Special Report by WorldTribune Staff, November 6, 2020
A reported glitch in the software of Dominion Voting Systems equipment saw 6,000 votes switched from Republican to Democrat in Antrim County, Michigan on Tuesday. The county clerk caught the issue and it has reportedly been corrected. Similar glitches with the software were reported in Georgia.
“The county clerk [Sheryl Guy] came forward and said tabulating software glitched and caused a miscalculation of the votes,” Michigan GOP chair Laura Cox said. “Antrim County had to hand-count all of the ballots. And all these counties that use this software need to closely examine their results for similar discrepancies.”
The Denver-based company’s Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5 software was used in 69 counties in Michigan on Tuesday.
Dominion Voting Systems Inc. is one of three voting equipment vendors which control 88 percent of the U.S. market.
During congressional testimony in January, John Poulos, CEO of Dominion Voting Systems confirmed that the machines Dominion manufactures include components from China and noted the issue of foreign suppliers isn’t unique to the voting equipment industry.
“Several of those components, to our knowledge, there is no option for manufacturing those in the United States,” Poulos said.
Election integrity analysts have long been concerned about what is known as supply-chain security, the tampering of election equipment during manufacturing.
Dominion Voting Systems software is also used in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Minnesota and in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Dominion Voting Systems has ties to prominent Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Bloomberg reported in April of last year that Dominion Voting Systems hired a high-powered lobbying firm that includes a longtime aide to Pelosi. They hired Brownstein Farber Hyatt & Schreck. Nadeam Elshami, Pelosi’s former chief of staff, is one of the lobbyists on the account.
In 2014, Dominion was listed in the Washington Post table as having donated between $25,001-$50,000 to the Clinton Foundation.
In Oakland County, Michigan, a glitch in a different system switched over 1,200 Republican votes to Democrat. The switch initially caused County Commissioner Adam Kochenderfer to lose. Once the glitch was found, and the votes were properly attributed, Kochenderfer went from losing by 100 votes to winning by over 1,100. According to the Royal Oak Tribune, Oakland County uses election software from Hart Intercivic. Hart uses a proprietary system called Verity. Eleven Michigan counties use Hart’s systems.
But what observers want to know is why both glitches in Michigan switched Republican votes to Democrat despite apparently occurring in different underlying systems.
Michigan state Sen. Ed McBroom announced Friday that a joint hearing of the state’s Senate and House of Representatives Oversight committees would be held Saturday “as part of a legislative effort to ensure the integrity of our state elections.”
In May, WorldTribune.com reported on suspicions of election fraud in South Korea’s April election which saw the party of unpopular leftist President Moon Jae-In win in a landslide. Particular attention was paid to “a new field of digital fraud involving vote counting machines, computer hardware and software, and Huawei information network telecommunications equipment,” noted Tara O of the East Asia Research Center.
Voting machine manufacturers have acknowledged that some of their equipment allows for the transmission of election-night vote counts via modem, a vulnerability security experts say hackers could easily exploit.
In Georgia, glitches with software updates on Dominion Voting Systems equipment were reported in contested polling locations in Morgan and Stanley counties.
Due to the glitches, Superior Court Judge W. Fletcher Sams extended voting until 11 p.m. on election night. The counties use voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems and electronic poll books — used to sign in voters — made by KnowInk.
The companies “uploaded something last night, which is not normal, and it caused a glitch,” said Marcia Ridley, elections supervisor at Spalding County Board of Election, Politico reported. That glitch prevented pollworkers from using the pollbooks to program smart cards that the voters insert into the voting machines.
Ridley said that a representative from the two companies called her after poll workers began having problems with the equipment Tuesday morning and said the problem was due to an upload to the machines by one of their technicians overnight.
“That is something that they don’t ever do. I’ve never seen them update anything the day before the election,” Ridley said.
Neither Dominion nor KnowInk responded to Politico’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state’s office also did not respond to follow-up questions about who uploaded the dataset and whether it had been reviewed and tested by anyone beforehand.
This article may be republished with credit to WorldTribune.com and the Free Press International News Service.
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