Thinking Critically About 2020 Stolen Election Claims

• Hardware and software security penetration testing;
• Hardware testing under conditions simulating the intended storage, operation, transportation, and maintenance environments; and
• Operational testing to validate system performance and functioning under normal and abnormal conditions.

RESPONSE
Flipping votes would be a hack of a county's air gapped tally system;

• ROV vote totals are transmitted directly from the ROV to the SOS. There are no computer servers located in foreign countries
• If the hack were of the SOS's system, then their posted results would differ from those at the county
• The tally system is the system responsible for generating voting results (the registration system has no role in this)

All of the swing (battleground) states used paper ballots. Flipping a vote on a machine in an air gapped tally system doesn't change the indelible ink mark on the ballot. 49 States required 3,077 counties to perform post election audits (Alabama does not). Those audits would have easily identified inconsistencies between machine counted vote totals and hand counted vote totals from the audits. The audits included either;

• A Hand Count of ballots from random precincts comparing those counts to the actual machine counts from those precincts. In California, a hand recount requires manually tallying votes in 1 percent or more of the precincts
• A Risk Limiting Audit (RLA). This is a statistical analysis that reduces the number of ballots that are reviewed. In California, the number of ballots reviewed depends on the how close the race is. Close races require more ballots to be included in the audit

3,077 Post election county audits did not discover any vote flipping scheme. That includes the 509 audits in the swing states that were won by Biden (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).

Hacks of air gapped computer systems are extremely rare. A 2021 report from the cyber security firm ESET listed the 17 known cases of air gapped systems being hacked in the previous 15 years. None were hacked wirelessly. None were any of our 3,144 county election systems.

Dominion Voting Systems' sued Sydney Powell for defamation of character. Powell never produced any of the evidence she claimed to have proving that votes were flipped. To the contrary, Powell's legal defense team filed a response with the court and, on pages 27 & 28, stated that "no reasonable person would conclude that the statements (Sydney Powell's) were truly statements of fact."

Mike Lindell's Antrim County flipped vote claim was investigated by J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the the University of Michigan. Halderman's report concluded that the problems in Antrim County were the result of human error and not a hack of the system. As Halderman explained in his report, after the scanning machines were programmed to scan the ballots, last minutes changes were made to the ballots and staff failed to update the programming in the the scanning machines.

RESPONSE
To date, no cyber expert has demonstrated (replicated) the method used in such a massive attack that allegedly took place in 2020.

Moreover, a hack of this nature could not have been carried out wholly in the cyber world. The physical aspect of this claim is incomprehensible. Voters cast 29,165,276 votes on paper ballots in these 8 battleground states won by Biden;

• Arizona: Total Votes Cast = 3,333,829
• Georgia: Total Votes Cast = 4,935,487
• Michigan: Total Votes Cast = 5,453,892
• Minnesota: Total Votes Cast = 3,201,142
• Nevada: Total Votes Cast = 1,373,376
• New Hampshire: Total Votes Cast = 790,597
• Pennsylvania: Total Votes Cast = 6,835,903
• Wisconsin: Total Votes Cast = 3,241,050

Consider the challenges facing the hackers and other facts surrounding a hack of this nature and scale;

• Without foreknowledge of the outcome of anyone of these 8 elections, how many million phantom voters did hackers need to create to ensure a victory?
• How many people (co-conspirators) did it take to mark and turn in all of those paper ballots?
• How did hackers recruit the army co-conspirators they needed to receive and mark the ballots?
• How did the hackers conceal the addition of millions of voters to county voter rolls so that there wasn't one ROV or ROV staff member in the nation that reported it?
• How were those recruiting efforts kept secret from state and federal law enforcement or the press?
• To what mailing addresses were those millions of ballots mailed? Mailing 20 or more ballots to one address may have gone unnoticed. Mailing millions of ballots to phantom voters would have required mailing large batches to 50,000, 100,000 or more addresses. How were the hackers capable of hiding this so that there wasn't one ROV, ROV staff member or postal carrier in the nation that reported it?
• How did the co-conspirators know how to forge the voter's signature on the mail-in envelopes?
• How is it that not one of the co-conspirators in this vast conspiracy has come forward to admit their part in stealing the 2020 election? How is it that none of them have been fingered by their now divorced spouses, estranged domestic partners or former friends?

The fact is that there have been no arrests and no credible evidence presented that supports this claim.

RESPONSE: Georgia's Republican Secretary Brad Raffensberger responded by saying, "I listened to what the President has just said. President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. Um, we don’t agree that you have won. And we don’t — I didn't agree about the 200,000 number that you’d mentioned. And I can go through that point by point ... we did a hand retally, a 100% retally of all the ballots and compared them to what the machines said and came up with virtually the same result. Then we did the recount, and we got virtually the same result." After listening to the President some more, Raffensberger said, "Well Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong ..."

The claims that "in Fulton County you’ll find at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures" or that there were "in the 50s of thousands — and that’s people that went to vote and they were told they can’t vote because they’ve already been voted for" are simply not true. In the first case, the President and the RNC raised over $200 million in the month after the election. They could easily have paid for a review of all of the Fulton County mail in ballot envelopes if they believed this to be true. Those envelopes bar coded to identify the voter and signed. In the second case, every news outlet in the nation would have been reporting if over 50,000 Fulton County voters were told they had already voted and were turned away at the polls.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (a Republican) issued a statement on August 15, 2023. It said "The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward - under oath - and prove anything in a court of law."

RESPONSE
Secretary of State Raffensberger responded by saying. "You’re talking about the State Farm video. And I think it’s extremely unfortunate that Rudy Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video and took it out of context. The next day we brought in WSB-TV and we let them show, see, the full run of tape and what you’ll see, the events that transpired are nowhere near what was projected ... We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times."

The two election workers named in the video sued Mr. Giuliani for defamation of character. Mr. Giuliani admitted in court that he lied. The women won the suit and were awarded a judgment of $148 million.

The claim ignores the audit safeguards built into the system. Election poll workers conduct an audit after they close their polling places. They provide a written report to the ROV that includes the number of ballots they were issued, the number of unused ballots they are returning and the number of ballots that were voted. That all becomes part of the larger audit each ROV conducts. If ballots were scanned three times, then the number of ballots counted would have been greater than the number voted ballots received.

Finally, Georgia conducted both a hand and a machine recount in every county including Fulton County where this supposedly happened. There was no credible evidence to support this claim.

RESPONSE:
The 10,315 number comes from a report that that contained a knowingly flawed assumption. The report's author noted that "Because the Voter Registration file only contains the Birth Year for each registered voter, a more exact match cannot be made and there may indeed be false positives." In section 3.1.6 (pages 36 to 40), an independent review by Justin Grimmer and Abhinav Ramaswamy analyzing the claim concluded that "Our estimate of approximately four coming from voters after they were deceased is in line with other estimates of dead voters ..." The Georgia SOS estimated that two dead people voted and later raised that number to 4. Jennifer Wu et al. studied the occurrence of dead people voting in the State of Washington. They concluded that there may have been up to 14 ballots received in the name of deceased individuals out of 4.5 million votes that were cast.

Speaker Bowers said that when pressed for proof of their claims that dead people in Arizona voted in large numbers, Mr. Giuliani replied, "We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence."

RESPONSE
More than 155 million votes were cast in the 2020 election. The arrest of a single Chinese citizen voting in 2024 made national news. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement charged 19 foreign nationals with voting in the 2016 election. A BPC analysis of The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Cases database found only 77 instances of non citizens voting between 1999 and 2023. A study conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice analyzing 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election concluded that there were approximately 30 instances of non citizens casting votes.

Many organizations from across the political spectrum have investigated these claims. There isn't any credible evidence of widespread voter fraud by non-citizens.

RESPONSE
It would have been easy enough to track which counties any large late night ballot drops came from. The President and the RNC raised over $200 million in the month after the election. The President and his team could easily have spent a small portion of that on recounts and reviewing election audits in any of those counties. In the case of Georgia, there was an automatic recount because of the narrow margin of victory. Georgia performed both a hand recount and a machine recount. Biden still won.

To quote Georgia Republican governor Kemp, "The 2020 election was not stolen. No one with evidence of fraud has to come forward - under oath - and proven anything in a court of law."

RESPONSE: Montgomery has a long history of making dubious claims according to Wikipedia. A number of stories and posts have detailed his activities including Reuters' "The man behind Trump World’s myth of rigged voting machines," Playboy Magazine's "The man who conned the Pentagon" and "Litigation History of Dennis L. Montgomery, 1993-present."

RESPONSE: Lindell has faced numerous legal challenges in response to his claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

A jury awarded Eric Coomer $2.3 million for defamation of character.

A Minnesota U.S. District Court has ruled Lindell defamed Smartmatic. The judge has deferred until later a decision of whether or not the statements were made with "actual malice" and "with knowledge that they were false or made with reckless disregard to their falsity."

The defamation case filed by Dominion Voting Systems is ongoing.

Lindell's own cyber expert spoke regarding the data purchased from Montgomery that was the basis for the "Prove Mike Wrong Challenge." He said the key data is "illegitimate" and "cannot prove a cyber incursion by China." Bob Zeidman, who entered the challenge and proved the information was wrong recounts the contest and ensuing litigation in his book "Election Hacks."

RESPONSE:
If you’ve ever listened to Dr. Frank, you know that he is confident and animated as he delivers polished presentations. He moves quickly though a mountain of information. He assures audiences that he "loves swimming in big data" and "was just the right person with just the right skills" to have discovered that nearly every county election system in the nation was hacked. He tells of creating a 6th order polynomial that, when combined with regression analysis, are proof of these hacks. He includes neat little charts that support his claims. It’s all too much for mere mortals to grasp.

These claims come at a time when our news is filled with reports of cyber-attacks and sophisticated on-line scams by Russians, Chinese and other hackers with mind bending skills. However, the cracks appear when you step back, think about what you know and look critically at Dr. Frank’s claims. Then you realize it's all incomprehensible and contradictory mumbo jumbo - a confused mixture of catch phrases that fail the common-sense test.

• Adding Phantom Voters?: The physical nature and scale of this claim is incomprehensible. See PHANTOM (FAKE) VOTERS
• Identical Turnout Rates?: What Dr. Frank postulates is logistically impossible. All of the swing states used paper ballots. Hackers couldn't have known how many millions of phantom voters to add in order to achieve a given turnout rate until they knew how many real voters voted. The number of real voters voting wasn't known until after the polls closed. At that point, it was too late to get the proper number of phantom voter paper ballots to the ROV's offices. Claiming that hack was replicated across nearly 260,952 age groups in 3,144 counties is nonsense
• The contradictions: Dr. Frank scoffs at the integrity of our air gapped tally systems, claims that hacks were done wirelessly and recommends scrapping our machine tally system. That implies a hack of our tally system. On the other hand, he claims phantom voters were added and produced identical voter turnout rates. That is a hack of the registration system. Was it our registration or tally system that he claims was hacked? He doesn't say.
• If the hack was of the registration system, then scrapping the machine based tally system and hand counting ballots makes no sense. That would only change how the illegal ballots he claims were created in the registration system were counted. On the other hand, if the hack was flipping votes from Trump to Biden in the tally system, then hackers had no reason to add phantom voters.
• Air Gapped System Not Secure?: Claiming that his phone has an air gap is blatantly disingenuous. Mobile phones are specifically designed to communicate wirelessly. Machines approved for use in our air gapped tally systems are just the opposite. They are prohibited from being connected to the internet or containing any hardware capable of sending or receiving wireless signals
• Dr. Frank claims that his 6th Order Polynomial proves that voter turnout rate was the same for every county in a state. He uses neat little charts to misdirect his audience's attention from an otherwise obvious truth. Page 3 of the 2020 Statement of the Vote shows that voter turnout in California ranged from a low of 61.68% in Imperial County to a high of 90.49% in Sonoma County. Likewise, voter turnout was not the same for various age groups. The website "Election Insights" has collected the voter turnout data of age groups from 18 through 100 for almost every county in 42 states. See the turnout data for your county by clicking here. The turnout data here in Sutter County and other California counties aren't even close to being the same. As an example, the turnout rate for 40 year olds in California ranges from about 62% to about 90%
• Justin Grimmer from Stanford's Hoover Institute has repeatedly debunked Dr. Frank's 6th order polynomial. In this one, Grimmer addresses Frank's claim that voter turnout was 88% in every precinct in California's Placer County.
• Nearly every county hacked?: Hackers so sophisticated as to be capable of hacking the election system of nearly every county in the country would not have wasted the effort. They would have limited the hack to selected counties in a few swing states to reduce their workload and limit their chances of being detected
• REAL WORLD VICTIMS;
  Tina Peters, the Clerk/Recorder/ROV for Mesa County Colorado believed Dr. Frank. She is now serving a 9 year prison sentence for following a plan "hatched during an April 2021 meeting with (Dr.) Frank ..."
  The Shasta County Board of Supervisors cancelled their contract with Dominion Voting Systems after a presentation by Dr. Frank. That was done without any credible evidence that any tally system in the nation, including Shasta County's, had been hacked. The county wasted over $1 million of taxpayer money fixing a problem that never existed. It was money that could otherwise have been spent on law enforcement, fire protection, roads and other county needs

RESPONSE:
TTV has made claims of widespread voter fraud to at least the states of Georgia and Arizona.

• Georgia attempted to investigate TTV's claims but TTV refused to turn over the evidence they claimed to have. Georgia then subpoenaed TTV for the alleged evidence. The the investigation was dropped after TTV finally responded with a court filing saying they didn't have any evidence.
• TTV made election fraud claims in Arizona as well. Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips of TTV met with members of the Arizona Attorney General's (AG's) office and repeatedly promised to provide their evidence of fraud
• TTV then claimed to the AG's office that they were informants for the FBI and couldn't turn over the evidence. TTV indicated the AG's office could obtain the evidence directly from the FBI.
• The AG's office met with the FBI. Agent's from the FBI indicated to the AG's representatives that Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips were not FBI informants and that TTV claimed that all of their evidence had been turned over to the AG's office. FBI agents further indicated that TTV told FBI agents that the FBI could obtain the evidence from the AG's office.
• TTV then publicly claimed to have turned over proof to the AG's office including a hard drive. The AG's office responded in a letter to the FBI and the IRS. The AG's office then posted the letter on it's website
• Referring to TTV's public claim that evidence had been turned over to the AG's office, the AG's letter says, "Not only is this patently false, TTV acknowledged via correspondence and during a meeting with them that they had not given us the information but that they would." The AG's office indicates that TTV has made false claims to the FBI as well.
• The AG's letter goes on to say; "TTV has raised considerable sums of money alleging they had evidence of widespread voter fraud and their efforts would train the public to protect election integrity at the polls and to help protect all voters' rights. They indicate they have provided the information to law enforcement agencies; in our case they have not after promising to do so. Another law enforcement agency has also stated they have not provided them the information, informing them they had given the information to us."
• The AG's letter concludes with "Given TTV's status as a non-profit organization, it would appear that further review of its financials may be warranted."

RESPONSE:
There are several problems with this movie;

• TTV's cell phone data alone does not prove ANYONE visited an election drop box. This letter from the George Bureau of Investigation (GBI) indicates TTV's data was only good to 100 feet. Ping data in this video from the Ohio Attorney General was only good to 150 meters (492 feet). An auto parkway with two traffic lanes in each direction and a center island is about 100 feet wide including the sidewalks. Amazon and other delivery drivers, taxi & Uber drivers, garbage collectors, election workers and police officers on patrol and on their personal travels could all have driven by enough election drop boxes and non-profits to be misidentified as mules.
• The video evidence DOES NOT PROVE ANYONE WAS A MULE. More than 2,000 mules, each depositing ballots in at least 10 drop boxes, 4 million minutes of video, 10 trillion cell phone data points and the movie doesn't show one person dropping ballots in multiple drop boxes. The movie shows random voters making single stops. Mr. D'Souza issued an apology to Mark Andrews who was shown in the movie dropping off ballots while the audio said "What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes."
• Mr. D'Souza says his team was misled by TTV into believing the images of people dropping off ballots were correlated to people that TTV identified as mules. TTV disputes this claim and posted that "The clip at issue .... was never part of True the Vote’s geospatial research - a fact which he (Mr. D'Souza) was informed of."
• The cell phone data should have been accurate enough to determine where many of the mules lived. If this were a real investigation, Mr. D'Souza and his team would have contacted enough "mules" to have determined beyond a reasonable doubt what they were actually doing. Were they harvesting ballots? Were they being paid to harvest ballots? Were they advising or directing voters how to complete their ballots? Or, were they just a police officer out on patrol?
• The movie portrays many of the people they define as mules having "bad backgrounds, bad reputations" and indicates they can be violent. It goes on to indicate that three dozen mules participated one violent BLM/Antifa riot. As former U.S. Attorney General William Barr testified, "The cell phone data is singularly unimpressive. … The premise that if you go by five boxes or whatever it was, you know that that’s a mule is just indefensible." Were the three dozen people that TTV identified as mules at the Atlanta BLM/Antifa riot people that harvested ballots or police officers misidentified as mules?
• RE: ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project), "ACLED requested a correction from the publisher based on the incorrect references included in the recalled version of 2,000 Mules, and we are happy to see that these references have ultimately been removed from the final copy of the book," said Sam Jones, ACLED's head of communications. "Our data do not support any of the claims or conclusions that were previously linked to ACLED."
• The murder of Secoriea Turner was not "ebbing on cold case status" as TTV claims. "Authorities in Georgia arrested and secured indictments against two suspects in the murder of Secoriea Turner in August 2021. In response to NPR's inquiries, True The Vote acknowledged it had contacted law enforcement more than two months later, meaning it played no role in those arrests or indictments." The movie gives no information on the other murder it says it was involved with.
• As previously noted, TTV refused to turn over any of the election fraud information they claimed to have had in Arizona to either the FBI or the Arizona Attorney General. The interview of the woman claiming that ballot harvesting in the City of San Luis (population 35,000) was widespread was likely the result of arrests associated with local races in the 2020 Primary election. In that case, the Attorney General's office prosecuted Alma Juarez, Guillermina Fuentes, Gloria Lopez Torres and Nadia Guadalupe Lizarraga-Mayorquin for ballot harvesting. The Associated Press also reported on this.
• Salem Media Group, the distributor of 2KM stopped distribution of the movie and the companion book after learning of misinformation in the book and movie

2,000 Mules plays on legitimate concerns that voters everywhere should have when political operatives are able to contact voters and collect (harvest) their ballots. Harvesting ballots is illegal in 31 states though relatives and care givers are allowed to collect ballots in some of those states. The illegal activity in the San Luis Primary election is an example. However, the movie fails to deliver credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election.

RESPONSE

RESPONSE TO THE ASOG REPORT:
At the request of the State of Michigan, J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the the University of Michigan, investigated the issues in Antrim County including reviewing the ASOG report. Professor Halderman reported that "The incident in Antrim County arose due to the county’s mishandling of last-minute ballot design changes ..." The report went on to explain "Antrim changed three ballot designs to correct local contests after the initial designs had already been loaded onto the memory cards that configure the ballot scanners." and "... was not caused by a security breach."

Furthermore, Professor Halderman includes a section of his report titled "Response to ASOG Report." Included in this section of the report is a rebuttal of several claims made by Mr. Ramsland in the ASOG report. Halderman addresses claims that the Dominion system is designed to create systemic fraud, Mr. Ramsland's mischaracterization of the adjudication process, and "fatally, adjudication functionality was not enabled at all in Antrim County during the November 2020 election."

Professor Halderman also disputes the Mr. Ramsland's conclusion that there were high rates of error. Halderman states, "Mr. Ramsland is largely referring to others kinds of errors that he believes occurred on the basis of his mistaken interpretations of the forensic evidence."

Professor Halderman's report is available here.

ARE DOMINION MACHINES CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET?
What we are told is that the scanners and tabulators in the tally system are in an air gapped system and are never connected to the internet. Mr. Lindell's and Mr. DePerno's claims may be the result of a failure to understand how the election system works.

Ballots are scanned and tabulated in an air gapped system as previously described. Results of the tabulation are then copied onto a thumb drive and taken to an on-line (non air gapped) computer where the file is downloaded. The file is then transmitted to the Secretary of States' office. This portion of the video is merely showing how results get from that non air-gapped computer to the Secretary of State's office.

Col. Phil Waldron:
Col. Waldron produced a Power Point presentation on January 3, 2021 titled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN" that provides a visual picture of his election concerns.

It is not true that foreign computers are involved in the transmission of data in our elections. As described above, after votes are tabulated in the air-gapped system, they are downloaded onto a thumb drive, taken to a non air-gapped computer in the ROV's office and transmitted to the Secretary of State's office. There is no overseas or third party computer involved.

Chinese ownership of election software is a legitimate concern. However, Col. Waldron's PowerPoint claim has been investigated by several sources. This report from USA Today tracks the origins of this claim and concludes that the claim is false.

Col. Waldron's PowerPoint is available here.

RESPONSE:
A person would be hard pressed to find anyone on the President's cabinet that was more loyal than Attorney General William Barr. Barr signed a memo on November 9, 2020 authorizing U.S. Attorneys and FBI to investigate voting fraud and election irregularity claims. On December 1st, Barr responded to a reporter and said that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents had been working to follow up specific complaints and information they've received, but "to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election."

Barr reaffirmed his position on December 21st at 27:40 in this video. He said, "I’ve already commented on fraud, let me just say that, you know there are fraud in, unfortunately, in most elections. I think we’re too tolerant of it and I'm sure there was fraud in this election but I was commenting on the extent to which we had looked at suggestions or allegations of systemic or broad-based fraud that would affect the outcome of the election and I already spoke to that and I stand by that statement."

RESPONSE: Justin Grimmer and Abhinav Ramaswamy from Stanford's Hoover Institute evaluate fraud claims from the 2020 election

USA Today published "Fact check roundup: Debunking false narratives about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot two years later." Its "2020 election misinformation" section addresses long list of other stolen election claims in its report.

FactCheck.org, a left-leaning organization, hosts "Viral Voting Misinformation" on its website. It addresses many stolen election claims. You are invited to read their responses to several election claims and judge the validity of their analysis.