Does a Report Prove That Dominion Voting Machines Were ‘Designed’ to Create Fraud?

No. The report is not new, and it is not evidence of election fraud.

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A widely shared Facebook post from late February claims there was “proven fraud” in Michigan in the 2020 presidential election. The claims are recycled from earlier voter fraud allegations. As evidence, the post points to a forensics audit report from December 2020, released by Allied Security Operations Group and signed by Russell James Ramsland, a former Republican congressional candidate. The intended goal of the report was, as stated in the document, to “test the integrity of Dominion Voting Systems in how it performed in Antrim County, Michigan for the 2020 election.”

The full caption of the Facebook post reads as follows: “Judge Releases Dominion Audit Report: System ‘Designed’ to ‘Create Systemic Fraud 13th Circuit Court Judge Kevin Elsenheimer released the bombshell audit report. A Michigan judge has released the bombshell report on the audit of Dominion Voting Systems, revealing that the machines and their software were ‘designed’ to ‘create systemic fraud.’ The report covers the forensic audit of Dominion’s machines in Michigan’s Antrim County — which received national attention after it was discovered that 6,000 votes for President Donald Trump were ‘flipped’ to Democrat Joe Biden due to an ‘error.’ 13th Circuit Court Judge Kevin Elsenheimer ordered the report’s protective order to be lifted on Monday night, allowing the details of the audit to be unsealed and released to the public.The data firm that conducted the forensic audit of Dominion Voting Systems determined that the machines and software in Michigan showed that they were designed to create fraud and influence election results, the report reveals.”

As noted in a previous fact check, this audit report is not evidence of voter fraud in Michigan, and more specifically, is not evidence that Dominion Voting Systems “are designed to create fraud.” 

Michigan Judge Kevin Elsenheimer called for the release of the report on December 14, according to the Detroit Free Press. This “forensic imaging” was ordered by Elsenheimer after William Bailey filed a lawsuit alleging issues with voting equipment in Antrim County, Michigan, stating that there were mistakes in how the county reported its unofficial results. 

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  1. Alex DeLarge

    "As noted in a previous fact check, this audit report is not evidence of voter fraud in Michigan, and more specifically, is not evidence that Dominion Voting Systems “are designed to create fraud.”

    This is another dishonest and awful fact check. You are supposed to be determining whether the forensic report is valid or not. Yet you don't say a word about the data examined, the methodology, or the findings. You just accept at face value the counter-claim that the county merely committed an innocent error -- yet you provide no evidence, explanation, or proof to back up that baseless counter-claim.

    Please either learn to do a "fact check" correctly, or stop pretending to be checking facts at all. This is Snopes-level propaganda.

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    1. Chris S.

      There was excellent deep dive into what happened in Antrim County in the Detroit News by Craig Mauger: https://www.detroitnews.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/02/23/how-mistakes-michigan-county-led-big-election-disinformation/6786153002. The machine tabulation errors were due to changes in the ballots (adding/subtracting candidates and issues in down ballot races). Human error led to the machines not being "informed" the ballot layout had changed. So the tabulations initially were incorrect because, for example, the machine read a vote on Line 2 as corresponding to candidate B when in reality after the ballot layout changed, a vote on Line 2 was for candidate A. But apparently the machine makes a tape backup and the tapes reflect voter selections and those tapes were accurate and matched the hand recount. Could the tapes be tampered with? I suppose, but if the tapes match the hand recount and those two tabulations match the (corrected) machine tabulation, I don't know what more could be done.

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      1. Alex DeLarge

        That sounds like useful information, so thanks. (unfortunately the article is behind a pay wall). One of the Dominion cheat theories however is that any non-readability issue with the ballot automatically kicks it into the "adjudication" process, in which anyone with "administrator" credentials can assign (including by remote internet access) the vote to any candidate they chose. So, the theory goes, ballots may be designed, or the machines set, to produce mass "adjudications" which are then assigned as chosen by a poll worker or hacker.

        Antrim I think illustrated how the reading problem can lead to this, even if no cheating was involved.

        Apparently, this is a very real vulnerability. Whether it was triggered and used improperly, no one knows (and may never know).

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      Beth

      I've lost track of how many times the Dispatch has fact checked this particular pernicious piece of garbage, and I don't have time to go back to all the links they provided, but how about this. The purported "forensic audit" that is the subject of this particular fact check was only focused on Antrim County MI - and honestly have you read it? It's terrible - unprofessional and full of unsupported assertions. I would be embarrassed to put my name or company's name on something so slapdash. In any event, the ballots in Antrim County were subsequently hand-counted and audited, and guess what? The results remained materially the same, with a change of only 12 votes from the machine tabulation: https://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,4670,7-127-93094-547883--,00.html

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      1. Alex DeLarge

        And the reason it only involved Antrim is because a local politician there lost because of the wrong results, so he had standing to sue. But look at it this way: 100% of the Michigan counties where Dominion machines were audited had f***ed up machine counts.

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        1. Fudrock

          Worth reiterating that this issue would have been caught during the canvassing process. That why it exists as a precursor to certification.

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      2. Alex DeLarge

        You prove my point. You've seen lot's of "fact checks" so you know the report is bad. But you can't explain what it said, or what was wrong with its methods or conclusions. You just know it's "garbage" because that's what you've been told.

        The county "corrected" the machine count after they were called out for it being obviously wrong. The hand recount you link to is just being compared to that "corrected" count. So it means nothing as to why the Dominion machines were so wrong before they were "corrected."

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        1. Beth

          Since you’ve read the report, explain exactly how it supports its suppositions?

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          1. Alex DeLarge

            The whole point of "fact checking" is to take on the burden of disproving the fact you want to debunk. If you can't or won't take on the burden you can't say a fact has been debunked. You can't just sit there and say "I'm waiting to be persuaded." I am not even arguing in favor of the report at this point, I just hate this new genre of lazy, pseudo-fact checks and fake "debunking."

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