USA 2020 Elections: Thread

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https://www.theepochtimes.com/election-assessment-in-pennsylvania-county-uncovers-five-issues-of-note_3855230.html

https://arizonaaudit.com/documents/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20795774-wake-tsi-audit
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20787202/gene-kern-fulton-county-document.pdf

Election Assessment In Pennsylvania County Uncovers Five "Issues Of Note"
Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

An election assessment conducted in a Pennsylvania county months ago
and quietly released to the public in recent weeks uncovered five
errors, including three linked to Dominion Voting Systems, whose
election management system is used in the county, the assessing firm
said.

Wake Technology Services Inc. (Wake TSI), a Pennsylvania-based firm,
conducted the assessment in Fulton County. Workers visited the
county’s offices late last year and about a month later, on Feb. 9.

The assessment was meant to review the mail-in ballots in the county
and explore whether conduct relating to absentee ballot requests,
distribution, receipt, and counting were in line with federal and
commonwealth guidelines, Wake TSI said in the 93-page report that was
quietly published on the county’s website, with no public fanfare, in
May.

Wake TSI personnel did not conduct a technology forensic audit of the
operating system or election management system (EMS) but did review
some system file dates, log files, ballot images, and other files.

Wake TSI said in its report summary that it found that the election
“was well run, was conducted in a diligent and effective manner and
followed the directions of Pennsylvania.” No anomalies were reported
during the election process and expectations were that the assessment
would not show any indications of fraud, error, interference, or
misconduct.

However, Wake TSI said it found five “issues of note,” including that
Dominion failed to meet the commonwealth’s certification standards;
that the election management system had Microsoft SQL Server Data
Tools installed, despite the software not being part of the U.S.
Election Assistance Commission’s certified configuration; and that
changes were made to the management system just three weeks prior to
the election.

Assessors said there is “no valid reason” for the software to be
installed on the system and that the presence “allows any user with
access to change and manipulate the EMS databases without logging
[recording] to the Database, EMS, or [operating system] logfiles.”

They also said that Dominion failed to fill out a document that
attests that the installed software versions conformed with certified
reasons, with Dominion apparently claiming filling out the form was
“optional.”

Dominion Voting Systems disputed the report’s findings related to it.

The Microsoft software “is a federally-certified component of
Dominion’s system, which meets U.S. Election Assistance Commission
(EAC) Voluntary Voting System Guidelines,” a spokesperson said in an
email, adding: “Only federal and state entities have the authority to
certify voting machines. Dominion’s systems have been certified by
both the U.S. EAC and the State of Pennsylvania.”

A search of the voluntary guidelines did not turn up any mention of
Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools, which can be used to create, debug,
maintain, and rewrite the source code of a database.

The Microsoft software in question can help recover from a corrupted
database if there’s a crash, such as a crash caused by a power surge,
but can also be used for nefarious purposes, according to Greg Miller,
chief operating officer of the OSET Institute, a California-based
nonprofit that researches, develops, and educates on elections
technology reform. The type of assessment Wake TSI conducted would not
be able to uncover whether it was used for something malfeasant.

The nonprofit’s policy and technology teams went over the assessment
and found cause for concern and spaces where both the county and
Dominion could improve, he added.

“No direct evidence of any malfeasance but, boy, people deserve
better. There were some fundamental mistakes that were made there and
I think Dominion owes some answers,” he told The Epoch Times.

The report showed “a couple of bureaucratic errors that would leave
the average voter wondering, and they should, they should wonder,” he
said. “It doesn’t look good. It looks awful. Unfortunately, the kind
of digital forensic analysis we would want to do to determine if the
presence of those toolkits caused any problems is almost impossible
now,” he said, adding that election machines that are under suspicion
would ideally be sequestered immediately before being audited.

The errors included the county not keeping documentation on whether
logic and accuracy testing was done on the machines, which is
inconsistent with the Pennsylvania Department of State’s conditions
for certification, and Dominion’s stated failure to fill out the
attestation form.

Logic and accuracy tests are done on machines before elections to make
sure that voting equipment and ballots set to be used in an election
can properly tabulate the results.

Wake TSI’s report states that Fulton County apparently “never had a
Logic and Accuracy test documented,” adding: “This is not to say
whether or not the L&A testing has been completed, but there is
nothing documenting that the process was completed.”

Wake TSI explained that the issue is not minor because inaccurate
scanning can significantly impact election results, using the example
of alignment of a candidate’s voting circle being off by a fraction of
an inch, which would render the system unable to properly read the
ballot, which would then go through the adjudication process, which is
open to interpretation by election workers.

“A simple human error, or a bad actor, could cause huge issues with
accurate ballot counting if it is not caught by proper testing both
before and after an election, as it is required by the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania,” the firm said, blaming both Dominion and Pennsylvania’s
Department of State.

The Department of State did not respond to multiple queries for this article.

According to Fulton County commission meeting minutes, commissioners
discussed on Dec. 29, 2020, on a third-party team that wanted to
inspect the 2020 election results. Commissioners Stuart Ulsh and Randy
Bunch, both Republicans, supported the inspection but the lone
Democrat commissioner, Paula Shives, said she would only be agreeable
to an inspection if machines were not removed. She also said that she
wanted to be present for the inspection.

Wake TSI visited the county offices two days later, collecting copies
of log files, images of scanned ballots, and other materials. Patti
Hess, the county’s director of elections and voter registration, or
Bunch remained in the room with the ballots during the entire course
of the review, according to the minutes and the election assessment.

A portion of the minutes from the Fulton County commissioners’ meeting
goes over Wake TSI’s election assessment, on Jan. 5, 2021.
(Screenshot/Fulton County via The Epoch Times)

Ulsh motioned at a Jan. 12 meeting to permit Wake TSI to complete the
mail-in ballot portion of the election review. Bunch voted yes. Shives
voted no “because she feels anyone wanting to review election
materials should go through the legal process and obtain a subpoena,”
according to minutes of the meeting.

The commissioners noted participating in the second visit, which they
described as an audit, in their Feb. 9 meeting.

No further mention was made of the assessment until May 11, when Ulsh
motioned that the Wake TSI’s report would be placed on the county’s
website after the firm released it. All three commissioners approved
the motion.

The two Republican commissioners in the county did not respond to
repeated requests for comment. Shives, the lone Democrat, answered an
initial query about the assessment by pointing The Epoch Times to Wake
TSI’s report. She did not respond to further questions.

Hess on June 2 declined to comment, saying she was too busy with
primary certification. Responding to a followup inquiry a week later,
she directed questions about the assessment to the commissioners.

Wake TSI did not return multiple requests for interviews or comment.

Wake TSI also included in its assessment analysis on what it described
as ballot-scanning errors, saying the scanning errors identified in
two sets of log files exceeded the allowable error rate set by the
federal government.

However, Miller said he did not know of the error rate they cited and
that the number of errors found was not unusual.

Dominion told The Epoch Times via email: “Claims of ‘scanning errors’
are also incorrect as they do not relate to Dominion’s system. These
are benign instances where ballots were not fed into the scanner
correctly and were ejected [‘reversed’] for the voter to try again or
instances of ballot mistakes such as overvoting or blank ballots.”

Another election expert said he did not think Wake TSI uncovered
anything significant.

    “Bottom line: Wake TSI didn’t find anything of substance that went
wrong. In my analysis of elections over the last ten years, I have
found a lot of errors made by tired people under pressure using a
complicated computer system. I have never seen anything that looked
intentional or that looked like an attempt at fraud. I don’t read
anything in the Wake TSI report that would suggest otherwise, and I
read a lot in the Wake report that points out how little they knew
about analysis of election data,” Duncan Buell, chair emeritus-NCR
chair in computer science and engineering at the University of South
Carolina, told The Epoch Times in an email.

    “There are experts who analyze elections. (I believe I am one of
them.). I don’t see that Wake was anywhere close to that space until
they were called on for the specific purpose of finding evidence that
might support The Big Lie. They didn’t find the evidence, so they
focus on the nits,” he added.

But Pennsylvania lawmakers said the assessment’s findings motivated
recent calls for an audit in the state.

“I’ve only done a preliminary review of the audit, however my first
concern is the lack of L&A inspections of the voting system after the
changes were made to the system. The non-certified database tools (I
have learned of SQL being discovered in machines in other states when
it is not a software product permitted under the Election Assistance
Commission guidance) are of significant concern as they allow for
manipulation of data and facilitate the transmittal and reception of
modifications to data from outside of the machines in question,”
Pennsylvania Sen. Cris Dush, a Republican, told The Epoch Times in an
emailed statement.

A screenshot from the website of Wake TSI shows members of its team.
(Screenshot/Wake TSI via The Epoch Times)

“Constituents from across the Commonwealth continue to have questions
about the 2020 Election. Because responses from the Department of
State and other state government officials have not answered these
many concerns, Senator Argall believes all options should be
considered—including an assessment of the Fulton County audit and how
it was conducted,” added Jim Brugger, a spokesman for Pennsylvania
Sen. Dave Argall, a Republican who chairs the Senate’s State
Government Committee.

The assessment showed blunders by both the county and Dominion but
also indicated that the election ran largely correctly, according to
Miller of the OSET Institute. Still, the issues identified highlight
the need for technology that’s more easily examined by auditors and
others, he added.

“The problem here is you’ve got black box technology when we need
glass box technology,” he said.

Wake TSI’s assessment was “set” by Pennsylvania Sen. Doug Mastriano, a
Republican, according to a Dec. 31, 2020 document signed by Wake TSI
that was obtained and published (pdf) by the Arizona Mirror and the
Washington Post.  Mastriano declined to comment. Wake TSI says in its
assessment that Mastriano and Pennsylvania Sen. Judy Ward “were aware
of our efforts.”

The document also said the Wake TSI was “contracted to Defending the
Republic,” a nonprofit founded by lawyer Sidney Powell, who has
claimed widespread fraud occurred in last year’s election.

Contact information was not listed on the nonprofit’s website. Powell
did not respond to an email.

Hess, Fulton County’s elections director, told acting Pennsylvania
Secretary of the Commonwealth Veronica Degraffenreid last month that
“various members” of the state legislature asked for Wake TSI to do an
audit in the county.

    “Since we believe in transparency, we agreed to let them come in
and do the audit,” she wrote in the letter, which was sent last month
and obtained by the Post.

Hess said that that Wake had three people in the room where the
ballots were stored. Hess would hand a ballot to one, who would write
down who was voted for before passing it on to a second person, who
also wrote down the ballot result. The third person then took a
picture of the ballot.

The team also took backups of “key data on our computers used in the
ballot counting process” and used a system imaging tool to “take
complete hard drive images” of computers used in the election, she
added.

Wake TSI was later subcontracted by Florida-based Cyber Ninjas to help
audit ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona. In its statement of work,
Cyber Ninjas cited Wake’s experience in Fulton County and said the
firm had workers that have been involved in investigating election
fraud issues dating back to 1994.

The Maricopa County audit started on April 23. Wake TSI stopped
working on the audit as of May 14, choosing not to renew its contract.
The ballot review work was taken over by Arizona-based StratTech
Solutions. The audit is expected to wrap up by the end of June, with a
report on what auditors found expected in July or August.