Quite a bit of “information” has come out recently in the mockingbird media, especially the Washington Post and the AP. There is an unusual interest in a small county in Georgia regarding their election machines. While most of the focus has been on what happened after the election (and subsequent run-off), this article will focus on why those events took place and why those events were justified.
It is worth noting, for your own personal determination, that none of the recent articles in the mockingbird media will outright call the forensic imaging in Coffee County a “breach” because that would be accusing these individuals of a crime. They add the word “alleged” in front of it (seriously…press cntrl+f on the article, search “breach”, and check the word preceding it every single time). The authors should know very well that there was no breach. And I won’t preface my accusation with “allegedly.” A breach implies a forced entry by someone without authorization. The definition of “breach” most applicable here is an “infraction or violation of a law, obligation, tie, or standard.”
Because the administration of county elections is delegated to the county officials, as per Pearson v. Kemp (below), the person of authority over the machines in Coffee County would be Misty Hampton, the county’s elections supervisor. And if Ms. Hampton permits the imaging and conducts it herself, it is unclear how that would be “stolen” software as Marilyn Marks, the plaintiff in the long running yet underachieving Curling v. Raffensperger case claims. I reached out to Marks for comment and citations of specific statutes that she claims are being violated. She did not cite any specific statutes but mentions Rule 183-1-12-.05, which ironically states the machines cannot be connected to the internet (more on that below) but also states that “lock and key access” is granted to only a handful of people, but does not explicitly state those are the only people allowed in the room. It’s also worth noting that there is no access log, as required per this Rule, when the Secretary of State’s Office seized the machines from the EMS room (according to the Rule Marks cites above, the SoS Office is not authorized to “lock and key access” of this room).
https://twitter.com/MarilynRMarks1/status/1571090022245470208
So now that we have established the mockingbird media’s bewildering claim that there was a “breach” initiated by the custodian of the machines, lets look at what actually happened in Coffee County leading up to these events. This is according to the sworn affidavit of Cathy Latham, the former Coffee Co GOP Chair and a Republican observer present that night. It is shocking.
The problems with the new Dominion Voting machines in Coffee County began in the June 2020 primary when early voting began in May 2020. The Secretary of State was notified of issues with the machines to which they said they would take care of it. This never occurred, and as a result, Coffee officials reached out to a nearby jurisdiction and borrowed a tabulator from them to conduct their election.
During the January 5th, 2021 run-off, Latham was also the Republican observer and Voter Review Panelist during the counting of votes. The elections supervisor informed Latham that the Douglas precinct was having issues with their ImageCast Precinct (ICP) optical scanner. It was failing to read the advanced voting ballots, so it was sealed by the elections director and a member of the elections board.
A Dominion technician determined that this was cause by a failure of a memory card. By this time, the “memory card error” was also used to explain discrepancies in several other Georgia jurisdictions during the 2020 General Election two months earlier. And it has been used since then in more recent elections to explain discrepancies, including in the most recent 2022 Primary. The decision was made to take those ballots and scan them on election day after the polls closed. The absentee and UOCAVA ballots would also be scanned at that time on the ImageCast Central Scanner (ICC) rather than the precinct’s ICP.
That night, there were three individuals in the scanning room: Misty Hampton, the Coffee Co elections supervisor, Cathy Latham, and Ernestine Thomas-Clark, who was the representative for the Democratic Party. The others present were looking from outside the room through the glass. On the first batch that Ms. Hampton began to scan, the machine jammed. It showed the error “QR CODE Failure.”
This error persisted “batch after batch, time after time.” Coffee County had an extra Dominion tech assigned to them after the problems in the June Primary, Nov. 3 General elections and the machine recount. The technician, Samuel Challandes of Colorado, suggested that Ms. Hampton needed to take a cloth and wipe down the scanner or, from time to time, he would suggest blowing compressed air at the eye of the scanner to remove paper debris. These attempts were futile.
Mrs. Latham notes in her sworn affidavit that “every ballot that had a QR Code Failure was a ballot for all three Republican candidates: Perdue, Loeffler, and McDonald. At one point during the evening, Mrs. Thomas-Clark looked over at me and said ‘This isn’t right.’ I agreed.”
The team began lowering the number of ballots in the batch they would run to no avail. Eventually, they were running 5-10 ballots at a time but making very little progress. Around 10:30pm, Eric Chaney, the Chairman of the Board of Elections, told the Dominion tech to get his boss on the phone. Scott Tucker of Dominion, the “boss”, was put on speaker. Mr. Chaney at that time told both Tucker and Challandes that they had 30 minutes to fix their equipment or Mr. Chaney would alert and invite the media in to document what was happening.
Mr. Challandes continued speaking with Mr. Tucker outside of the building and came back 30 minutes later, smiling. He told them to retry the machine and assured them this time it would work. While standing next to the scanner but never touching it, smart phone in hand, he instructed Ms. Hampton to wipe the machine down one more time, as they’d done all night without resolution. Mr. Challandes “started grinning and said this time it would work and there would be no more problems.” Apparently, he couldn’t contain his joy as both Ms. Hampton and Mrs. Latham had to ask him to settle down from his apparent excitement.
Sure enough, it worked. They ran a large batch and finished up the rest of the batches with little problem.
“After Mr. Challandes left the room and we were finishing the wrap up and getting final numbers for the press, Mr. Chaney asked ‘Did we all just witness what I think we witnessed?’ I looked at him and said ‘Is there anyway that something was donwloaded to that scanner from his phone or from the Internet? There is no way that wiping the machine with a cloth stopped the QR Code Failure readings.”
There is no explanation for the above circumstance other than sheer luck or a remote connection somehow to the machines. Keep in mind routers and splunk logs are stonewalled at every turn in every case involving these machines across the country.
