Report Concludes Manipulation of Database Occurred in 2020 Election in Colorado County
A report prepared for the legal team representing Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters stated researchers uncovered evidence of the manipulation of 2020 general election data.
The county used election management software from Dominion Voting Systems.
The manipulation means all the initial 25,913 initial ballots cast during early voting “cannot be validated,” according to the report’s authors, cyber expert Jeffrey O’Donnell with Ordros Analytics and Walter Daugherity, a lecturer who has taught at Texas A&M University’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering for over 30 years.
“There was an unauthorized creation of new election databases during early voting in the 2020 General Election on October 21, 2020, followed by the digital reloading of 20,346 ballot records into the new election databases, making the original voter intent recorded from the ballots unknown,” the report said.
“In addition, 5,567 ballots in 58 batches did not have their digital records copied to the new database, although the votes from the ballots in those batches were recorded in the Main election database.”
The computer experts determined the manipulation could not have been inadvertent and was not done by county election officials.
“There is no function or feature on the [Election Management System] server that could be executed inadvertently or deliberately by a local election official that would cause this combination of events to occur, especially within the time frame that these events occurred,” the report stated.
“Given the complex sequence of data manipulations and deletions necessary to produce the digital evidence described in this report, this combination of events could not have been the result of either deliberate or inadvertent actions by those officials.”
New report out of Mesa County, Colorado finds definitive electronic manipulation in the 2020 Presidential Election
25,913 ballots cannot be validated, unauthorized election databases created contrary to lawhttps://t.co/2R6G9dwe9x pic.twitter.com/sQW3a7QmEY
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 23, 2022
The researchers further stated a computer update loaded into the EMS overrode evidence of database manipulation.
“Dominion’s installation of the Trusted Build update on the EMS in May of 2021, as ordered by the Colorado Secretary of State, destroyed all data on the EMS hard drive, including the batch and ballot records that evidenced the creation of new databases and reprocessing of ballot records,” the report said.
The authors determined a “critical security failure” occurred.
“The manipulation would not be identifiable to an election official using the voting systems, nor to an observer or judge overseeing the election conduct, much less to citizens with no access to the voting systems; without both cyber and database management system expertise, and unfettered access to database records and computer log files,” according to the report.
Researchers found databases used at the end of the election did not contain all the files that were there at the beginning.
“This leads to the possible conclusion that some batches and ballots were excluded from the new databases so as to inhibit the possibility of their being audited or examined,” the report said.
The document stated, “Unauthorized creation of new Tabulation and Adjudication databases occurred during the counting of the November 2020 General Election, along with the selective copying of batch and ballot records from the original databases to the new ones.
“This manipulation places all 25,913 initial ballots counted into a state where they cannot be validated — some because it is possible that their vote information was changed, and unverifiable that it was not, and the rest because their ‘chain of evidence’ has been intentionally obfuscated.”
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O’Donnell and Daugherity wrote, “Because the unauthorized methods used to alter batch and ballot-level information described above are available within the DVS EMS server, this system cannot be considered reliable for use in any election.”
Earlier this month a grand jury indicted Peters, who is a Republican candidate for Colorado secretary of state, on 10 charges related to copying and releasing sensitive information from Mesa County’s election management system, the Colorado Sun reported.
In November, Peters explained to KCNC-TV why she made copies of the voting system information.
“I was concerned that they were going to delete some important election files, and so I did a backup,” she said.
In a March 9 news release, Peters noted that she “facilitated the imaging of a Dominion voting machine both before and after suspicious software upgrades that were authorized by [Democratic Colorado Secretary of State Jena] Griswold.”
Her “efforts exposed tens of thousands of suspicious deletions of voter records by Griswold’s vendor agents. Dominion voting machine technicians have now confessed under oath that their software changes called ‘trusted builds’ were designed to delete files,” the release continued.
Peters previously released two reports she commissioned, regarding Mesa County’s EMS in September 2021 and February 2022.
The clerk accused Mesa County District Attorney Daniel Rubenstein and Griswold of targeting her for political reasons.
“Using a grand jury to formalize politically-motivated accusations against candidates is tactic long employed by the Democrat Party,” she said in her statement.
“Using legal muscle to indict political opponents during an election isn’t new strategy, but it’s easier to execute when you have a district attorney who despises President [Donald] Trump and any constitutional conservative like myself who continues to demand all election evidence be made available to the public,” Peters added.
“But a grand jury is one of the last cards the Democrats have to play here. They hope to influence voters enough with indictments and arrests and media drama during the primaries, to elect a weaker general election opponent for Secretary of State Jena Griswold.”
Rubenstein told KCNC-TV the grand jury was “randomly selected by the same pool that elected Tina Peters.”
Griswold accused Peters of releasing passwords to the servers to the public and that “all the servers and hard drives were copied.”
Patriot Project has reached out to the Colorado secretary of state’s office regarding the report’s findings concerning database manipulation.
