Dominion Voting Systems’ Ranked Choice Voting algorithm (RCV) was in play in Michigan’s Antrim County elections, according to Russel Ramsland Jr., lead analyst for the Plaintiff in a court-ordered audit of Dominion’s systems.
The suit between a private citizen and Antrim County requested injunctions on the Nov. 3 presidential election result because the tally took “votes cast for President Donald Trump and instead counted them for Presidential Candidate Joe Biden.”
Ramsland told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly Reports that the evidence that the RCV algorithm was in play was ordered redacted by the presiding judge. “The original report had log evidence that we published in the report to show exactly what we did and exactly the findings. Now, those did ultimately get redacted. And so now, the complaint is ‘well, but there’s no real proof’ and Dominion says ‘no, these things can’t be done.’”
State defense lawyers requested the Judge require the redactions to protect Dominion’s proprietary source code from being published in the screenshots, arguing the release of the code could be a security issue.
Kevin Elsheimer, the 13th Circuit Court Judge who presided over the case, sided with the State saying he did not want to allow the publication of potentially proprietary information.
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Instead of counting individual votes, the RCV algorithm allows “the user to assign a weighted numerical value to candidates and change the overall result,” leading to the winner of an election being decided on “a basis of points, not votes,” according to Section J Error Rates in the audit published by Ramsland Jr.’s firm, Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG).
Figure 11.3 of the audit confirms this functionality is present in Dominion’s software with a screenshot of the DVS user manual showing a “RCV Profile Screen.”
“Choice voting results are evaluated on a district per district basis and each district has a set number of points (100). Elimination and declaration of winners is done on a basis of points, not votes.”
The screenshot also shows option boxes with titles such as “Exclude Unresolved Write-ins,” “Declare Winner by Threshold,” “Skip Overvoted Rankings,” and “Assign Skipped Rankings to the set of Exhausted Ballots.”
ASOG’s audit found that Antrim County’s “Dominion software configuration logs in the Divert Options, shows that all write-in ballots were flagged to be diverted automatically for adjudication.”
Adjudication is a process where ballots, rather than being counted based on how they were filled out by the voter, are sent to a poll worker or election official to manually process. This then puts the burden on the adjudicator to faithfully assign the votes as the ballot is filled out.
Videos by concerned election workers have shown this function can allow a worker to directly fill out and count a completely blank ballot, alter an existing ballot, or simply batch adjudicate an entire set of votes in favor of one candidate or the other with a few clicks.
The audit appears to show that all but two of the override options in the DVS manual were enabled in Antrim County’s setup. “In the logs all but two of the Override Options were enabled on these machines, thus allowing any operator to change those votes. [Image 9]:”
Unfortunately, this image is part of the court ordered redactions and is blacked out in the version released to the public.
The audit does show verifiable and hard to explain irregularities took place in Antrim County. One such case is a vote for School Board Member for Central Lake Schools.
The mystery of write-in counts
On election night, candidate Melanie Eckhardt lost to Keith Shafer 519 to 525. An additional column for “Write-in” is noted on the paper roll with a count of 24 for a total of 1068 votes.
According to ASOG’s audit, the clerk of Central Lake Township, Judith Kosloski, was asked by an employee of the County Clerk’s Office to perform a recount for unspecified reasons.
“We were then told by Ms. Kosloski that on November 5, 2020, Ms. Kosloski was notified by Connie Wing of the County Clerk’s Office and asked to bring the tabulator and ballots to the County Clerk’s office for re-tabulation. They ran the ballots and printed ‘Roll 2.’”
Kosloski “noticed a difference in the votes and brought it up to the clerk.” However, her concerns were ignored, “canvasing still occurred, and her objections were not addressed.”
The November 6 paper roll shows a completely different story from the tabulation on election night, adding 742 votes to the count. Eckhardt defeated Shafer by a count of 852 to 846 and there were now 112 “write-in” votes.
While this may or may not be evidence of both the RCV algorithm’s function and automatic adjudication of write-in ballots being applied, it is certainly consistent with the functions shown in the DVS manual and raises the question of how ~70 percent of the paper ballots could have missed being counted by the DVS systems and the poll workers on election night, as well as where 88 extra write-in ballots were discovered.
Redaction Makes Claim Unverifiable
However, the remaining redacted portions of the audit make unverifiable claims.
The audit describes the final error found in the Election Management System logs: “The last error for Central Lake Township, Precinct 1 occurred on 11/21/2020 at 14:35:11 System.Xml.XmlException System.Xml.XmlException: The ‘ ‘ character, hexadecimal value 0x20, cannot be included in a name.”
Hexadecimal value 0x20 is a “space” and the error thrown appears to be a generic XML parsing error that results from having white spaces erroneously present in element names, which is not allowed in XML syntax.
Yet Ramsland claims: “Bottom line is that this is a calibration that rejects the vote (see picture below). [Image 12]:,” which is a blacked-out image.
The final redacted portion of the audit shows a statement of “direct proof of an attempt to tamper with evidence.”
Text before another redacted image claims: “Notably 42 minutes earlier on Nov 21 2020 at 13:53:09 a user attempted to zero out election results,” and shows an error log string “Id:3168 EmsLogger — There is no permission to {0} — Project: User: Thread: 189.”
In the Democracy Suite EMS Functionality Description manual for the DVS systems, there are multiple errors in the manual that begins with “There is no permission to,” yet none have the title “There is no permission to {0}.”
Twitter user TRAPEZOID OF DISCOVERY points out in a thread he posted on December 14 the likely answer is that this {0} is simply an undefined variable: “Quick comp sci recap: programming languages provide you with the ability to substitute values into strings. This allows you to essential [sic] write a template, like “There is no permission to {0},” where {0} will get dynamically replaced with the actual error message.”
“That’s why there are multiple errors in the manual that start with ‘There is no permission.’ Instead of asking a programmer to write out every message individually, they can write the template, and the rest of the message is swapped in depending on the specifics of the error.”
Ramsland Jr. continued in his Newsmax interview: “Dominion’s argument is no longer with us. Dominion’s argument is with their own user’s manual and their own logs, because the logs — had they been able to be published — show very clearly that the RCV [ranked-choice voting] algorithm was enacted.”
He claimed: “It shows very clearly that the error messages were massive,” and “It was very clearly [sic] that races were flipped.”
Ramsland’s Credentials Questioned
It should be pointed out that Ramsland Jr., whose listed credentials in the audit are an MBA from Harvard and a political sciences degree from Duke, does not have a verifiable background in computer sciences. His LinkedIn profile shows he obtained his degrees in the 1970s and does not confirm the work experience he claims in the audit with NASA and MIT, let alone any work experience.
Little is also known about ASOG. The firm’s webpage is a spartan template that has not been updated since June, does not list team members, and does not show any contact information besides a Dallas, Texas, phone number.
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