Report Claims Dominion Ballot Error Rate Was At Least 85,000 Times FEC Limit; Officials Dispute Findings
UPDATE, Dec. 23, 2020: After Lead Stories published a fact check regarding the claims in Ramsland’s report, The Western Journal changed the headline of this article from “Dominion Audit: Ballot Error Rate Was At Least 85,000 Times Higher Than FEC Allows” to its current version. Lead Stories took issue with several aspects of the report and its author. Among them:
“The expert making the claims has not been put under oath nor cross-examined, provides no witnesses and officials say he does not have access to the data needed to make the calculations he presents.” The Western Journal reached out to Ramsland about this objection, who said that he had access to the data he needed to perform the audit, but not to the ballots themselves. He was also concerned about violating the court order that released his report, because that order, he said, requires some information to be redacted from the report prior to its public release.
“Michigan’s Director of Elections declared in a sworn court filing that Trump partisan Russell James Ramsland, Jr.’s claims describe software features not in use in Michigan and said Michigan’s audit on December 17, 2020 will prove the claims false.”
“The spokesman for Michigan’s secretary of state said Ramsland’s Allied Security Operations Group report includes fabricated statistics that would require access to ballots, which Ramsland does not have.”
“Under oath, on December 15, 2020, the founder and CEO of the company that makes Michigan’s balloting and tabulation software directly refuted the claims about fraud and vote-switching, saying Dominion Voting Systems software only operates with paper ballot systems, so that tallies can be audited and as proof of Ramsland’s lack of expertise, that the system does not offer the fractional vote recording Ramsland claims is proof of fraudulent intent.”
“Ramsland, operating as Allied Security Operations Group, made significant factual errors in a similar ‘report’ used by Trump lawyers in an earlier election fraud suit tossed out by a Michigan judge. In that Detroit case, ASOG listed numerous voting districts with perfect 100% voter turnout, a rarity. But, that report on Michigan voting listed dozens of Minnesota precincts. Michigan circuit judge Timothy M. Kenny said, in throwing out the case, that it was ‘rife with speculation and guesswork.'”
Finally, Ramsland has claimed to worked with NASA and MIT and to hold degrees from Duke University and Harvard. Lead Stories was unable to verify any of those claims, but Ramsland is listed in congressional testimony as an alumnus of both Duke and Harvard.
The Western Journal has left the body of our article largely unchanged, but is including this information from the Lead Stories fact check to provide additional context regarding the Allied Security Operations Group report.
A Michigan judge ordered the release Monday of an independent forensic audit report of the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Antrim County, which flipped from a win for Democrat Joe Biden to President Donald Trump after a glitch was discovered and corrected.
The audit, which was led by Russell Ramsland of the Dallas-based Allied Security Operations Group, revealed over a 68 percent ballot error rate — at least 85,000 times higher than the Federal Election Commission guidelines allow.
Additionally, Ramsland’s team reported the “extremely suspicious” absence of logs regarding the abnormally high number of digitally adjudicated ballots.
Antrim County in northern Michigan made headlines last month after the discovery of an Election Day computer “glitch” that had falsely switched the county from a win for Trump to a Biden victory.
The amended results showed the president winning the county with 9,748 votes to Biden’s 5,960.
Ramsland’s report said that of the 15,676 individual voting events recorded on the Dominion Voting Systems in Antrim County, 10,667 ballots — 68.05 percent — were errors.
The allowable election error rate established by the FEC guidelines is 1 in 500,000 ballots, but Ramsland’s team used 1 in 125,000 or 0.0008 percent, making the requirement less strict to account for vagueness in the law, Ramsland said in a text to The Western Journal.
In other words, what occurred in Antrim County was at least 85,000 times higher than what is allowable.
Ramsland’s team also said it found that a “staggering number” of votes were digitally adjudicated in 2020.
The report explains that Dominion software classifies ballots in two categories: normal and adjudicated.
Ballots sent to adjudication can be altered by administrators, as was demonstrated by an election worker in Georgia last week.
1/ Wondering how Dominion software might create the opportunity for fraud! Coffee Co., Ga Board of Elections shows how. Watch and learn.
Part 1https://t.co/G6TYUuoBKW
— Jenny Beth Martin (@jennybethm) December 10, 2020
“A staggering number of votes required adjudication,” the report said. “This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles still stored on the server. This is caused by intentional errors in the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency and no audit trail.”
“Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all the adjudication logs log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing,” Ramsland’s team said. “The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes. The lack of records prevents any form of audit accountability, and their conspicuous absence is extremely suspicious since the files exist for previous years using the same software.
“Removal of these files violates state law and prevents a meaningful audit, even if the [secretary of state] wanted to conduct an audit. We must conclude that the 2020 election cycle records have been manually removed.”
The audit also found Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s statement on Nov. 6 that “the correct results [in Antrim] always were and continue to be reflected on the tabulator totals tape” to be false.
Sixty-four Michigan counties use Dominion Voting Systems, according to WLNS-TV in Lansing.
Attorneys for the state of Michigan sought to prevent the Ramsland audit from being released, the Detroit Free Press reported Monday.
Assistant Attorney General Erik Grill called it “inaccurate, incomplete and misleading.”
However, Judge Kevin Elsenheimer of the 13th Circuit Court in Michigan approved the release with some references to software coding redacted.
Current results in the state show Biden leading Trump by approximately 154,000 votes.
In an interview in the spring, Ramsland told The Western Journal those seeking to swing a U.S. presidential election electronically would just have to focus on a few key swing states.
“So if you want to change the presidency of this country, all you really have to do is put your whole team on making sure that your guy wins precinct by precinct in at least a semi-believable number in five states and probably only the big metropolitan areas of five states,” he said.
The Arizona Republican Party has filed suit to gain access to review the digitally adjudicated and duplicated ballots in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix and also uses Dominion Voting Systems.
Ignoring what the #FakeNews says, we WON our case: 1-1. “Discovery” was granted; irregularities were uncovered (no one believed it could be done). Appealing to the Supreme Court of the United States for more time, which is considered to be very precious. Stay tuned!
— Arizona Republican Party (@AZGOP) December 12, 2020
An initial review of 100 random ballots allowed by a judge found a 3 percent variance in favor of Biden.
Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward said Monday that the case is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court after being rejected by the Arizona Supreme Court.
In today’s update, Chairwoman Kelli Ward exposes the media malpractice of so-called journalists who are parroting the talking points of shady Democrat operative Marc Elias. pic.twitter.com/1Jt1elnYKB
— Arizona Republican Party (@AZGOP) December 14, 2020
Biden’s current lead in the Grand Canyon State is 10,457 votes.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the first name of Russell Ramsland.
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