Dominion Voting CEO says Antrim County report part of 'reckless disinformation campaign
https://www.freep.com/story/news/politic...906017001/
LANSING —" The CEO of Dominion Voting Systems told Michigan lawmakers Tuesday his company has been targeted in "a dangerous and reckless disinformation campaign," and rebutted allegations that range from Dominion tabulators flipping votes between candidates to the company having ownership ties to the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
John Poulos testified by video feed for three hours before the Senate Oversight Committee, flanked by company attorney Greg Bower.
Dominion, based in Denver, has been at the center of a range of conspiracy theories surrounding the Nov. 3 election, many of them linked to an election night error in reporting unofficial results from Antrim County, one of 65 Michigan counties that use Dominion equipment.......
"Republican Lisa Posthumus Lyons, the Kent County clerk and former attorney general Bill Schuette's running mate in the 2018 election for governor, said the testimony from Poulos "puts to rest the false claims of tabulator manipulation in the November election."
A consultant's report based on an examination of 22 Antrim tabulators, ordered released by a Michigan judge Monday, is "severely flawed" and was prepared by "a biased, non-independent organization," Poulos said.
The Allied Security Operations Group report is signed by Russell Ramsland, a cybersecurity analyst and former Republican congressional candidate who mistook voting jurisdictions in Minnesota for Michigan towns in one recent flawed analysis of voter turnout in the Nov. 3 election. In another, filed in support of a federal lawsuit filed in Michigan, he made inaccurate claims about voter turnout in various Michigan municipalities, claiming that Detroit, where turnout was 51%, had turnout of 139%, and that North Muskegon, which had turnout of 78%, had voter turnout of 782%.
The report alleged that the Dominion system was designed to allow votes to be shifted from one candidate to another, but Poulos said that is false.
"The most important check on our machines is the paper ballot. Michigan has paper ballot records for every vote cast on a Dominion machine," he said.
"If there was any manipulation of the system, the paper ballots would not match the machine totals. Moreover, if unauthorized votes were somehow added to the count, those numbers would not match the canvassing."
Trump's attorneys have seized on the Antrim story and Trump tweeted Monday and Tuesday about the Allied Security Operations Group report. But Trump never requested a paper ballot recount in Antrim, as was his right. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said such a recount of the votes cast for president in Antrim County will begin this week, as part of a series of audits Benson is conducting statewide.
Poulos also testified that:
Dominion tabulators are not connected to the Internet. In some jurisdictions, though not in Antrim, cellular modems are used for very brief periods, after the polls are closed, to transmit unofficial results from the precincts to the county headquarters. In Antrim, the tabulator memory cards are sealed and delivered to the county clerk by hand and there is no Internet connectivity, which could pose a potential risk of hacking, he said.
Dominion systems, which are subject to rigorous testing and certification at the federal and state levels, have no "fractional voting," under which ballot numbers are converted to vote numbers based on an algorithm or points system, as Matthew DePerno, a Portage attorney representing plaintiff William Bailey in an Antrim County lawsuit, has alleged.
Dominion, which began in Canada in 2003 and moved its headquarters to Colorado in 2010, has no ties to China, Venezuela, billionaire George Soros, or a company named Smartmatic. Dominion does not use or license Smartmatic software, he said. In 2009, Smartmatic licensed the use of a Dominion tabulator for use in the Philippines, but that relationship is long over, he said. The only other indirect connection is that Dominion in 2010 purchased assets from Sequoia Voting Systems, and Smartmatic briefly owned Sequoia between 2005 and 2007. The Smartmatic allegations are connected to a conspiracy theory alleging Dominion software was created in Venezuela as part of a scheme to ensure Chavez, who died in 2013, never lost an election.
"These falsehoods I've just listed are only a sampling of the most egregious lies," Poulos testified.
"The disinformation campaign being waged against Dominion defies facts or logic. To date, no one has produced credible evidence of fraud or vote switching on Dominion systems because these things simply have not occurred."
Staff writer Clara Hendrickson contributed to this report.