Detroit Poll Challenger: Tabulator Workstations Were Online

Kevin Hogan
12/2/2020
Updated:
12/2/2020

Patrick Colbeck is a former Michigan state senator, an aerospace engineer, and a poll challenger in Detroit. He served at the Absentee Voter Counting Board from 5 p.m. on Election Day to roughly 5:30 p.m. the next day.

Colbeck said the counting boards all had electronic poll books, which are one of the links in the chain of custody to maintain an election.

He did not identify physical Internet connections to the poll books, but he did notice wifi networks on his phone including one called AV_Connect. He suspects the AV stands for Absentee Voter. He became suspicious and started investigating.

“I went to all the different tabulator workstations, went underneath the table monitor and checked out where all these cables were routed. All the tabulator computers were connected via Ethernet cables to a network router. And that router in turn was connected to another router was connected to the adjudicators. Those were connected to another router/slash firewall,” said Colbeck.

Colbeck said all of these were connected to the local data center.

He tried to verify if the voting machines were connected to the Internet by asking other election officials if they were. The officials said there was no Internet connection.

Having seen the physical connection underneath the tables, he decided to check all of the terminals. In the schematic, all of them had an Internet connection based on the connectivity icon in the bottom right corner of the screen.

“I said, ‘Tell you what, you can dispel this once and for all, just do me a favor, move your little mouse over that little icon down in the bottom right-hand corner, it'll pop up words that say connected to Internet or not connected. And you can dispel this whole thing right away.’ And he said, ‘you’re just gonna have to trust me.’”

The possible Internet connection is important, Colbeck says, because the chain of custody must be maintained from the qualified voter file all the way to the last step—the final vote tally. He says these error messages combined with the evidence of 6,000 votes being switched in Antrim County show why the Internet connection is important.

Colbeck’s findings are further complicated by a declaration in Sidney Powell’s lawsuit in Georgia. In it, a military intelligence analyst has declared Dominion software was accessed by agents of China and Iran to manipulate the general election.