How to Bust Dominion Vote-Flipping in Your State: Citizens Demand the Ballot Images

Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

How to Bust Dominion Vote-Flipping in Your State: Citizens Demand the Ballot Images
Evidence of 2020 ^ | NOVEMBER 12, 2020 | PUBLIUS

Posted on 11/20/2020 6:30:22 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum

FOIA the ballot images

Evidence is growing that the Trump campaign was the target of a massive vote-counting machine-hack fraud, Gateway Pundit has reported. An independent researcher has compiled data showing the forensics of the hacks.

Machine-hacking has been an ongoing issue for election integrity activists.

Most voters have no idea of what actually happens when they, or a poll worker, feeds a paper ballot into a Dominion Voting Systems, or similar, optical scan vote-counting machine. The short course might go something like this.

1. Paper ballot gets fed into slot. Slot accepts paper ballot.

2. The machine automatically takes a digital image of ballot, at lighting speed. In other words, it snaps a picture.

3. The specialized “electronic eye” in the machine now reads the voter marks from the digital image, not from the paper ballot. This is the way all modern generation optical scan vote-counting machines work, including the machines belonging to the Dominion systems Democracy Suite.

The digital images of the ballots are then automatically saved in the machine’s memory. Because they are the primary record of what the machine has actually counted, in all federal elections they must be saved, by law, for 22 months. (See: “Saving All Ballot Images Would Increase Election Security”)

Ballot images have been touted as an “audit feature” by some companies. They are meant to provide an initial check on the totals that the machine has arrived at. Votes on the digital images can be read and counted by election workers, or the public, to verify the counts, without actually accessing or touching the paper ballots. Election integrity activists have recommended they be made available to the public to instill confidence in election results.

Click to expand image

Page from literature for Hart Intercivic vote-counting machine, indicating ballot image audit feature (highlighting.)

If a sharp-eyed grandma with time on her hands finds a count to be terribly off, that provides a solid basis for demanding a paper ballot hand-recount. It must be a hand-recount, because there is no point to simply running the same ballots through the same type of machine which made the error in the first place.

The ballot images are all anonymous, of course, because the ballots are. This is the principle of the secret ballot. Some election departments have attempted to keep ballot images secret by using the argument that posting the ballot images, or making them available to the public on a flash drive or DVD, violates the principle of the secret ballot.

But that argument deliberately misunderstands what the principle of the secret ballot means, and is frankly idiotic. The secret ballot means no one can ever trace who cast that ballot. The secret ballot was never meant to equal secret counting.

Voting is secret. Counting the votes should not be.

What could cause such an error? The fact is that the technology of vote-counting machines is impressive, and known to be fantastically accurate in counting. Ballots with stray marks or ambiguous markings are rejected for manual adjudication. The machines are about as accurate as cash-counting machines at ATMs.

Unless. And it is a big unless. Unless they are hacked and programmed with malicious instructions to illegally add votes to some candidates, while subtracting them from others.

In 2016, an election integrity activist and computer programmer made the discovery that vote-counting machines can assign fractional numeric values to votes, making it possible to actually decide what margin of victory one desires beforehand, from a particular vote total, and work the math backwards.

In computer programming, variables are “declared” as either fractions or integers. In short, there is no such thing as a fractional vote. The only reason for it to exist in a program is to enable the perpetration of machine fraud.

Now “glitches” in Dominion systems are popping up across the nation. It is time to ask the question: why are ballot images, made with machines paid for with public dollars and stored on publicly-owned hard-drives, not made available to the public? An entire city would fit on a flash drive or DVD. These are what the machine has counted.

The Trump legal team should immediately, as a first step, demand the ballot images from all Dominion vote-counting machines. Citizens can also demand ballot images on their own, through a FOIA request. In New York a court ruled that digital ballot images were to be accessible to the public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The logic for demanding and releasing the ballot images is simple: There is no reason not to, that is not a bad reason. If there is nothing to hide, then election departments should be happy to oblige.

As of September 2019, Dominion voting machines are used in 2,000 jurisdictions in 33 U.S. states and Puerto Rico. They are used significantly in all the key swing states of GA, AZ, PA, NV, and MI.

Bloomberg reports:

“Dominion Voting Systems — which commands more than a third of the voting-machine market without having Washington lobbyists — has hired its first, a high-powered firm that includes a longtime aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”

AuditElectionsUSA.org publishes a database of the counties and cities in the US whose voting systems use ballot imaging technology.

The only stronger evidence of machine vote-hacking than large discrepancies revealed by examination of the ballot images, would be if election departments, as they have been wont to do lately, suddenly announced that the images, or even the paper ballots themselves, had been, illegally, destroyed. In a Massachusetts Republican primary this year, the Massachusetts Secretary of State, William Galvin, told an outsider candidate that his ballot images had been destroyed, when he asked for verification of his vote. (See: “Making Digital Ballot Files Public Is Key to Transparency”)

For a good overview of the ballot images also see “Voting Machine Digital Ballot Images Could Let Public Recount Elections, But Many Locales Aren’t Saving or Sharing This Data” at Alternet.com.

Ballot Image Browsing Software

Source: Wired