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An overview of last week's post-election court cases, hearings, affidavits, testimony, press conferences and rallies

As of press time on Tuesday here are some highlights of last week’s post-election legal and legislative reports prompted by various groups, including the Trump campaign.

Georgia: Gov. Brian Kemp called on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Dec. 5 to order a signature audit of votes after the release of video footage appeared to show poll workers in Fulton County processing ballots in the middle of the night.

According to Trump campaign attorney Jackie Pick, who testified during the Thursday hearing, the surveillance footage was filmed on Election Day, inside Georgia’s largest vote-counting center.

She testified that witnesses said a lady came out to announce to everyone, “We’re going to stop counting, everyone go home.” What happens after everyone clears the building on the surveillance video is that four poll workers stay behind and quickly roll boxes of ballots from under covered tables which were clearly kept separated from the rest of the ballots.

They proceed to start scanning the ballots. Pick adds, “And they will continue counting unobserved, unsupervised, not in public view, as your statute requires, until about one in the morning,” said Pick. “So you do the math, ...We believe that could easily be and probably is certainly beyond the margin of victory in this race. Because, if only three scanners working for two hours... That’s 18,000 ballots that went through,” said Pick.

Currently, Biden leads Trump by less than 12,000 votes in Georgia.

Pennsylvania: Votes counted after deadline – The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on Sept. 17 that election officials could accept all mail-in ballots, including absentee ballots, up to three days after the Nov. 3 election. However, on Nov. 6, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Alito ordered Pennsylvania election officials to segregate ballots that arrived after Election Day.

Last week Republicans urged the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal of a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that dismissed a GOP lawsuit challenging no-excuse mail-in voting, and either seeking to block the state from certifying the election or directing the general assembly to choose its own electors.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito asked officials in Pennsylvania to file briefs by the morning of Dec. 8 in response to the emergency injunction petition filed by Republicans seeking to invalidate or rescind the results of the Nov. 3 presidential election in the Keystone State.

Georgia: Attorney Lin Wood plans to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, after an 11th Circuit federal court with judges appointed by Trump, Obama and Bush, denied his appeal in a case seeking to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. District Judge Grimberg said that Wood lacked legal standing as an individual voter to challenge Georgia’s election procedures.

Wood said “my case presents an opportunity for the judicial system to make clear that the Georgia general election was unlawful as a result of substantive changes in absentee ballot procedures by the Secretary of State without approval by the Georgia legislature.”

USPS whistleblowers

A postal truck driver testified to shipping an estimated 144,000 to 288,000 completed ballots across three state lines in October in a national press conference hosted on Dec. 1, by The Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society. They featured three USPS whistleblowers who testified of personal eyewitness accounts demonstrating significant potential election fraud, some of which affects hundreds of thousands of ballots.

Their affidavits are being used as evidence in litigation to ensure election integrity and the upholding of election laws in key battleground states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They revealed substantial evidence against election officials and widespread illegal efforts by USPS workers to influence the outcome of the election.

Ballot issues

Poll worker and watcher testimonials

A woman who said she worked as a volunteer poll observer in Arizona’s Pima County claimed she was told by election officials to allow people to vote who may not have been properly registered to vote in Arizona on Election Day. “I was having to allow people to vote who literally had just moved here. A large percentage had addresses from two apartment complexes,” Anna Orth told GOP Arizona State legislators on Monday.

A poll watcher with 20 years’ experience filed a sworn affidavit in Georgia claiming she found batches of “pristine” mail in ballots printed on paper that was “different” and they were exact replicas but they had no mail creases, although presumably they were mailed and were 98% for Biden.

A poll observer at the TCF Center in Detroit on Election Day testified in front of the Michigan State Senate hearing that she saw numerous military ballots that looked like “Xerox copies” and were all allegedly marked for Democrat Joe Biden.

The woman, who only identified herself as Patty and said she has nine years’ worth of experience, told the lawmakers that “military ballots … looked like they were all exactly the same Xerox copies of the ballot. They were all for Biden across the board; there wasn’t a single Trump vote.”

Perfect black bubbles with “eclipses” around the mark

Several poll workers in Georgia filed sworn affidavits that they saw ballots that were unusual during the recount and seemed to be printed and they had “perfectly made” bubble markings with “eclipses” around the inside edge of the bubbles. “They all had a perfect black bubble and all were Biden select.” They also said there was at least one that printed crooked in the middle of the batch.

No signature verification

Poll workers in Michigan and Georgia said that no effort was made to verify mail-in ballot envelope signatures. In Detroit, a poll worker said in sworn testimony that she was told not to ask for identification of voters.

Tens of thousands of ballots arrive overnight

Tens of thousands of unsealed, unsecured ballots arrived in vehicles with out-of-state license plates in Michegan’s Wayne Country at 4:30 a.m. the morning after Election Day, according to a sworn affidavit by a poll worker. “I specifically noticed that every ballot I observed was cast for Joe Biden,” the poll worker said.

Ballots counted multiple times

Seven witnesses in Michigan say in sworn affidavits that they saw the same ballots being run through tabulation machines multiple times with their ballot numbers covered with tape.

Backdating of ballots

A City of Detroit elections worker signed an affidavit saying she was instructed to back-date mail-in ballots and not to look for any deficiencies in the ballots. In Pennsylvania, an analysis of the voter database shows that more than 51,000 ballots were marked as returned just a day after they were sent out – an extraordinary feat, given the U.S. Postal Service delivery times – while nearly 35,000 were returned on the same day they were mailed out. Another more than 23,000 had a return date that was earlier than the sent date.

Poll watchers obstructed

Republican poll watchers in Philadelphia, Detroit, and other major cities say they were obstructed from properly observing the handling and counting of ballots. Poll watchers say that they were told to stand back so far that they couldn’t see what was happening, or that in some cases, ballots were handled in rooms to which they had no access. Other poll watchers said they were denied access despite having proper credentials.

According to Rudy Giuliani, lawyer to Trump, in Pennsylvania alone there were more than 682,000 mail-in ballots that were entered “that were not observed by any single Republican.”

One Philadelphia poll worker said the vast majority of mail-in ballots were processed “15 to 200 plus feet from us.” The poll worker said “it was impossible for...any observer to see what the workers were doing with any type of specificity” and “the observers were not able to challenge any decision or determination being made on the processing of these mail-in ballots.”

No signature verification

A lawsuit filed in Georgia on Nov. 30 states that “decreased signature verification arose because counties did not screen mismatched and absent signatures and ballots unsigned without the oath, as required by the Election Code.”

Similar accusations of a lack of signature-verification requirements have been made in states across the country. In Arizona, a judge ruled on Nov. 30 that the state’s Republican Party could inspect a sampling of mail-in ballots envelopes. Similar requests in Georgia have been rejected so far.

Votes cast for people who had moved out of state

By comparing data to the National Change of Address database, analyst Matt Brynard and his team identified hundreds of thousands of people in six contested states (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada) who had moved out of state, yet still had a vote cast in their name in that state. Georgia, for example, had 138,221 such people.

PO boxes listed as home addresses

Braynard’s team identified, based on voter registration data, voters who registered using a post office box but attempted to disguise the box number as an apartment or suite number. Just in Georgia, his team found 1000 such people.

Electronic voting systems issues

Unusually low ballot rejection rate

An affidavit by Benjamin Overholt, an expert in applied statistics and research methods at the University of Northern Colorado, notes that there was a 0.15% rejection rate in the 2020 general election, compared to a .28% rejection rate in the 2016 general election, 0.20% in the 2018 general, and 0.28%t in the 2020 primary election.

Easy to manipulate

Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017 about “how easy it can be to manipulate computerized voting machines.” Halderman said that during his research, he and his team found they “could reprogram the machine to invisibly cause any candidate to win.”

Venezuelan ties

One of the voting-machine vendors used in the United States, Smartmatic, was as of 2005 “owned by Venezuelan investors,” according to The Wall Street Journal. According to The New York Times in 2006, the company was “linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez.” It is unclear who owns Smartmatic at the moment; the company itself is mysterious about its ownership other than stating it is “privately owned.”

Built in vulnerabilities

Voting machines produced by Dominion have built-in settings that allow for manual alterations. Options include giving different weights to votes belonging to different candidates. The system also allows for ballots to be scanned multiple times and for vote results to be removed.

These functions make the system vulnerable to manipulation. “In looking at these systems, we identified almost a dozen ways that you could inject or interdict to manipulate votes,” cybersecurity expert Col. Phil Waldron testified before Arizona lawmakers on Nov. 30.

No employee oversight

According to a sworn affidavit by a cyber security expert in Georgia, Dominion personnel were the only ones with knowledge of, and access to, the Dominion server. The expert said this was “highly unusual in my experience and of grave concern from a security and conflict of interest perspective.” He also said it was apparent Dominion employees have “complete access” to the computer system.

Servers not hardened?

Dell computers running the Dominion server appeared not to have been “hardened” – the process of “securing a system by reducing its surface of vulnerability” – according to a cyber expert who observed voting during the Georgia primaries. The expert said he found it “unacceptable for an EMS server not to have been hardened prior to installation.”

Hacking risk

A cyber expert in Georgia said he observed that computers used to process votes in Georgia during the primaries appeared to have “home/small business companion software packages” installed on them. “One of the first procedures of hardening is removal of all unwanted software, and removal of those game icons and the associated games,” the expert said.

Outdated operating system

A cyber expert who observed the Georgia primaries said the Windows system of the main computer in the rack connected to the Dominion voting system “has not been updated for four years and carries a wide range of well known and publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.”

Broken certification process

The federal Election Assistance Commission is responsible for the certification of all voting machines used in the United States. The agency, however, is so small that in 2017 senators sent a letter to the EAC raising concerns about the fact that the agency “employs only one full-time staff member dedicated to overseeing the certification process.” The agency relies on only two small companies to conduct actual testing.

USB sticks plugged into machines

A poll observer from Pennsylvania’s Delaware County, Greg Stenstrom, said he “personally observed USB cards being uploaded to voting machines by the voting machine supervisor on multiple occasions.” Stenstrom told Pennsylvania lawmakers during a hearing on Nov. 25 that this person was “not being observed” and was “not part of the process’ from what he could see. According to Stenstrom, the supervisor was “walking in with baggies,” and he observed him plugging the cards into machines at least 24 times.

Connected to the internet

An information technology contractor for Dominion Voting Systems who worked at the TCF Center in Michigan and a former state senator who was a poll challenger both said in sworn affidavits that the voting machines used in the Nov, 3 election were connected to the internet. Dominion has denied its machines are connected to the internet.

According to the National Election Defense Coalition, some states allow their vote tabulation computers to be connected to the Internet.

The NEDC has stated, “These configurations provide increased opportunities for nation-state actors, partisan criminals, hacktivists or other malign attackers to gain access to our voting machines and manipulate and/or disrupt our elections. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have confirmed that our foreign adversaries have targeted election networks in all fifty states for cyber attacks.”

Information from this overview has come directly from press conferences, hearings, the New York Post, the NEDC, The Epoch Times, court filings, and wire services.

 

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