Thousands of Ballots Were Scanned Numerous Times in Dominion Machines: Contractor Witness

A Dominion Voting Systems contractor said she witnessed at least 30,000 ballots being counted numerous times in Dominion machines.
Thousands of Ballots Were Scanned Numerous Times in Dominion Machines: Contractor Witness
Dominion contractor Melissa Carone sits down for an interview in Detroit, Mich., on Nov. 27, 2020. (Bowen Xiao/The Epoch Times)
Isabel van Brugen
12/3/2020
Updated:
12/4/2020

A Dominion Voting Systems contractor who worked at Detroit’s TCF Center on Election Day testified before the Michigan House Oversight Committee on Dec. 2 that she witnessed at least 30,000 ballots being counted numerous times in Dominion machines.

Melissa Carone, a freelance IT worker who assisted Dominion at Detroit’s ballot-counting site from 6:15 a.m. on Nov. 3 to 4 a.m. the next day, before returning later for several more hours on Nov. 4, said in an affidavit on Nov. 10 that she “witnessed nothing but fraudulent actions take place.”

The affidavit was submitted as a supplement to a lawsuit in Michigan.

“I observed numerous employees, city workers, running batches of ballots through the tabulators countless times, without discarding them first,” Carone said Wednesday, responding to a question from President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani about what she observed while working at the center.

Carone said that the tabulating machines would jam two to three times an hour. She explained that the proper way to scan ballots when there’s a paper jam is to reset the count on the machine, or in other words discard the count, and rescan all of them with the jammed paper on top.

“Instead of discarding, they were just rescanning, rescanning, rescanning,” Carone said. “Counting ballots nine to 10 times.”

Carone noted that there were approximately 22 to 24 tabulating machines where she was working, and that she observed the malpractice “thousands of times” while she was at the site.

A worker with the Detroit Department of Elections celebrates after hearing the nearly final number of 167,000 absentee ballots that were counted being announced over the loudspeaker at the Central Counting Board in the TCF Center in Detroit on Nov. 4, 2020. (Elaine Cromie/Getty Images)
A worker with the Detroit Department of Elections celebrates after hearing the nearly final number of 167,000 absentee ballots that were counted being announced over the loudspeaker at the Central Counting Board in the TCF Center in Detroit on Nov. 4, 2020. (Elaine Cromie/Getty Images)

She explained that ballots were to be tabulated in batches of 50. However, as she observed poll workers scanning ballots more than once, the number of tabulated ballots on some machines reached figures in the hundreds.

Carone alleged that when she alerted her manager Nick Ikonomakis about the issue, he dismissed her concerns.

“I called my manager to a specific tabulating machine and I showed him a number on it that was over 500. They shouldn’t be over 50—ballots come in batches of 50. I said that we have a severe problem here Nick,” Carone explained.

“He [Nick] said, ‘Melissa I don’t want to hear that we have a problem, we are here to assist with IT, we are not here to run their election,’ and at that point I was really frustrated and upset, I could tell what was going on,” she said.

“What was going on?” asked Giuliani.

“He was in on it. They were cheating. It was very, very apparent,” Carone replied. “It was apparent that he was in on it. When he caught on to me knowing that he was in on it, he just wanted nothing to do with me.”

When questioned why more people haven’t come forward with allegations that they witnessed fraudulent actions at the Detroit ballot-count site, Carone said that her life has been destroyed.

“I’ll tell you why,” she said. “My life has been destroyed because of this. I’ve lost family, I’ve lost friends, I’ve been threatened, my kids have been threatened, I’ve had to move, I’ve had to change my phone number, I’ve had to get rid of social media—nobody wants to come forward. I can’t even get an actual job any more, because Democrats like to ruin your lives. That’s why.”

A second witness, a Republican poll challenger, echoed Carone’s claims, saying she noticed that some workers at Detroit’s TCF Center appeared not to know what to do when ballots were jammed. She asserted that workers in some cases wouldn’t discard the ballots prior to the problem ballot, therefore she saw numbers at 300 to 400 when they were tabulated in batches of 50.

“I could tell most of these people didn’t have enough training, and they were just mindlessly doing their job,” she said.

“This election I will say, these Democrats took every avenue possible to commit fraud in this election, and what I saw on Nov. 3 and Nov. 4 was over 20 counts of fraud taking place right in front of my face,” Carone added.

Judge Timothy Kenny ruled against the plaintiffs on Nov. 13, in a Michigan lawsuit that was asking “the Court to stop the certification process of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.” He wrote Carone’s “description of the events at the TCF center does not square with any of the other affidavits. ... The allegations are simply not credible.”

Dominion has not responded yet to a request from The Epoch Times for comment and declined to appear before a state legislative hearing when requested.