In the 2020 Presidential Election, several states took an excessive amount of time to process and tabulate mail-in ballots after universal and/or no-excuse mail-in balloting was permitted in most states due to COVID fears. According to an article by the Washington Post, 27 states allowed early processing of mail-in ballots in 2020. That number has since ballooned to 43 states in total.
The WaPo article titled “Pennsylvania presidential election results could again take days to count” was highlighting the Keystone State’s refusal to adopt legislation that would permit this mail-in ballot processing. The Democrat-led House passed a bill to allow early counting, but it was not brought to a vote in the Republican-led State Senate:
“Despite widespread calls for change, Pennsylvania is likely to again take several days to announce this year’s winner, alarming state election officials who worry the delays will cause confusion, deteriorate trust in the process and make election workers targets for harassment.”
An ABC News article from October 2020 described the processing of mail-in ballots in Arizona, a key swing state in both 2020 and this year in 2024:
“After signature verification is complete, officials can separate the ballots from their envelopes and prepare them for tabulation. Tabulation can begin 14 days before the election, after the completion of logic and accuracy testing for the relevant equipment.
While tabulation could begin two weeks ahead of Nov. 3, no results can be released until one hour after polls close on Nov. 3, and all ballots, including those sent by mail, are due by then.”
Last week during the Why We Vote podcast from Badlands Media, Elbert County, CO commissioner Dallas Schroeder exposed a shocking feature in the Dominion ImageCast Central (ICC) tabulation equipment: the ICC, which is primarily used to tabulate mail-in ballots in a centralized location, can display and/or print the results of a race prior to Election Day.
And no one would ever know as it does not show up in the system’s log files.
“Hidden” feature in Dominion Voting Systems ImageCast Central allows anyone with administrative access, including remote access, to tally and report results from scanned mail-in ballots before Election Day.
To make things worse, this feature does not show up in the system log… pic.twitter.com/ykZtNvkh5Z
— CannCon (@CannConActual) July 29, 2024
According to the Why We Vote interview and a letter to CO Senators Stephen Fenberg and Rod Pelton, and Rep. Rod Bockenfeld in 2023, Schroeder and the county’s current clerk, Rhonda Braun, were running test ballots through their tabulation equipment with a Dominion representative. Upon completion of the test ballots, Braun, the elections manager at that time, had begun to go to the EMS server in order to verify the results were accurately counted.
The Dominion rep told her that they could do it right there on the ICC. Schroeder said he and Braun looked at each other, confused, thinking “Ok…that’s news to us.”
“Show us how that works,” Schroeder said. He was then shown that with administrative access, you can press a button to stop tabulation.
“When that happens (stop tabulation), there’s another little button that shows up that says ‘show results.’ And so you can hit the ‘show results’ button and sure enough, it shows the results of what you just have run through there. Not the number of ballots but the actual number counts…From there, Rhonda asked if you can print that out. He said ‘sure!’ He hit the button and it prints it out.
We were kind of blown away to have that report….So Rhonda then asked ‘how does it show in the log, the slog files?’ He said, ‘I don’t know…I’ve never looked.’
Well, lets look, just for fun. He goes in there and hits the button and sure enough it shows up there ‘Ballot 1 scanned…Ballot 2 scanned…Ballot 3 scanned…’ it goes through everything that had taken place on that work order. And then it comes to where it logs ‘Stop Tabulation’ and then it just goes right back to ‘Start Tabulation’ because we had run more ballots after that. So where is the part of the file where it says that we did ‘Show Results’? And where’s the part of the file where it says that we printed a report? It wasn’t there.
This ‘feature’ could present a dangerous opportunity for a bad actor to obtain results from mail-in balloting prior to the Election Day voters taking to the polls. Furthermore, there is potential for someone to access the system remotely and run this report without any evidence of the totals being disclosed in the log files.
Colorado is one of 47 States, as mentioned earlier, that not only allows, but mandates early tabulation of mail-in ballots under the guise that these results are not published until Election Day. But this is a façade since this report can be run without anyone being able to ensure that the results weren’t prematurely published since there is no evidence in the system log files. For this reason, after the 2020 election, Schroeder did not begin tabulating mail-in ballots until Election Day. He did not want to put any of his employees in a position where they could be accused of checking the results early without any way to defend the accusation.
According to Schroeder, the Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold did not appreciate this and in 2023, the Colorado legislature passed what Schroeder calls the “Elbert Rule,” which mandates scanning of mail-in ballots to begin four days before Election Day.
Access is not limited to in-person personnel either. In a “Week in Brief” newsletter sent out by Colorado Secretary of State’s office on June 24, 2022, the posted a “Security Best Practices Reminder” that stated, “A guide on how to check Wi-Fi is disabled on components of the Dominion Democracy Suite System is attached to this newsletter.”
It’s not just Colorado. During the 2020 Senate run-off elections in Georgia’s Coffee County, their Dominion tabulator was having significant difficulty processing ballots without jamming several times per batch. According to a sworn-affidavit from Cathy Latham, the then-Rural County Chair of the Republican Party, the Dominion representative present was given an ultimatum by Eric Chaney, the County Board of Elections (BOE) Chairman, to fix the machines in thirty minutes or the media would be alerted.
According to the affidavit, the Dominion rep called his boss, Scott Tucker, and went outside in private to talk with him. When the rep returned, he told them to wipe the machine lens again, and that it would work. He never physically touched the machine but all of the sudden it was functioning perfectly.
The BOE Chairman Chaney asked “Did we all just witness what I think we witnessed?” to which Latham responded, “Is there anyway that something was downloaded to that scanner from his phone or from the Internet? There is no way that wiping the machine with a cloth stopped QR Code Failure readings.” Hampton agreed. So did the Democrat Party Rep, Ernestine Thomas-Clark who, again, said “This isn’t right.”
During the 2020 Presidential Election, Schroeder was the county clerk who was responsible for running the election. He was also one of two clerks in Colorado who made a forensic image of the Dominion software before the “Trusted Build.” The other clerk was Mesa County’s Tina Peters, who will be in court next week for felony charges related to her decision to image the machine ahead of the “Trusted Build.”
For the full interview with Dallas Schroeder, check out the podcast below or check it out on the Rumble app for ad-free viewing.