The firm that was hired to conduct an audit of Dominion Voting Systems technology for its use in the 2020 elections had previous ties with the company. The firm, Pro V&V, was hired by Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who failed to disclose this connection in his Nov. 17 statement announcing the results of the audit. In his statement, Raffensperger noted that Pro V&V had found no evidence of tampering with the machines.
He also praised Pro V&V by mentioning its various accreditations. “Pro V&V, based in Huntsville, Alabama is a U.S. Election Assistance Commission-certified Voting System Test Laboratory (VSTL), meaning the lab is ‘qualified to test voting systems to Federal standards.’ VSTL certification is provided for under the Help America Votes Act of 2002. Pro V&V’s accreditation by the USEAC was also recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),” he said in the statement.
Dominion voting system bought for US$107 million in 2019
However, he failed to mention that Pro V&V basically seems to be a small company that runs out of a single office suite. The firm’s website has a link that shows its accreditation from the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The accreditation certificate shows that it is only effective through Feb. 24, 2017. It is not known whether the firm has renewed its accreditation or not. Except for one instance, Pro V&V has been the only testing lab for Dominion Voting Systems since the company introduced its Democracy Suite version 5.0 in February 2017.
The state of Georgia bought an election system from Dominion for US$107 million in 2019. Two Pro V&V employees, Wendy Williams, and Michael Walker approved Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite 5.5-A’s testing report for Georgia in November last year. These are the same people who also tested Dominion’s modified Democracy Suite 5.5-C in April and June this year. Williams also played a key role when Dominion faced some last-minute certification issues.
In August this year, electronic voting security expert Harry Hursti gave a sworn declaration in which he admitted seeing problems in Georgia’s voting systems during elections in June and August. He noted that the scanner and tabulation software settings that were being used to decide which votes to count on hand-marked paper ballots likely resulted in some of the votes left out from being counted.
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Dominion also used technical conclusions from Pro V&V in a pre-election Georgia lawsuit that had questioned the reliability of the company’s system. According to court documents, an expert defined Pro V&V’s testing as “cursory testing” and “superficial.” During a Georgia Senate Government Oversight Committee meeting on election fraud on Dec. 3, Ryan Germany, counsel for Georgia’s secretary of state’s office, stated that an audit of the Dominion system by Pro V&V showed no issues with the system. However, Germany also failed to disclose Pro V&V’s history with Dominion.
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