones in the voting process for many years. The first threshold is when voters record their choices: the ballot itself. The second is the finish line where election boards, acting like a jury, re-examine ballots in election challenges and recounts.

The starting line of this national debate is the ballot itself. It is indisputable that a hand-marked paper ballot is not the same as a computer printout that represents a voter’s intent. Human-made marks, while sometimes sloppy, are direct records tied to voters. Additionally, so-called canvassing boards, comprised of local election officials, reexamine ballots in post-Election Day challenges and recounts. As contentious as that process sometimes is, hand-marked paper ballots are an accepted baseline of voter intent—evidence linked to voters.

...

Democratic Party staffers are raising red flags about new voting technology for the coming primaries

Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/probe-of-missing-georgia-votes-finds-extreme-irregularities-in-black-districts/

no lnx

Probe of missing Georgia votes finds ‘extreme’ irregularities in black districts

Written by Andrew O'Hehir / Raw Story August 30, 2019

A trove of documents turned over in a congressional probe of missing votes in Georgia’s lieutenant governor race — along with other voting issues — revealed serious irregularities.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee is investigating whether voting machine errors caused a large drop-off in votes in the lieutenant governor race between Democrat Sarah Riggs Amico and Republican Geoff Duncan, who won the election by about 123,000 votes. The probe is looking at why so many fewer votes were recorded in the race compared to other statewide races, as well as the voter suppression issues that plagued the 2018 state elections.

There were 159,000 fewer votes cast in the lieutenant governor race than in the gubernatorial race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp. While it is common for down-ballot races to see fewer votes, the lieutenant governor race had twice as much drop-off as other statewide races, even though it was the second race on the ballot, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

There were 80,000 fewer votes cast for lieutenant governor than in other down-ballot races, which represents a 4 percent drop-off from the gubernatorial race, compared to a 2 percent drop-off among even less charismatic down-ballot races. For various reasons, this appears illogical. Historically, the lieutenant governor race has had a much lower drop-off rate than other statewide races in previous elections.

More than 15,500 pages of documents turned over the to Oversight Committee and obtained by the Journal-Constitution shows that the election was plagued by widespread irregularities.

In one case, a voting machine in Kemp’s home precinct recorded that Republicans won every race, while the other six machines in that same precinct showed that Democrats won every race. The machine showed Republicans winning by roughly the same margin by which Democrats won on the other machines. A statistician’s analysis cited in court documents said “odds of an anomaly that large are less than 1 in 1 million,” the Journal-Constitution reported.

But the problems were far more widespread. The documents show a decline in votes on electronic voting machines in 101 of the state’s 159 counties, even though paper absentee ballots in the same districts did not show a significant decline.

An analysis by the Democratic data-tracking firm TargetSmart found that the drop-off “grew even more extreme in precincts with large African American populations,” according to the report.

“I’ve never seen a drop-off pattern like this, ever,” TargetSmart data analyst Chris Brill told the Journal-Constitution.

The Georgia election as a whole was marred by Republican voter suppression efforts and aging, vulnerable voting machines. The Coalition for Good Governance, an election security group that sued to contest the lieutenant governor race, issued a report alleging that the extreme drop-off in black districts suggests the undervote could not be explained by voters simply skipping that race on their ballots.

“The rates of touchscreen machine–reported undervotes in such precincts in the Lt. Governor contest are far greater than the undervote rates in non–African American neighborhoods regardless of whether those neighborhoods lean Democratic or Republican,” the report said. “The undervote problem did not happen at the same exaggerated levels in many primarily White neighborhoods that overwhelmingly voted for Stacey Abrams and other Democrats, rebutting the argument that the difference can be explained by party-driven voter behavior.”

The group’s analysis found that the drop-off rate in some African-American areas was as high as 13 percent, much higher than the 4 percent statewide figure, The Root reported.

Brill told The Root that TargetSmart’s analysis showed that “as the percentage of the African-American vote would get higher, the undervote would also get higher.”

Brill said in an affidavit filed in court that the results are “extremely suspect and irregular and cast a serious doubt over the accuracy of the final vote and the certified outcome of the lieutenant governor’s contest,” adding that he “finds no reasonable, plausible explanation other than machine malfunction.”

Phillip Stark, a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a court filing that the undervote rate “strongly suggests that malfunction, misconfiguration, bugs, hacking, or other error or malfeasance caused some DREs [direct recording electronic voting machines] not to record votes in the lieutenant governor’s contest.”

Georgia is one of five states that exclusively uses electronic machines, with no paper backup. Most of the machines in the state are outdated touchscreen devices that are considered vulnerable to hacking. In a ruling earlier this month, federal Judge Amy Totenberg called the state’s machines “unsecure, unreliable and grossly outdated.” Totenberg ordered the state to start using machines with paper backups by next year.

Although there is no clear explanation for what happened to the votes in the lieutenant governor’s race, the Georgia Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit filed to challenge Duncan’s election.

Republican state officials, meanwhile, have been opposed to any sort of review. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has refused to open an investigation into the matter and state officials claimed that the undervote may have been caused by “low interest,” the Journal-Constitution reported, even though other races did not see anywhere near the same drop-off. The secretary of state’s office previously denied Amico’s request for a recount, arguing that it was common for voters to skip down-ballot races without addressing the much higher vote total in other races nor the racial disparity.

Eddie Perez of the Open Source Election Technology Institute, which has pushed for Georgia to adopt hand-marked paper ballots, questioned why officials were so resistant to investigating an election with an inexplicable vote total.

“I don’t know why the state of Georgia appears to be resisting an examination,” Perez told the Journal-Constitution. “They’re not getting any closer to the truth. This really is unusual, and it begs explanation.”

The Coalition for Good Governance is asking the Georgia Supreme Court to consider their lawsuit challenging Duncan’s election after a county judge dismissed the case, even while conceding that there were issues with the entire voting system.

“There is a real wall up and real obstacles to prevent sunshine from coming in and having any kind of election transparency,” Marilyn Marks, the executive director for the Coalition for Good Governance, told the Journal-Constitution. “Let’s find some facts. It’s crazy to think that the paper-ballot voters felt one way about the candidates and the machine voters felt another way.”

Stark, the Berkeley statistician, said in a court filing in the lawsuit that the irregularities are too large to ignore.

“Based on my analysis, described above, and my knowledge of Georgia’s DRE voting system used in the November 6, 2018 election,” he said in an affidavit, “it is my opinion that the certified results of the lieutenant governor’s race are in substantial doubt.”

McConnell Blocks Election Security, Takes Checks From Voting Machine Lobbyists

https://truthout.org/articles/mcconnell-blocks-election-security-takes-checks-from-voting-machine-lobbyists/

In 2016, Russian hackers targeted voting systems in 21 states and, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, breached systems in Illinois and two counties in Florida, gaining access to information on millions of registered voters. In his report, Mueller described the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 elections as “sweeping and systematic.”

Three years later, security experts warn that not enough has been done to address vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations recently told Congress that “the threats just keep escalating,” adding that he viewed the 2018 midterms as a “dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020.”

In fourteen states, some 2018 midterm voters submitted their votes on touchscreens that did not produce paper trails necessary to verify their votes or audit election outcomes. If votes had been inaccurately processed in these precincts — whether through equipment errors or foreign hacking operations — election officials wouldn’t have been able to find or correct the problems.

Several Democratic and Republican members of Congress have submitted legislation to shore up election security. Proposals from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) include replacing paperless electronic voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots and optical scanners, subjecting voting equipment vendors to rigorous cybersecurity standards, and requiring vendors to report cybersecurity incidents.

But all the bills have hit a roadblock. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has reportedly told his colleagues that he will not allow the Senate to vote on election security legislation this session.

“At this point I don’t see any likelihood that those bills would get to the floor if we mark them up,” Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said recently when asked by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) whether the Rules Committee, which Blunt chairs, would mark up any election security bills. The Hill asked McConnell’s office about Blunt’s comments regarding election security and was referred to the majority leader’s verdict on the Mueller report: “case closed.”

Senator Wyden told Sludge he thinks McConnell does not want to make elections more secure.

“The only logical conclusion is that Senator McConnell wants American elections to be vulnerable to hackers and foreign interference,” Wyden said. “It is unconscionable for Republicans to stick their heads in the sand and do nothing after what happened in 2016. If Congress doesn’t act, it’s only a matter of time before hackers successfully interfere again.”

The two largest voting machine vendors in the U.S., Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Dominion Voting Systems, together supply more than 80% of the nation’s voting machines. The companies have operated extensive lobbying operations in states for years, and both companies recently hired new lobbyists to represent them at the federal level.

ES&S hired lobbying firm Peck Madigan Jones in Oct. 2018 and paid it a combined $150,000 to lobbythe U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019. ES&S did not employ any federal lobbyists in 2017, and when they reported lobbying in previous years it was at a much lower level, spending just $10,000 in many quarters.Dominion Voting Systems, which was recently acquired by New York-based hedge fund Staple Street Capital, signed its first-ever federal lobbying contract in January 2019 with Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck and has paid the company at least $30,000 so far to lobby Congress.

Several of the lobbyists working for ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems have recently made contributions to McConnell’s campaign and joint fundraising committee.

Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck lobbyist David Cohen, who lobbies for Dominion Voting Systems on issues related to election security and monitors federal legislation for the company, gave McConnell $2,000 on March 31: $1,000 to his campaign committee and $1,000 to his joint fundraising committee. Lobbyist Brain Wild, who works alongside Cohen on the Dominion contract, gave McConnell $1,000 on the same day.

Emily Kirlin, a lobbyist for Peck Madigan Jones who lobbies for ES&S on election security and H.R. 1, gave McConnell’s campaign committee $1,000 on February 19, and her colleague who works with her on the contract, Jen Olson, gave McConnell $1,000 on March 4.

“It’s not surprising to me that Mitch McConnell is receiving these campaign contributions,” the Brennan Center for Justice’s Lawrence Noren told Sludge. “He seems single-handedly to be standing in the way of anything passing in Congress around election security, and that includes things that the vendors might want, like money for the states to replace antiquated equipment.”

“Mitch McConnell’s conflicts of interest in blocking any and all election security legislation is not only shameful, it is placing our democracy at risk,” Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, told Sludge. “The conflicts of interest arise from more than the campaign contributions he is receiving from voting machine vendors — contributions which certainly appear to be a reward from the industry for letting them off the hook — but it is also a self-serving act for strictly partisan purposes.

“McConnell believes this foreign interference in our democratic process will again favor the GOP, and so he is doing everything possible to make sure that window stays wide open for those who seek to do harm to our political system,” Holman said.

McConnell’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Voting machine vendors like ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems are not currently subject to any specific regulations or mandatory security standards.

“In contrast to other sectors, particularly those that the federal government has designated ‘critical infrastructure,’ there is almost no federal oversight of private vendors that design and maintain the systems that allow us to determine who can vote, how they vote, what voters see when they cast their vote, how votes are counted, and how those vote totals are communicated to the public,” Noren told Congress recently in a testimony. “In fact, there are more federal regulations for ballpoint pens and magic markers than there are for voting systems and other parts of our federal election infrastructure.”

Several of the bills that have been proposed in Congress would subject them to regulation and oversight for the first time, and some could result in the companies doing less business with the states as they encourage the use of hand-marked ballots instead of machines.

A bill from Senator Wyden — the Protecting American Votes and Election Act (PAVE Act) — would, for the first time, establish minimum cybersecurity requirements that election equipment vendors would have to comply with in order for their equipment to be eligible for use in federal elections. The rules would be established by the Department of Homeland Security, and systems would have to be tested and certified by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC).

The PAVE Act would also require voting systems to use an “individual, durable, voter-verifiable, paper ballot of the voter’s vote that shall be marked and made available for physical inspection and verification by the voter before the voter’s vote is cast and tabulated.” And while the bill does not explicitly ban electronic systems for marking paper ballots — something that both ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems have begun manufacturing — it specifies that funding it would give to states to replace their paperless systems could not be used “to acquire any electronic device that a voter can use to mark a paper ballot.”

If a paper ballot requirement were to become law, with or without a funding restriction such as the one included in Wyden’s bill, the increased costs and security risks of ballot-marking machines could make them less appealing to states looking to purchase new systems.

According to testimony from Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, equipping a precinct with ballot-marking electronic devices costs about three times as much as equipping it with a truly paper-based system along with a dedicated electronic device for voters with disabilities. “Fortunately, the most cost-effective approach is also the most secure: hand-marked paper ballots counted using optical scanners,” Halderman stated.

Another bill being blocked by McConnell, the House-passed H.R.1, includes a paper ballot requirement and would subject vendors to additional new security regulations. Voting machine vendors would be required to follow cybersecurity best practices that would be issued by the EAC’s Technical Guidelines Development Committee, and they would have to report election cybersecurity incidents and response plans to the EAC. They would also be forced to submit their equipment to independent security testing, and the EAC would be empowered to decertify any equipment that does not meet its security standards.

“I don’t know why Mitch McConnell is staging a full roadblock of election security legislation,” Wyden said. “But it is clear as day that there are politicians in the country who view insecure voting equipment as a benefit that helps them win elections. Instead of defending Americans’ constitutional rights, they are looking at this issue from a purely cynical and political standpoint.”

619 an

As he blocks election security bills, Mitch McConnell takes checks from voting machine lobbyists

written by June 12, 2019

This article was written by Donald Shaw and reprinted from Sludge, which produces investigative journalism on lobbying and money in politics. In 2016, Russian hackers targeted voting systems in 21…

This article was written by Donald Shaw and reprinted from Sludge, which produces investigative journalism on lobbying and money in politics.

In fourteen states, some 2018 midterm voters submitted their votes on touchscreens that did not produce paper trails necessary to verify their votes or audit election outcomes. If votes had been inaccurately processed in these precincts—whether through equipment errors or foreign hacking operations—election officials wouldn’t have been able to find or correct the problems.

Several Democratic and Republican members of Congress have submitted legislation to shore up election security. Proposals from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) include replacing paperless electronic voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots and optical scanners, subjecting voting equipment vendors to rigorous cybersecurity standards, and requiring vendors to report cybersecurity incidents.

“At this point I don’t see any likelihood that those bills would get to the floor if we mark them up,” Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said recently when asked by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) whether the Rules Committee, which Blunt chairs, would mark up any election security bills. The Hill asked McConnell’s office about Blunt’s comments regarding election security and was referred to the majority leader’s verdict on the Mueller report: “case closed.”

Senator Wyden told Sludge he thinks McConnell does not want to make elections more secure.

The two largest voting machine vendors in the U.S., Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Dominion Voting Systems, together supply more than 80% of the nation’s voting machines. The companies have operated extensive lobbying operations in states for years, and both companies recently hired new lobbyists to represent them at the federal level.

ES&S hired lobbying firm Peck Madigan Jones in Oct. 2018 and paid it a combined $150,000 to lobby the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019. ES&S did not employ any federal lobbyists in 2017, and when they reported lobbying in previous years it was at a much lower level, spending just $10,000 in many quarters. Dominion Voting Systems, which was recently acquired by New York-based hedge fund Staple Street Capital, signed its first-ever federal lobbying contract in January 2019 with Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck and has paid the company at least $30,000 so far to lobby Congress.

Several of the lobbyists working for ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems have recently made contributions to McConnell’s campaign and joint fundraising committee.

“It’s not surprising to me that Mitch McConnell is receiving these campaign contributions,” the Brennan Center for Justice’s Lawrence Noren told Sludge. “He seems single-handedly to be standing in the way of anything passing in Congress around election security, and that includes things that the vendors might want, like money for the states to replace antiquated equipment.”

“Mitch McConnell’s conflicts of interest in blocking any and all election security legislation is not only shameful, it is placing our democracy at risk,” Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, told Sludge. “The conflicts of interest arise from more than the campaign contributions he is receiving from voting machine vendors—contributions which certainly appear to be a reward from the industry for letting them off the hook—but it is also a self-serving act for strictly partisan purposes.

McConnell’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Voting machine vendors like ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems are not currently subject to any specific regulations or mandatory security standards.

A bill from Senator Wyden—the Protecting American Votes and Election Act (PAVE Act)—would, for the first time, establish minimum cybersecurity requirements that election equipment vendors would have to comply with in order for their equipment to be eligible for use in federal elections. The rules would be established by the Department of Homeland Security, and systems would have to be tested and certified by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC).

The PAVE Act would also require voting systems to use an “individual, durable, voter-verifiable, paper ballot of the voter’s vote that shall be marked and made available for physical inspection and verification by the voter before the voter’s vote is cast and tabulated.” And while the bill does not explicitly ban electronic systems for marking paper ballots—something that both ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems have begun manufacturing—it specifies that funding it would give to states to replace their paperless systems could not be used “to acquire any electronic device that a voter can use to mark a paper ballot.”

Another bill being blocked by McConnell, the House-passed H.R.1, includes a paper ballot requirement and would subject vendors to additional new security regulations. Voting machine vendors would be required to follow cybersecurity best practices that would be issued by the EAC’s Technical Guidelines Development Committee, and they would have to report election cybersecurity incidents and response plans to the EAC. They would also be forced to submit their equipment to independent security testing, and the EAC would be empowered to decertify any equipment that does not meet its security standards.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/as-he-blocks-election-security-bills-mitch-mcconnell-takes-checks-from-voting-machine-lobbyists/

As he blocks election security bills, Mitch McConnell takes checks from voting machine lobbyistsno lnxAs he blocks election security bills, Mitch McConnell takes checks from voting machine lobbyists

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/disgusting-chat-log-with-photos-show-alleged-tampering-with-absentee-ballots-in-miami/

ost of the chat log for a group, which named itself after the candidate they served, seemed to be the typical dry canvassing discussion you’d expect between campaign workers: coordinating lunch plans, meeting points, talking strategy, etc.

Until, that is, it suddenly wasn’t.