Linda Lee Tarver, president of the Republican Women’s Federation of Michigan and former election integrity liaison in the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office, said Thursday that Dominion chief John Poulos’s recent testimony left more questions unanswered than it clarified.
The context for Tarver’s concerns was that preliminary results in Antrim County first put Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden ahead of President Donald Trump by around 3,000 votes, with the discrepancy corrected several days later, putting Trump ahead by around 2,500 votes. On Nov. 21, final certified results showed Trump won the county by nearly 4,000 votes.
He said that because of a rule change, the machine programming needed to be updated in October. But Antrim County officials failed to update all 18 tabulators, meaning some had new programming while some still had the old programming.
Officials then forgot to conduct the logic and accuracy tests on the programming, he said. A third error took place when a contracting firm in October programmed the tabulators in a way that allowed memory cards with both the old and new programming to count votes.
“If all of the tabulators had been updated as per procedure, there wouldn’t have been any error in the unofficial reporting,” he said.
Poulos also said any discrepancies with the counts from its machines can be investigated by referencing paper ballots and insisted that all audits and recounts of Dominion technology used in the 2020 election have “validated the accuracy and reliability” of the election results.
“No one has produced credible evidence of vote fraud or vote switching on Dominion systems because these things have not occurred,” he insisted.
Russell Ramsland Jr., co-founder of Allied Security Operations Group, which conducted the audit, said in the report that Dominion’s system “intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors.”
“The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud,” he stated.
Poulos disputed the findings, calling the report “severely flawed” and accusing the Allied Security Operations Group, which conducted the audit, “a biased, non-independent investigation.” He claimed that it is “impossible” to switch votes using Dominion’s machines.
Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, in a Dec. 14 statement, also disputed the validity of Ramsland’s audit, saying that Allied Security Operation Group “has no apparent expertise in election administration and technology” and called the report “critically flawed, filled with dramatic conclusions without any evidence to support them.”
The results of the hand-tally recount were announced on Thursday, essentially confirming the machine tallies, yielding a net gain of 12 votes for Trump.
“This is very typical of what we find in a hand-count of ballots,” said Lori Bourbonais, with the Michigan Department of State. “It is normal to find one or two votes in a precinct that differ between a hand tally and machine count.”
Following claims that a Dominion employee used a USB drive to manipulate and steal voting data in Georgia, a spokesperson for Gwinnett County and Georgia’s voting system implementation manager said that the person in question was a technician who was transferring a data report to another computer for processing, while a Dominion spokesperson said it is not physically possible for vote tabulators to use a USB stick to add votes for a candidate.
A statewide risk-limiting audit in Georgia, which involved a hand recount, saw a net gain of 285 votes for Trump in Gwinnett County, essentially in line with the machine tallies.
