Dominion Voting Systems voting machines are being decertified after a Pennsylvania county’s election audit.
Pennsylvania’s acting Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid made the declaration in a letter after Fulton County officials allowed third-party contractor to access data. The voting machines are purportedly not safe to use in future elections, and therefore will be decertified.
“Following delivery of a certified and procured system, the county is supposed to independently perform acceptance testing on the system,” the Pennsylvania Department of State’s letter said. “Thereafter, the equipment and software are expected to remain under the full control of the county.”
“As you have confirmed through our correspondence, Fulton County officials allowed Wake TSI, a company with no knowledge or expertise in election technology access to certain key components of its certified system,” the letter went on. “Fulton County officials permitted Wake TSI employees to access their ‘election database, results files, and Windows system logs.’ Further, the county allowed this third-party entity to use some type of ‘system imaging tool to take complete hard drive images of these computers’ and ‘complete images of two USB thumb drives’ used to transfer results files from their voting system computers to the computers used to upload results to the state’s voter registration and election results reporting system. These actions were taken in a manner that was not transparent or bipartisan.”
“As a result of the access granted to Wake TSI, Fulton County’s certified system has been compromised and neither Fulton County; the vendor, Dominion Voting Systems; nor the Department of State can verify that the impacted components of Fulton County’s leased voting system are safe to use in future elections.”
Fulton County used the Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5A voting system. Wake TSI was the Pennsylvania company hired for the election audit. The Washington Post reported earlier that Wake TSI was “contracted” to a nonprofit group run by Sidney Powell. In July, a forensic investigation was announced in the State of Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania’s costly decision to decertify the Dominion Voting Machines is similar to that of Maricopa County, which decertified its machines after the Cyber Ninjas audit. At a recent audit update with the independent contractor, Arizona Senate President Karen Fann questioned the decision to decertify the Dominion machines, which will cost the taxpayers $2.8 million.
“I have this question, I don’t understand,” Fann said, “How can the Secretary of State say that she can’t certify the machines weren’t tampered with, when supposedly we have people that… certified people that come in to certify machines aren’t tampered with? It doesn’t make sense. Could you explain that to me please?”
Digital forensic election expert Ben Cotton rebutted claims that the voting machines were compromised and thus could not be used in future elections.
“Madame President, I certainly undertand your confusion, and I share that with you,” Cotton said. “I’d also like to reiterate that as part of our evidence handling procedure, we had cameras watching over our evidence storage facilities and our acquisition and replication procedures 24/7.”
“So, any form of tampering certainly would have been caught,” Cotton added.
It is uncertain how much it will cost to replace Dominion Voting Machines in Fulton County. If Fulton County replaces the machines, it will mean more profit for a private voting machine company that plays a pivotal role in elections across the country.
