Several people have asked me in good faith and from their sense of civic duty to comment on this article so I feel compelled, though I have to preface my comments with the simple observation that Colorado Newsline is a Soros-funded propaganda outlet routinely pimping the most retarded agitprop imaginable, and this is no exception. It’s like asking me to respond to the claim that Brawndo has what plants crave. They’re idiots, doing idiot things, acting as an instrument of liars and tyrants. I can see what they are, but I can’t really understand what they are.
There are so many ignorant, stupid, baseless assertions throughout the article, a proper responsive diatribe would be several pages. And it’s worth noting that it isn’t all author Sara Wilson’s fault; she knows fuck-all about elections or election systems and is likely faithfully quoting liars like Fitzpatrick, and Koppes, though Wilson clearly and predictably made no effort or pretense to journalistic integrity. E.g., rather than her masturbatory and compulsory inclusion of imbecilic canards like “election denial” and “election conspiracists,” and “So-called election integrity activists,” she might have actually read the three Mesa Forensic reports and mitigated her own ignorance, or spoken to any of their authors to understand the legitimate basis of the legitimate concerns of citizens.
But it’s late, and there will be more idiocy from these people tomorrow and the next day, so let’s start here:
“Fact Check” – Sara Wilson has no idea if any CO voting systems are connected to the internet, nor to any unauthorized network or device external to the boundary of the certified voting system suites, which is not the same thing as “the Internet,” and which is the actual concern and problem.
In fact, neither do Carly Koppes or Molly Fitzpatrick know, because neither of them know much at all about the voting systems and both lack, like 99.99% of public officials, any actual relevant expertise or knowledge, e.g. cyber/cybersecurity which might aid them. Even the director of the voting system testing lab, Pro V&V, which has tested most of CO’s voting system versions (not CO’s voting systems, themselves, which have never been tested to any significant or useful degree by ANYONE), stated in the Curling v. Raffensperger case in GA that he had no particular cyber security background or expertise. That’s the guy responsible for making sure our voting systems are secure.
That same voting system testing lab used to, once upon a time, employ a sub-contracted tester with actual cybersecurity skills and credentials – a “white hat” hacker who had worked in U.S. Army’s Threat Systems Management Office Red Teams, conducting penetration and security testing on U.S. defense systems before he began working a side job as a contractor conducting security testing for the voting system testing labs.
The voting system testing labs didn’t let that cybersecurity tester do the kind of necessary testing he was accustomed to undertaking to assess the vulnerability of U.S. defense systems, which face the same exquisite advanced persistent threat faced by U.S. election and voting systems, but even in the straitjacket of highly-circumscribed and wrote testing, he was able to penetrate the access defenses of every single voting system he tested, and found them all, to greater or lesser degree, non-compliant with even the antiquated, obsolete security standards expressed in the various voluntary voting system guidelines.
That security tester’s name is Clay Parikh, and despite the extraordinarily ignorant and stupid claims of Koppes and Fitzpatrick, Clay Parikh believes our voting systems are highly vulnerable to compromise and exploitation. So does Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Texas A&M, Dr. Walter Daugherity. So does cybersecurity forensic examiner and cyber Red Team leader Ben Cotton. So does Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, Andrew Appel. So does Professor of Computer Science at University of Michigan, J. Alex Halderman.
Halderman’s 2021 report, btw, in Curling v. Raffensperger, identified 9 critical vulnerabilities in the Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite ImageCast X (ICX) component, concluding that the vulnerabilities could be used to not only alter election logs and files on the ICX, but to alter the election results in that jurisdiction. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), responsible for securing and protecting the “critical infrastructure” for our elections, didn’t bother to issue their own notice for almost a year after the Halderman report. CISA’s notice included a list of mitigation steps they recommended for the 16 states identified by Halderman as prospectively affected by the vulnerabilities. Colorado was one of those states.
Though warned by citizens, CO took none of the precautionary mitigating steps recommended by CISA. So, so secure. Layers and layers, I tell you.
I could write a book about what Koppes and Fitzpatrick don’t know. E.g., that the BIOS passwords they think protect Windows-based computers in the voting systems can be disabled within seconds of physical access of the type Dominion personnel had (e.g. by the jumpers on the Dell Poweredge R630 motherboard), or by PowerShell scripts executed from hidden partitions on hard drives or removable media, and that the wireless networking cards installed on those voting systems could be enabled, disabled, and used without leaving a trace in system or security logs. Halderman himself demonstrated with a pen in a GA courtroom that he could bypass the security features on the ICX tablets within seconds.
Speaking of vulnerable hardware, it’s great that many CO counties’ voting system hardware has now been replaced with equipment that leaves out the thousands of wireless networking devices previously embedded in them, but why did they ever have wireless networking devices to begin with? Imagine the members of a traveling sports team stopped at airport security because 90% of them have hand grenades in their carry-on luggage, and they tell the TSA agents: “Fact check: we’re totally not going to use these hand grenades.”
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of CO counties’ voting systems in 2020 and 2022 elections had wireless networking cards incorporated in their components – in many counties, like Mesa County which had at least 36 wireless networking devices, the counties’ voting systems had multiple wireless networking cards. The voting system testing lab reports for CO’s voting systems all state that they didn’t even bother to test the telecommunications functionality or security of the voting systems, because they weren’t supposed to be used in CO. Again, if they’re not supposed to be used (and they’re not), then why were they in the voting systems to begin with?
Koppes and Fitzpatrick aren’t even allowed to touch the voting systems, due to the respective counties’ population sizes and CO statute; Wilson, no doubt never asked. Not that it would do Koppes or Fitzpatrick any good, given their shared lack of expertise and profound lack of curiosity or interest in what’s true. Case in point, Wilson’s claim that the “new hardware does not include any wireless networking cards or physical Wi-Fi capabilities,” explicitly citing Fitzpatrick’s Boulder County as the exemplar.
Unfortunately for all three members of this braintrust, a 10-second search of the CO SecState’s current voting system inventory (
coloradosos.gov/pubs/electio…), verified against the Dell Support site, shows that, e.g. a Dell Latitude 3490 laptop used for Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite 5.17 ImageCast Voter Activation (ICVA) (programs the smart cards used in the ICX touchscreen devices) in Fitzpatrick’s Boulder County, Service Tag 9LZPXQ2, was equipped by Dell as requested by Dominion Voting Systems, with part D4V21, an M.2. form factor Dell DW1820 dual-band WiFi/Bluetooth card.
Given that Fitzpatrick purportedly doesn’t even think this card exists, what are the chances that she’s ever done anything even remotely adequate to ensure it isn’t being used (and, to be clear: it is nefarious that the card is present)? Also, never mind that every single one of the Dell laptops used in CO’s voting systems was manufactured and assembled for Dell in contract facilities in the People’s Republic of China, with no oversight whatsoever from any agency of the U.S. Government and no supply-chain security whatsoever.
How many more wireless networking cards (“which totally aren’t being used, we swear, even though they haven’t been tested, we lied about them being there, and we lack the expertise to determine if they’re being used”) are still embedded in CO’s voting systems? We have no idea. The last time I looked up every Dominion ImageCast Central (ICC) scanner/tabulator computer in CO, it took me hours, and I found over 100 of those computers were registered to an entity in Australia and included the dual-band WiFi/Bluetooth networking cards. The CO SecState certified those systems, anyway. Layers and layers and layers.
I’ve left Clerk Davis out, to this point, because she’s new to the gaslighting game, though if she’s stupid enough to claim that there’s a computer anywhere, much less the extraordinarily insecure computers in our voting systems, which “cannot be hacked,” then she’s bound for idiocracy stardom, as well. She’s about 400 yards out in front of her own skis, talking about something she knows nothing about, repeating the propaganda she herself has been fed. Her ClearBallot voting system in Douglas county ALSO has wireless networking capabilities, e.g. the Dell Latitude 5500 laptop, Service Tag GZD9M53, used as part of a ScanStation scanner/tabulator, is equipped with Intel’s AX201 dual-band WiFi/Bluetooth networking card. As in the Dominion systems, Davis’ ClearBallot laptop has never been tested as an article or by exemplar for wireless networking security. Layers and layers and layers.
This could go on and on; I hope you all get the point. The premise that public officials like Koppes and Fitzpatrick are ”trusted sources” regarding election and voting system security would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous to our liberty and Constitutional government, and they deserve all our scorn for gaslighting us.