Crucial security and adjudication logs are missing from Dominion Voting Systems machines from Michigan’s Antrim County, according to a forensics report (pdf) released on Dec. 14 in compliance with a court order.
“Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. 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,” the report, authored by Russell Ramsland, states.
“We must conclude that the 2020 election cycle records have been manually removed.”
The absence of the adjudication logs is particularly alarming because the forensic exam found that the voting machines rejected an extraordinary number of ballots for adjudication, a manual process in which election workers determine the ultimate outcome for each ballot.
“The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots,” Ramsland said. “We observed an error rate of 68.05 percent. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.”
“These errors resulted in overall tabulation errors or ballots being sent to adjudication. This high error rates proves the Dominion Voting System is flawed and does not meet state or federal election laws,” he added. “Because the intentional high error rate generates large numbers of ballots to be adjudicated by election personnel, we must deduce that bulk adjudication occurred. However, because files and adjudication logs are missing, we have not yet determined where the bulk adjudication occurred or who was responsible for it. Our research continues.”
Ramsland manages the Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), which includes former Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and Central Intelligence Agency officials. The group focuses on cybersecurity and open-source network penetration testing.
ASOG examined Dominion products in Antrim County earlier this month as part of an ongoing case. The team inspected and performed forensic duplication on the county’s election management server, which was running Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5.3-002, compact flash cards used by local precincts in their Dominion ImageCast system, USB memory sticks used by Dominion Voter Assist Terminals, and USB memory sticks used for the poll book.
In addition to missing adjudication logs, the examination found that the systems are also missing security logs prior to 11 p.m. on Nov. 4.
“This means that all security logs for the day after the election, on Election Day, and prior to Election Day are gone. Security logs are very important to an audit trail, forensics, and for detecting advanced persistent threats and outside attacks, especially on systems with outdated system files,” Ramsland said.
“These logs would contain domain controls, authentication failures, error codes, times users logged on and off, network connections to file servers between file accesses, internet connections, times, and data transfers,” he added. “Other server logs before November 4, 2020 are present; therefore, there is no reasonable explanation for the security logs to be missing.”
13th Circuit Judge Kevin Elsenheimer approved the forensic examination in Bailey v. Antrim County, which alleges the infamous vote flip county officials reported last month may have not been the result of human error, as officials had alleged.
Elsenheimer earlier Monday agreed to let the report on the examination be published.
The office of Michigan’s Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Dominion, and a spokesman for Antrim County didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Erik Grill, an assistant attorney general, told the judge on Monday morning that Ramsland’s preliminary report was “inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading.” Haider Kazim, an attorney for the county, said it contained several errors the county believes were based on “faulty assumptions and incorrect assumptions.”
Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.