Boy Was I Wrong And I’m Ecstatic
The 2024 Election Showed Us What We Have To Fix At All Costs
When an act injurious to freedom has been once done, and the people bear it, the repetition of it is most likely to meet with submission. For as the mischief of the one was found to be tolerable, they will hope that of the second will prove so too
John Dickinson
I am glad the election is over, and the outcome was far different and better than what I had projected. My fears and what I thought were reasonable suspicions were proven wrong. I am very glad. In fact, I’m ecstatic that my nightmare scenario did not come to fruition. To say that my state of Michigan has had significant challenges with election fraud is an understatement. Just in the past 2 weeks alone we have seen:
1.2 million voters on the voter roll who do not reside in the state.
35,000 newly registered voters with no social security number, first or last name nor date of birth matching in the Social Security Administration’s Help America Vote Verification System.
16,000 voters over the age of 100 while only 2900 are reported in the Help America Vote System.
164,000 duplicate votes cast on 10/29/2024.
After several years of studying the Antrim county lawsuit over the Dominion voting machines, the process of mail-in ballots and the unprecedented lack of absentee ballot validation, I saw many signs that our prior cautious steps to ensure valid votes were being cast were called into question. And as a software developer of 30 years experience, I found the analysis of Secretary of State Benson’s expert, J Alex Halderman, ignored its own findings. Halderman confirmed the allegation that administrator passwords were shared, that the database in Antrim county was not protected by password which meant anyone could walk up and perform a query of the database and get current tallies for candidates. What a simple task it would be to then use a cell phone to request more ballots to shore up totals. These security holes identified in the Antrim lawsuit, along with Halderman’s acknowledgment, meant the database and network system would have failed Sarbanes Oxley and HIPAA audits in the private sector.
Yet in 2020, that violation of standard practice of computer security and the CISA recommendations was fine. And in 2022 we re-elected many of those who mistreated us severely during Covid. I was certain that Michigan citizens would have removed people from power who had so abused their authority, and used a crisis to consolidate that power. I was very wrong - we returned the same crop of politicians to power. Given that Michigan had the revelations I listed above, I know we can’t rest on our laurels.
For those new to Cultural Courage or the podcasts from OZFest you may not know that I live in Michigan. I took up the charge to fight what I saw was the spread of tyranny from Covid lockdowns, to speak out against the contentious outcome of the election and Michigan’s race to embrace the goals of the UN and World Economic Forum’s 4th Industrial Revolution. All of these require that you give up your liberty. That ain’t cool. My views and concerns about how far we have fallen have not changed with Trump’s victory. I am encouraged by Trump winning the election, but whether it was Trump’s skill, providence or luck, there are systems for stealing elections that are left in place.
We can’t rest, thinking that all is well and leave these tools at the establishment’s disposal. Just because my team won doesn’t mean that those mechanisms of manipulation should be used. We can’t let those who stripped away the protections for safe elections recede temporarily into the shadows like Sauron, only to emerge once Trump leaves office. Let’s face it. We can’t expect people like Trump to always step up and protect us.
To expect that is to misunderstand what our country was established to do: allow us to chart our own course, to constrain what the government can do to channel our energies and thoughts against our will.
What’s The Problem?
It’s not solely the voting “machines”. We have become accustomed to hearing revelations of hacking, of digital espionage. It’s a thrill to start researching and feel as though we are part of a community that is fighting for freedom. Cyber warfare and countermeasures online have an allure, like a movie.
As a software developer I have spent years writing programs that have “scaffolding” in place that trace the path of information as it is read, updated, saved and transmitted while the commands of a user are executed. You build a mechanism that easily tells you that the seven steps of your program you expected to execute have actually transpired. We call it logging. It means we can trace what happens, when it happens and record the steps with their date and time of execution.
The Dominion voting machines are nothing proprietary except from a legal standpoint. No secret sauce nor amazing tech. They accept ballots, the scanning creates images that match and tally. They just add 1s to totals. No multiplication required. Dominion has used Dell architecture in the past, it’s nothing super secret. There are operations such as optical recognition that reads an image and maps the image to the image of a ballot. That technology has been around a long time. Bell and Howell scanners are very similar, and back in the early 2000s I designed a system for scanning my company’s business records, sites plans, leases and legal agreements using Bell and Howell. High volume scanning and form recognition with the ability to process 80 double sided sheets of paper per minute. It’s very cool, but it’s been in use for over two decades. The data management and tallying is not all that complex. The volume is high, but banks perform far more sophisticated tasks with their software. I have worked on those systems as well.
My point here is that when these systems malfunction, you can trace the steps, easily, to discover what has gone wrong. You can also detect, easily, when processes have run multiple times to give you weird results. If the computers that run these processes have their event recording mechanisms turned off, data updates can transpire quickly, but every system administrator will ask “is the logging turned on?” If tracing and logging events is not enabled, the next question is “well why the hell not?”
In publicly traded companies that handle PCI or financial data, you can go to jail if you don’t do those things.
The fraud is easier to pull off when you submit fake ballots among the legitimate ballots, scan them, and they are counted as legitimate. Paper is paper. And remember, these ballots are anonymous. There is no “Indiana Jones” that appears as the voter’s name on the ballot.
Here’s another way to think about this. You have two jars full of quarters. One jar has quarters that only have been used in Michigan. The other jar is full of quarters from New Jersey. Your task is to separate the Michigan quarters from the New Jersey quarters.
Ok, close your eyes. Ready?
There, I created one big pile for you, just start separating the Michigan quarters from the New Jersey quarters. The same applies with identifying the ballots submitted by fake voters. When they are lumped together with legitimate ballots, good luck.
See what I mean?
What Are the Symptoms?
1.2 Million ineligible Voters on The Voter Rolls
We have 1.2 million voters who may not be qualified to vote, they could be illegals, they could have moved and someone has filled a ballot out in their name and submitted it, they could be a college student who also votes back home. Like the quarter, once the vote leaves the envelope, there is no way to distinguish that a ballot is cast by a fake voter.
So the question is how to get the fake paper ballots into the system without detection? Well just drop off more ballots. But how are those introduced with the other ballots that have been collected at the polls?
Mail-in and Absentee ballots are the vehicle. Once you get a mail-in ballot removed from the envelope that contained that ballot and the signature of the voter, the game is over. Even with a hand count, how would you distinguish the Indiana Jones ballot from a legitimate ballot? You can’t.
Our state has a process where the Secretary of State is prohibited, by law, from mailing out unsolicited mail-in ballots. Secretary of State Benson violated that law in 2020 under the guise of operating in unprecedented times brought about by Covid. Therefore the state dispersed millions of mail-in absentee ballots. The voter rolls were the source of the addressees in that process. In other words, for Indiana Jones to get a ballot, Indiana Jones must be registered as a voter with an address.
The registered voters are the key. If there is an entry in the Secretary of State’s system, you can get the absentee ballot. And while you need to provide a signature, our Secretary of State issued guidance to county clerks in 2020 and 2022 to assume the validity of a ballot, bypassing a signature validation. The Republicans took SoS Benson to court several times over this practice.
Numerous media outlets have assured us, along with SoS Benson, that the excess voters on the rolls are “inactive”. That sounds pretty technical, like when your account on social media is inactive, and no changes can be made. Or like when you have a form you’re filling out, and you can’t go any further with data entry because you’re “not active in the system”. As a systems developer, when I hear “inactive” the situations I just described are triggered in my mind,
But here’s the deception: inactive merely means the state believes you may no longer be a resident, and will remove you in two voting cycles unless you respond to correspondence that has been sent asking if you’re still around. You can still vote, nothing prevents you from requesting an absentee ballot nor from that ballot as a vote.
This is deception. The media repeats it.
So are you getting why I am so suspicious of the integrity of Michigan’s election systems?
35,000 Voters Who Don’t Match the Social Security Database
Former Secretary of State Ruth Johnson analyzed current voter rolls and discovered that there are 35,000 voters who do not have social security numbers and who cannot be found in the Social Security Administration’s Help America Vote Verification System.
So far in 2024, there have been 34,535 individuals whose name, date of birth, and Social Security numbers do not match any record found in the Social Security database,” said Johnson, R-Holly. “That is a huge increase from previous years and very alarming to me. Far-left operatives have pushed for changes in our constitution and laws that allow for same-day registration with no ID and our clerks do not have the ability to check or verify citizenship.
With Proposal 3 of 2018, Proposal 2 of 2022 and new election laws pushed by the secretary of state and passed by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, so much integrity has been stripped away from our elections,” Johnson said. “We have no system to check if people are registering or voting who are not eligible. The only way the student at UM was caught is because he requested his ballot back from the clerk.
What should our source of truth be, the federal governments Social Security records, or registrations made on campuses?
16,000 voters over the age of 100
Charlie LeDuff, a journalist in Detroit, has taken a different approach. He compared the ages from the voter rolls to the corresponding entries in the same Help America Vote Verification system. As he describes it, there are 16,000 voters listed on our voter rolls who are over the age of 100. Checking the social security database that Johnson referred to, he found that there are 2199 listed as being that age.
How many votes did Trump lose Georgia with in 2020? Around 11,000.
These groups of numbers seem inconsequential until you realize that they add up quickly when the margins are thin. And from a different perspective, Trump lost all of the Georgia Electoral Votes with a number less than the centenarians who are considered able to vote in Michigan today.
164,000 Duplicate Votes Cast on 10/29/2024
Matt DePerno, a Michigan attorney and 2022 candidate for Attorney General, reported an alarming incident in the Qualified Voter File, a registry of voters with their name and address. Each vote has an identifying number that is unique among all the voters who cast ballots. In other words you should never two of the same voter ids, in no case should you see the voter id #131313 more than once in the QVF.
On 10/29/2024 115,000 voters cast 279,000 votes.
Did you catch that? 115,000 voters cast 279,000 votes. Shouldn’t that be 115,000 votes? This is what I mean when I say that while the volume of voting data is high, the mathematics required to administer and monitor voting activity is grade school level. We are adding 1s to totals. We used to call that tallying.
DePerno provided an example where a single voter with the id X cast 29 votes. The screenshot is below. Note that the voter is listed at multiple addresses.
There were 164,000 extra votes.
To get technical here, I have designed databases that will not allow duplicate rows like the ones depicted in the DePerno screenshot, so the excuse that this was a glitch is not even a flimsy excuse. It’s a LIE. Database technology is designed to prevent such “anomalies”, and these are simple to find.
Your Guy Won, So What?
Government by precedent, without any regard to the principle of the precedent, is one of the vilest systems that can be set up. In numerous instances, the precedent ought to operate as a warning, and not as an example, and requires to be shunned instead of imitated; but instead of this, precedents are taken in the lump, and put at once for constitution and for law.
Thomas Payne
Shouldn’t I be gloating over the vanquished posting their meltdown videos on TikTok? Has the tide been turned and now that my candidate will ascend the perch of power, shouldn’t I be happy with the win?
I am very happy.
But I am still deeply concerned. We can’t trust this system, given the “glitches” and “anomalies” listed, in just the past 2 weeks alone. And sure, the Dominion Voting machines are hackable, J Alex Halderman, who I criticize regularly, has demonstrated many vulnerabilities exist.
The solution is something that will be painful, but it’s necessary. If we continue to allow precedent to become habit, then we think that the failings are actual law and just the way things have always been and “both sides cheat, it’s no big deal”, we are done with liberty.
Patrick Colbeck, former state senator, has the correct solution. Each state should conduct a chain of custody audit. When the election is run correctly, the identifying numbers on the absentee ballots should match the number on the ballot. By law the secretary of states must retain records of the ballots as they are processed. In Georgia, SoS Brad Raffensperger cannot fulfill the requests of the Georgia Election Commission and produce the chain of custody for the votes cast that comprise Biden’s victory totals.
If this was Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, I would want the same standard. Why? Because otherwise I am at the mercy of people who in previous years locked me in my house during a panic over a virus no more virulent than the flu. Because I had my state pass a law to remove my county’s right to preside over zoning issues related to energy projects, putting lithium processing facilities on major watersheds.
The precedents are adding up to tyranny. Just like the absentee ballots. And we will not always get a charismatic Superman to save the day.
