Election Security Investigation
Everyone Stop What they Are Doing and Read this Important info.
November 14, 2024
To: All Democratic Party Voters
From: Robert J. Rei
Dear readers,
Today marks the ninth day since the corrupted results of the 2024 National Elections surprised all of America.
The very first thing that everyone needs to really understand, with the simplicity of a child, is that there are no longer any such things as “Voting Machines” which at one time were actual machines with levers and mechanical parts and nothing electronically powered have since evolved into what are now known as “Election Management Systems”(EMS).
Now typically I would take some time to focus on and expend my efforts to craft an accurate, articulate, and informative essay, but given the significant gravity of the seriousness of what appears on the surface to be a lack of visible push-back from top-level government officials, departments, and agencies etcetera against what is clearly and obviously a corrupted Election result, I have chosen for this letter to provide a minimum of commentary as I would rather supply everyone who is genuinely determined to prevent the Trump-Cabal from invading the White House—and easing Vladimir Putin’s agents of chaos into every sector of American Government—with actual documentation and authoritative, creditable, official, and reliable information; this way you can determine for yourselves what is right and what is wrong for our current situation.
Slowly and steadily there is a growing chorus of voices all across America demanding that Vice President Kamala Harris & Governor Tim Walz do their jobs and respond to the concerns of those who chose to elect them into the highest office of America.
And what might that concern be you are asking?
It is really quite simple:
we are all demanding, and protesting for Vice President Kamala Harris to ask for the recounts of any number of suspect voting situations before all deadlines for recount requests by a candidate expire prior to the state deadlines to seek recounts;
We the People deserve and require the assurances of a full scale Election Security Investigation.
What follows might surprise and shock nearly every reader.
March 9, 2023
As news trickled out that former President Trump's supporters had organized to access federally protected election machines and copied sensitive information and software, election expert Susan Greenhalgh waited for FBI or Justice Department leaders to announce an investigation.
“It just seemed so stunning that we thought, well of course there's going to be a big reaction and the government is going to investigate,” said Greenhalgh, senior advisor on election security for the nonprofit Free Speech For People.
When months passed with no such announcement, Greenhalgh and over a dozen other election experts wrote a 14-page letter to Justice Department leaders in December outlining what they called a "multi-state conspiracy to copy voting software" and asking the agency to open an investigation.
Greenhalgh was baffled when she received a terse, noncommittal response from the FBI a month later that seemed to indicate no action had been or would be taken at the federal level.
Now, just months before the 2024 presidential primaries, it remains unclear whether any federal agency has plans for a comprehensive investigation of the effort to gain access to election systems. Election and law enforcement experts are concerned that the stolen information might be used to interfere with future elections and that the FBI and Justice Department may be sending the wrong signal to those responsible if agencies don't investigate.
Without a national investigation, “we’re never going to know what the overall plan here was,” Greenhalgh said. [Report continues]
14-page letter to Justice Department leaders
December 12, 2022
We are writing to you to call attention to significant multi-state events impacting ongoing election security which were first revealed in discovery in a civil lawsuit by a non-governmental plaintiff. Because these events were revealed in a private lawsuit rather than through a law enforcement investigation, the significance and consequences may not have registered with the relevant federal agencies. Specifically, we are writing regarding the multi-state plan, directed and funded by attorneys for Donald Trump—including Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Jesse Binnall—to access voting systems and obtain and distribute copies of voting system software unlawfully, which could potentially constitute federal crimes and be relevant to investigations into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The same software is used in voting systems across the U.S. Its misappropriation and distribution pose serious risks to the credibility and trustworthiness of election results. The matter urgently requires your agencies’ attention.
This alarming development was not addressed in the Public Service Announcement (PSA), published by CISA on October 4, 2022.
On October 28, 2022, news reports confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Capitol Police, and the National Counterterrorism Center released a joint intelligence assessment warning that violent domestic extremists pose a heightened threat to the security of the 2022 mid-term elections. Federal security agencies are rightly concerned about potential attacks on elections. But because the unauthorized access and copying of election system software was uncovered by private action, it appears that the consequences of those activities —orchestrated by individuals associated with domestic extremists—have not been factored into these risk assessments. We write to highlight this important information for your agencies to integrate it into threat assessments, criminal investigations, and risk mitigations. [Letter continues]
https://freespeechforpeople.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/doj.fbi_.dhs_.coffee.ga_.12.12.2022.pdf
December 4, 2023
We are writing to follow up on the December 12, 2022, letter calling for investigations by the Department of Justice (DOJ), Special Counsel, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into the multistate conspiracy to access, copy, and distribute voting system software from multiple states to Trump allies and election deniers. The conspirators sought and obtained copies of voting system software from both Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software (ES&S), which together count over 70% of U.S. votes. Copies of the software were then shared extensively with Trump supporters. How often this software has been copied, shared, recopied, and reshared can’t be known.
We reiterate our earlier call for federal investigation of this multistate plot and federal action to mitigate the risks to elections that it created, due to new insights that we believe increase the urgency for the Department of Justice and FBI to open such an investigation before the U.S. progresses much further into the 2024 election cycle, because democracy is literally on the ballot.
This plot was allegedly carried out by agents of the Trump campaign in support of Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, but it has urgent implications for the 2024 election and beyond.
The December letter urged the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to conduct a risk assessment of U.S. voting systems to evaluate new or increased threats resulting from the unauthorized distribution of proprietary voting software to factions and individuals who have expressed intent to disrupt elections. There is no evidence that any such risk-assessment has been conducted.
The letter cited detailed evidence of the unlawful voting system breaches in Coffee County, Georgia, their links to the Trump campaign, and their connections to voting system security breaches in other states. The evidence cited in the letter was uncovered by the plaintiffs in the federal civil litigation Curling v. Raffensperger, not by state or federal law enforcement.
Free Speech For People sent a follow-on letter April 18, 2023, which summarized evidence and testimony obtained by the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The evidence cited implicates Donald Trump in the scheme to obtain voting system software from Georgia and other states.
According to testimony to the Committee, the plot to obtain access to voting machines through cooperative county officials in Georgia and Michigan was discussed with Trump by Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani at a December 18, 2020 meeting in the White House. Giuliani proposed a plan to gain access to voting equipment through ‘voluntary’ means, as an alternative to a proposal to direct federal agencies to seize voting machines. The evidence presented by the Committee also shows that Powell sent a follow up email to chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump’s personal assistant a few days later to provide an update as to how the attempts to obtain voting software were progressing, apparently to keep Trump apprised of the scheme. The plans, alleged to have been discussed with Trump, appear to mirror the breaches in Coffee County and other states.
https://freespeechforpeople.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/doj.fbi_.coffee12.4.23.pdf
Yesterday November 13, 2024 the organization that produced the above letters posted a letter online at their website that is addressed to Vice President Harris and is signed by eight experts in the fields of computer security and election security; as detailed in a footnote of the letter dated December 12, 2022:
Free Speech For People is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest legal organization that works to renew our democracy and our United States Constitution for the people. As part of our mission, we are committed to promoting, through legal actions, secure, transparent, trustworthy and accessible voting systems for all voters. We are not parties or counsel in the civil litigation referenced in this letter. The coalition of signatories includes renowned computer security experts and election experts.
November 13, 2024
Dear Vice President Harris,
We write to alert you to serious election security breaches that have threatened the security and integrity of the 2024 elections, and to identify ways to ensure that the will of the voters is reflected and that voters should have confidence in the result. The most effective manner of doing so is through targeted recounts requested by the candidate. In the light of the breaches we ask that you formally request hand recounts in at least the states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. We have no evidence that the outcomes of the elections in those states were actually compromised as a result of the security breaches, and we are not suggesting that they were. But binding risk-limiting audits (RLAs) or hand recounts should be routine for all elections, especially when the stakes are high and the results are close. We believe that, under the current circumstances when massive software breaches are known and documented, recounts are necessary and appropriate to remove all potential doubt and to set an example for security best practices in all elections.
In 2022, records, video camera footage, and deposition testimony produced in a civil case in Georgia disclosed that its voting system, used statewide, had been breached over multiple days by operatives hired by attorneys for Donald Trump.
The evidence showed that the operatives made copies of the software that runs all of the equipment in Georgia, and certain other states, and shared it with other Trump allies and operatives. Subsequent court filings and public records requests revealed that the breaches in Georgia were part of a larger effort to take copies of voting system software from systems in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Arizona, and to share the software in the operatives’ network. According to testimony and declarations by some of the technicians who have obtained copies of the software, they have had access for more than three years to the software for the central servers, tabulators, and highly restricted election databases of both Election Systems & Software (ES&S), and Dominion Voting Systems, the two largest voting system vendors, constituting the most severe election security breach publicly known. Combined, their equipment counts nearly 70% of all votes nationwide. Ninety-six percent of Arizona voters use Dominion and ES&S equipment; 100% of Georgia voters vote on Dominion machines; 98% of Nevada votes on Dominion voting machines and the remainder uses ES&S; 69% of Michigan voters’ ballots are counted on Dominion or ES&S equipment; 89% of Pennsylvania voters ballots are counted on Dominion or ES&S equipment; ES&S counts 92% of North Carolina ballots; and either ES&S or Dominion counts 97% of Wisconsin votes. Possessing copies of the voting system software enables bad actors to install it on electronic devices and to create their own working replicas of the voting systems, probe them, and develop exploits. Skilled adversaries [Elon Musk1] can decompile the software to get a version of the source code, study it for vulnerabilities, and could even develop malware designed to be installed with minimal physical access to the voting equipment by unskilled accomplices to manipulate the vote counts. Attacks could also be launched by compromising the vendors responsible for programming systems before elections, enabling large scale distribution of malware. In December 2022 and again in 2023, many of us, concerned by the security risks posed by these breaches, wrote to the Attorney General, FBI Director, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director outlining the security concerns and urging an investigation. Though there have been limited, localized investigations, there is no evidence of a federal investigation to determine what was done with the misappropriated voting software. Other relevant parties have pointed to the serious risks posed by the misappropriation of the voting software. Before it was known that partisan operatives had taken the software, Dominion Voting Systems objected vehemently to providing its software to the same partisan actors who ultimately got copies through voting system breaches, stating that to give its software to biased actors would cause “irreparable damage” to the “election security interests of the country.” Before the breaches in Georgia had been confirmed, the Georgia Secretary of State’s chief information officer testified that having copies of the software would provide a “road map” to the ways the system could be accessed. The Georgia Attorney General opposed providing copies of the software to lawyers for the Trump campaign in a late 2020 election challenge, arguing that images of the voting system software would provide “the keys to the software kingdom.” Notably, U.S. elections are potentially resilient because there are paper ballots recording the voters’ intent in most states, meaning that even if the voting system is at risk, the will of the voters can be determined reliably by recounting the paper ballots by hand (although we are aware that not all paper ballots are verified by the voter, and not all states take adequate care to protect the ballot chain of custody.) Audits will be conducted in some of the most scrutinized states, but in key states they will not be conducted in a timely way that could reveal any concerns with the vote count. In addition, in most states the audits are insufficiently rigorous to ensure any potential errors in tabulation will be caught and corrected, and they cannot be considered a safeguard against the security breaches that have occurred. Specifically, Georgia’s audits are non-binding, and Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin laws do not provide that the audit be conducted before certification. Therefore, it would be impossible to know for these critical states if the audits uncovered errors or miscalculations before the state deadlines to seek recounts. Among swing states, only Arizona’s audit laws ensure that, if enough discrepancies are identified, the audit hand count will be expanded to correct a potentially incorrect result. In other words, aside from Arizona, in contested states, there is no legal mechanism for the audit to correct the outcome, no matter how much error the audit uncovers. Given these facts, the only guarantee for rigorous, effective audits of the vote in the swing states will be through candidate-requested statewide hand recounts. The facts around the voting system breaches are not disputed; it is well documented that there were severe, multiple voting security breaches before the 2024 election. To ensure that voters can have confidence that the breaches in security did not taint the results of the 2024 election, we recommend pursuing hand recounts in, at minimum, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as they will provide insufficient safeguards against threats posed by the breaches of the election software and will not provide important information in a timely way. Thank you for your time and consideration of this important matter.
Sincerely,
Duncan Buell Ph.D. Chair Emeritus — NCR Chair in Computer Science and Engineering Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina*
David Jefferson Ph.D. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory* (retired) Election Integrity Foundation*
Susan Greenhalgh Senior Advisor for Election Security Free Speech For People Chris Klaus Founder Internet Security System*
William John Malik Malik Consulting, LLC*
Marilyn Marks Executive Director Coalition for Good Governance Peter G. Neumann Ph.D. Chief Scientist, SRI International Computer Science Lab*
John E. Savage An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science Brown University*
*Affiliations are listed for identification purposes only and do not imply institutional endorsement.
https://freespeechforpeople.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/letter-to-vp-harris-111324-1.pdf
The following two articles are included here to support the assertion of the vital necessity of actually and validly securing American Election Management systems to prevent bad actors of all types from State-sponsored agents to crooked politicians to stupid people who actually think that they can and should be the ones to police these highly complex and intentionally limited access equipment and systems.
March 30, 2023
Using copies of election software that was improperly [this should read “Illegally taken”] taken from multiple counties and that has been circulating among election deniers [←WTF!→], they presented unfounded claims that they had discovered evidence of fraud and foreign interference. They also discussed their goals of securing jobs as election officials and building a team of computer experts to access elections systems in more than 60 counties in order to prove their theories.
“This is exactly the situation that I have warned about,” Kevin Skoglund, chief technologist for Citizens for Better Elections, said of the presentation during CPAC. “Having the software out there allows people to make wild claims about it. It creates disinformation that we have to watch out for and tamp down.”
In the weeks after the 2020 election, and for at least the first six months of 2021, supporters of former President Trump arranged to gain access to federally protected election machines and copied sensitive information and software. What they intend to do with the information is not entirely clear.
In two instances, courts or state lawmakers granted access to the election systems. Trump supporters also persuaded election officials or law enforcement to give them access to election machines in Mesa County, Colo.; Coffee County, Ga.; Fulton County, Pa.; and several Michigan counties. It is unknown how many other election systems across the country were accessed, copied and shared.
Skoglund and other experts in cybersecurity and elections say a full investigation into who accessed election machines in 2020 and 2021, who paid for the efforts and how those involved intend to use the information is necessary to prevent misuse.
Far-right presentation using misappropriated election software alarms experts
One of the most serious problems is that US Government leaders are afraid to tell the people the truth fearing the worst should the people be told that their election systems have been hacked. From my perspective not telling the people the truth and ASAP is actually a form of self-sabotage and is an excellent way to fulfill Arnold Toynbee’s maxim—“Great civilizations are not murdered. They commit suicide.”
October 21, 2024
Yet ever since July 28, 2016, when the director of the C.I.A. began briefing President Barack Obama on the Kremlin’s plot to help elect Donald Trump, it has been agonizingly clear that government alarms about hidden meddling by foreign hands might themselves be perceived as tainting the electoral process. Obama decided not to alert the public before Election Day about the full extent of the Russian conspiracy to assist Trump, fearing that such a disclosure would look like a thumb on the scale in favor of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and potentially undermine her widely expected victory.
That, it turned out, was the wrong worry. When the Kremlin brazenly pulled off another hack-and-leak operation the next year, in Europe, France’s response provided an instructive contrast. The Russians had stolen gigabytes of e-mails and other data from the Presidential campaign of Emmanuel Macron. But, before the day of the vote, credibly nonpartisan government agencies informed citizens of a foreign cyberattack; an electoral commission instructed news organizations not to report on the leaked material. David Salvo, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, at the German Marshall Fund, told me that the French government’s action, and the public’s trusting response, was “the best-case scenario.”
The U.S. intelligence agencies, though, waited until two months after Trump won the 2016 election to lay out the sweeping scale of the Russian operation. Instead of averting a partisan battle, the delay ignited one. Democrats argued that the Kremlin’s support rendered Trump an illegitimate leader; Trump and his allies claimed that the intelligence agencies were part of a deep-state conspiracy against him. Seven years later, the fight continues.
Now another U.S. Presidential election may hinge on tens of thousands of votes across a handful of states. Almost any illicit advantage could arguably decide the outcome (and cast doubt on the results), making the race a prime opportunity for foreign meddling. Indeed, intelligence officials and tech-company analysts say that more foreign spies than ever are getting into the game. Clint Watts, the manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, told me that the Kremlin’s success in 2016 “convinced almost every authoritarian nation that they needed to jump into this.” And the biggest players, Russia and Iran, are working even harder at election influence than they did in 2016 or 2020. Yet the government’s warnings about foreign schemes are frequently undercut… [Story continues]
The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference: A group of intelligence officials confers about when to alert the public to foreign meddling.
I was going to write about the “Duty To Warn Letter” by Stephan Spoonamore, but the material above took precedent, plus while I was investigating the above letters I discovered that Stephen Spoonamore is a network Architect principally in fraud detection and infrastructure protection systems and has already previously discovered and reported election fraud that took place in 2002 in the state of Ohio, as can read about at the linked to letter below:
(Circa 2008)
7. After reviewing the system architectures provided last week, I again state that analysis is correct, and the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system at SmartTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmartTech computers.
8. It has been asserted by some that local County Elections officials had been instructed to Fax final results to confirm them, but this action would not have mattered if the local elections boards computers were already under the control of the KingPin. The results Faxed from the County to the Secretary of State would be results inserted by the SmartTech KingPin into the County Tabulator. The Faxed output is in fact a smokescreen to mask the already hacked results and provide an illusion the tabulators were not reporting results over the internet.
9. The final tabulation results to the Secretary of State's offices. Any tabulator with a known IP address connected to the Internet at the county level could be addressed by the SmartTech computer. The SmartTech computer would as the results of the evening proceeded be able to know how many votes Bush needed to steal from Kerry, and flip enough votes on the desired county tabulators to reverse the outcome of the election.
https://law.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/documents/KLBNA-E4-5-27-09.pdf
The Duty To Warn Letter:
Spoonamore is currently using an account on Spoutible to rally people to contact their legislators, law enforcement personnel, activists etcetera to demand that Candidate Harris request the necessary hand counts before the state deadlines expire for being able to initiate any recounts. You can follow him at: https://spoutible.com/thread/37794003 and https://spoutible.com/thread/37969889
You will see some “Accuracy Alerts” attached by the AI moderators to some of his posts, these should be ignored as the AI-moderator gives precedence to Main Stream Media sources over human-input postings and does not take into account the fact of Spoonamore’s expertise and experience.
[Edited to add the following post focused on the “Duty To Warn Letter”]
So then what can you do about this truly alarming situation?
Naturally one of the first steps to take is to call as many of your government representatives and officials as you can contact and inform them of these things. If necessary send them this newsletter.
On that note perhaps the best way to make your opinion heard and recorded for history by the Archivist of the USA is to contact Vice President Harris and urge her to do the right thing and get into the fight that she promised she would continue battling with corrupt entities that would seek to destroy the USA and remind her that when she spoke to Israel’s president Netanyahu about his genocidal activities against Palestinians she made it perfectly clear to him that she would not be “Silent” about his crimes; as such it seems to me that if she is willing to not be silent about a foreign country’s inhumane and criminal activities, then she should be prepared to use a YUGE MEGAPHONE to warn the American people that Donald Trump and his accomplice Elon Musk have corruptly stolen an obscene number of American votes for his own personal use, just as he treats and views everyone and everything in his life as being nothing more than something or someone for him to use for his own sociopathological-lying, egomaniacal, narcissistic, greedy, usage.
Share Your Thoughts with Vice President Kamala Harris
https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/vicepresident/
The following webpage contains official White House information about how to call or write a letter to the The White House.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/get-involved/write-or-call/
And last but certainly not least please restack this post, share it, discuss it, hey you can even print it out and post it up around on bulletin boards and other places, whatever works; just make noise and bring these things to people’s attentions’.
Thank you for reading,
Robert J. Rei, Fall River, Massachusetts, November 14, 2024
“vi. Open-ended vulnerability testing should not exclude those threat scenarios involving collusion between multiple parties including manufacturer insiders [Elon Musk]. It is acknowledged that threat scenarios become less plausible as the number of conspirators increases;” Page 130/124 California Voting System Standards, California Secretary of State, October 2014, https://admin.cdn.sos.ca.gov/regulations/elections/california-voting-system-standards.pdf. See also→
Thank you for continuing to bear witness to this systemic corruption. Recording it for those who may survive after us who will soon begin to experience why strict adherence to rule of law is all that stands between us and social chaos.
Speechless