Bombshell Dominion 'Error Code' Uncovered in 97% of Georgia Counties
Open records requests reveal 64 of 66 Georgia counties have the same unsolved 'Tennessee Error' that caused seven scanners to miscount hundreds of ballots.
In a podcast episode released last week Thursday, David Cross and Kevin Moncla of the Election Oversight Group reveal that open records request from 64 of 66 Georgia counties show the same security error “QR code signature mismatch” and warning message “Ballot format or id is unrecognizable” that caused seven scanners to miscount hundreds of ballots in Williamson County, Tennessee.
The "Tennessee Error" is an “anomaly” discovered on Dominion’s Image Cast Precinct (ICP) Tabulators (also referred to as "scanners") that occurred during a Williamson County election held on October 26, 2021.
The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) defines an anomaly as "an irregular or inconsistent action or response from the voting system or the system component, which resulted in the system or component not functioning as intended or expected."
In Williamson County, an election worker tallying votes on a post-it note realized that hundreds of ballots removed from a tabulator did not get counted.
Even though that tabulator never signaled that a problem occurred.
After further investigation, election officials realized that the anomaly caused 7 out of 18 tabulators to miscount ballots.
The State of Tennessee, the EAC, and the two accredited entities that test voting machines, Pro V&V and SLI Compliance, investigated the anomaly and were able to repeat the problem but were "not able to determine the root cause of the anomaly.”
The federal government and the state could not determine the cause of the problem, so they brought in Dominion Voting Systems to investigate why their tabulators were miscounting ballots.
On February 11, 2022, Dominion submitted a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) report to the EAC.
On March 31, 2022, the EAC released a report on the “Tennessee Error” entitled, “Dominion Voting Systems D-Suite 5.5-B”, which incredibly states “the direct cause of the anomaly was inconclusive” and “erroneous code is present in the EAC certified D-Suite 5.5-B and D-Suite 5.5-C systems.”
In essence, the EAC and Dominion admit they do not know the cause of the problem, and there is no explanation or definition of the “erroneous code”, nor how it got there after the software was certified by the EAC.
The report continues, "analysis of audit log information revealed entries that coincided with the manifestation of the anomaly; a security error “QR code signature mismatch” and a warning message “Ballot format or id is unrecognizable” indicating a QR code misread occurred. When these events were logged, the ballot was rejected."
In other words, as the Election Oversight Group explains:
"Investigators reviewed the system log (SLOG) files (it’s just a diary the scanner keeps of the election), and it showed multiple instances of an error called a “QR code signature mismatch” with a warning message of “Ballot format or id is unrecognizable.” Testers noticed that the machines counted the votes properly until the error was triggered. After the error was triggered, the current ballot in the machine was not counted, and every ballot after it was not counted - until the machine was reset."
The U.S. government report explains that Dominion’s tabulator marked all of these uncounted ballots as "provisional" even though tabulators typically do not scan provisional ballots, which are customarily hand-marked paper ballots that are placed in an envelope and addressed by election officials after the polls close.
Furthermore, according to Moncla, the uncounted ballot images “were in a provisional folder that was hidden from the tabulator's count and the poll closing tape.”
“In other words, the tabulator didn’t reflect their existence anywhere.”
After the EAC report was released, Cross and Moncla asked EAC Director Jonathan Panek if the government found the anomaly in other states or counties.
The EAC Director who authored the “Tennessee Error” report replied, “no additional reports were received.”
Cross and Moncla then placed open records requests for SLOG files from all 159 Georgia counties, only to be “unlawfully blocked and significantly delayed” by Ryan Germany from the Secretary of State’s office.
The two volunteers behind the Election Oversight Group had to file a complaint with the Inspector General to force Mr. Germany to comply and have so far only received the SLOG files from 66 counties.
Incredibly, 64 of 66 or 97% of Georgia’s counties have the same “Tennessee Error” that Dominion Voting Systems and the U.S. government already investigated and admitted they do not know the cause.
For example, 107 instances of the security error “QR code signature mismatch” and the warning message “Ballot format or id is unrecognizable” show up in Chatham County’s SLOG files during the recent 2022 primary election.
In Gwinnett County, during the 2020 primary election, there are 84 instances of the same “Tennessee Error.”
Cross and Moncla say, “our work indicates the precinct scanners in Georgia have not counted ballots accurately since they were first installed” in 2020.
The Election Oversight Group, whose stated mission is “to protect & secure our elections,” have filed an “Official Notice and Demand for Emergency Review” with Georgia’s State Election Board that seeks intervention in the 2022 mid-term elections.
Moncla says, “The anomalies have not only been identified by locating the same errors in common with the Williamson incident but have also been realized by the discovery of ballots having been scanned but not included in the tabulator results.”
Dekalb County, 2022 Primaries- Hand-count revealed approximately 2800 ballots that had been scanned but not included in the tabulator results.
Gwinnett County, 2020 General Election- Approximately 1600 ballots were scanned but not included in the tabulator results.
Floyd County, 2020 General Election- Hand-count found approximately 2800 ballots that were scanned but not included.
Additionally, Fulton County, Pennsylvania, filed a lawsuit against Dominion Voting Systems last month for a “breach of contract.”
The county alleges that their log files show “an external IP address” located in Quebec, Canada, and that an unauthorized “python script” had been installed after the certification date.
In May, CISA, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, disclosed nine vulnerabilities that “an attacker could leverage to install malicious code” on the Dominion ImageCast X machines that are used in 16 states, including; Williamson County, Tennessee, Fulton County, Pennsylvania, and in every county in Georgia.
“Nearly as stunning as the EAC’s admission that the direct cause of the anomaly was inconclusive is the statement on the same page that they successfully fixed the anomaly,” Moncla emphasized.
“The contradiction, “We don’t know what caused it, but it’s fixed,” wouldn’t be acceptable coming from a car mechanic, much less the Election Assistance Commission addressing the critical infrastructure systems which tally our votes.”
This article will be updated with the Election Oversights Group’s official complaint with Georgia’s Election Board when it becomes available later this week.
Moncla plans to file lawsuits against the EAC and the State of Georgia.
If you want to support David Cross and Kevin Moncla’s election integrity efforts, you can donate at www.givesendgo.com/electionoversight.
As a software developer, I can actually confirm that there is such a thing as "we don't know what caused this, but it's fixed".
When we ("we" here being my employer, not Dominion -- but I doubt any other software company is different in this regard) get a bug report about an old version of our software, the first thing we do is try doing what is described as triggering the bug on the current version. If we can reproduce the bug, we go on to check what's causing it. If we can't, it gets closed as "fixed in the current version" without further investigation.
Now given that this bug possibly changed the outcome of an election and there's no "This is fixed in the current version, so we'll recount the election with the current version" mitigation, this is not acceptable at all - but the fact that they're saying "we don't know what caused it, but it's fixed" by itself is not necessarily evidence of foul play. It IS evidence of sloppy work that should not be permitted under those circumstances. Unlike ours, their product is NOT something where "fixed in the next version" is sufficient.
For volunteers going to Logic and Accuracy Testing at ROV's all over the country in the coming weeks, what do we look for? What information do we request? What documents should we file to preserve our rights to appeal or protest should some anomaly be suspected?