Security Group That Audited Voting Machines Declares Them a ‘National Security Issue’

Then-President Donald Trump, left, and then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in file photographs. (Getty Images)

A company that said it carried out a forensic audit of 22 Dominion Voting Systems in a small Michigan County this month, in a report on Monday, suggested that President Donald Trump take steps to ensure U.S. national security via a 2018 executive order on foreign interference after asserting that the Dominion machines are "intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors."

"We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results," read a report (pdf) from Allied Security Operations Group released on a website belonging to Matthew DePerno, a local lawyer representing a plaintiff involved in the case. "The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud."

Earlier in December, the audit of voting machines in Antrim County was ordered by Judge Kevin A. Elsenheimer last week (pdf), pertaining to a marijuana proposal that was on the ballot on Nov. 3, not the presidential election. However, the Antrim County voting machines were flagged for switching 6,000 votes from Trump to Joe Biden, which the Michigan Secretary of State's office and Antrim County clerk's office both said was due to human error.

Later in its report, Allied Security Operations described Dominion's involvement in the elections as a "national security imperative." It then made a reference to the 2018 Trump executive order that directs current Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to conduct an assessment on foreign interference in the U.S. general election up to 45 days after the Nov. 3 election and allows the president to take action against any foreign actors.

"We recommend that an independent group should be empaneled to determine the extent of the adjudication errors throughout the State of Michigan. This is a national security issue," wrote Allied's Russell Ramsland, a former GOP candidate in Texas, in the report.

Disputed

The Epoch Times has reached out to Dominion Voting Systems for a request for comment. The firm has repeatedly denied that it can change votes from one candidate to another or that it has any ties to a foreign government.

"All Dominion systems are capable of producing paper records and are 100 percent auditable, with testing, reviews, audits, and recounts subject to oversight and verification by all political parties," the company says on its website, describing claims to the contrary as "election disinformation."

On Dec. 18 after a recount in Antrim County, the firm issued a response via email.

"The results of the hand recount in Antrim County confirmed what we already knew and have communicated under oath: our machines accurately tabulate votes," the company wrote. "We are proud certifications and audits across the country have repeatedly shown the accuracy, transparency, and reliability of Dominion's systems. We are grateful to serve as one of Michigan's election technology providers."

Erik Grill, the assistant attorney general for Michigan, said on Monday that DePerno and Allied Security's report have made “inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading" claims. DePerno "has stated that the report proves that the secretary of state lied. He has stated that he’s asked the Senate majority leader to set aside the electors and appoint new electors based on what he found,” Grill said.

Michigan Elections Director Jonathan Brater also disputed Allied's report.

In a court filing, Brater said the report "makes a series of unsupported conclusions, ascribes motives of fraud and obfuscation to processes that are easily explained as routine election procedures or error corrections, and suggests without explanation that elements of election software not used in Michigan are somehow responsible for tabulation or reporting errors that are either nonexistent or easily explained."

"Because voting tabulators in Michigan use hand-marked, paper ballots, any alleged errors in tabulators can be caught during a hand recount, which any candidate could have requested in Antrim County," Brater added, according to the Detroit Free Press.

But elsewhere in the report, Allied Security asserted that the "results of the Antrim County 2020 election are not certifiable," adding that it's the result of "machine and/or software error, not human error."

"The tabulation log for the forensic examination of the server for Antrim County from December 6, 2020 consists of 15,676 individual events, of which 10,667 or 68.05% of the events were recorded errors," according to the report. "These errors resulted in overall tabulation errors or ballots being sent to adjudication. [The] high error rates proves the Dominion Voting System is flawed and does not meet state or federal election laws."

The group also flagged several perceived security flaws in the machines, saying Dominion's ImageCast Precinct machines "have the ability to be connected to the internet," adding that "by connecting a network scanner to the ethernet port on the ICP machine and creating Packet Capture logs from the machines we examined show the ability to connect to the network, Application Programming Interface (API) (a data exchange between two different systems) calls and web (http) connections to the Election Management System server."

Dominion machines are used in Maricopa County, Arizona, and Fulton County, Georgia, among other locales.

Last month, Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, in reference to the reported 6,000-vote switch, said initially that what happened appeared to be a human error in combination with a software glitch.

Antrim County, Michigan in a Google Maps photo. (Google Maps)

“The error in reporting unofficial results in Antrim County Michigan was the result of a user error that was quickly identified and corrected,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said last month.

Ramsland, a former Reagan administration official who has worked for NASA, and others from the group examined Dominion products in Antrim County earlier this month as part of an ongoing case. His team, hired by plaintiff William Bailey, inspected and performed forensic duplication on the county’s election management server, which was running Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5.3-002, compact flash cards used by local precincts in their Dominion ImageCast system, USB memory sticks used by Dominion Voter Assist Terminals, and USB memory sticks used for the poll book. They used X-Ways Forensics and other tools including Blackbag-Blacklight Forensic Software, and Virtual Box.

The "foreign interference" 2018 order signed by Trump includes the imposition of "any recommended sanctions" against entities that are believed to have interfered in the election. This includes "blocking and prohibiting all transactions in a person’s property and interests in property subject to United States jurisdiction," "exclusion of a person’s alien corporate officers from the United States," and "any other measures authorized by law," among other provisions, according to the White House.

The Epoch Times has reached out to Michigan's Secretary of State's office and Antrim County about the Allied Security forensic audit report.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this article.