A Dominion Voting Systems whistleblower who says she witnessed irregularities at the TCF Center in Detroit on Election Day is accusing Dominion’s CEO of lying during the recent Michigan Senate hearing.
CEO John Poulos answered questions about Dominion’s machines and software for several hours.
Melissa Carone was a contractor who worked for the company during the election. She told NTD, part of the Epoch Media Group, that Poulos misled legislators or outright lied.
Poulos told the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee on Dec. 15 there were three workers, two employees and a contractor, at the TCF Center. Carone alleged there were actually five there.
Poulos told legislators that the vote tabulator units sit atop a ballot box that is sealed during ballot counting. Carone said that may be the case elsewhere, but at the TCF Center the ballot boxes were not attached to the machines.
Poulos told the committee that Dominion works with all political parties and uses a “nonpartisan approach.” Carone said her manager at the TCF Center, who co-owns the company, said numerous times that people at the center who had American flags on their shirts or masks were Trump supporters, and he made derogatory remarks about Republicans and Trump supporters.
“If one of their owners is making comments like that and statements like that to a worker, then obviously they’re not bipartisan,” Carone told NTD.
Poulos told legislators that most Dominion machines cannot connect to the Internet. Carone said, citing a recording she made during a training, that every tabulator in the TCF Center had a modem and was connected to the Internet.
“What they would do is they would go off the Internet and then reconnect, go off and reconnect,” she said.
President and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems John Poulos testifies during a hearing in Washington on Jan. 9, 2020. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“There were numerous inconsistencies with his story,” Carone said. She noted that some legislators appeared to struggle to follow some of what Poulos said, accusing him of speaking “in a way that a lot of people wouldn’t understand.”
“They didn’t even really understand what he was saying. And he did this in order to remain credible to the public, or try to remain credible,” she added.
Sent a list of Carone’s allegations, a Dominion spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email that “Dominion stands behind Mr. Poulos’s testimony under oath before the Michigan State Senate, and we welcome those who differ to take the same steps to ensure truth, trust, and accountability in their own public statements.”
The representative also pointed to a lengthy statement the company has posted on its website and has continued updating, challenging allegations against it.
Carone’s accusations came after Linda Lee Tarver, president of the Republican Women’s Federation of Michigan and former election integrity liaison in the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office, told NTD that Poulos’s testimony left more questions unanswered than it clarified.
“My overall impression of the hearing is that the CEO of Dominion had to come and defend his product. They have many states, billions of dollars invested. And yet, the reality is that we did not learn much more than the accusation of human error, when there is evidence that it is Dominion error,” she said.
Workers with the Detroit Department of Elections sort through absentee ballots at the Central Counting Board in the TCF Center in Detroit, Mich., on Nov. 2, 2020. (Elaine Cromie/Getty Images)
Poulos faced questions about Antrim County, where a forensics audit concluded Dominion’s voting system “is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
Officials had blamed a vote flip in the county, which initially reported a win for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden but later affirmed that President Donald Trump won, on human error.
Russell Ramsland, who authored the report, said during an appearance on Newsmax on Friday that Poulos was wrong when he alleged there are “no switched or deleted votes involving Dominion machines.”
“The CEO needs to read chapter 11.0 in his own user’s manual, because it describes the algorithm, it describes the various options for using the algorithm, and it says it does both as fractions—exactly what we reported and exactly what we saw in the log. So he needs to, I guess, go find his own product and understand how it really works, because he’s dead wrong,” Ramsland said.
After the audit report was published, legislators in other states began pursuing audits.
Arizona lawmakers subpoenaed an audit of Dominion machines in Maricopa County, but officials on Friday voted not to comply with the subpoena.
Legislators in Michigan subpoenaed Detroit and Livonia for election information, including hard drives and memory devices for adjudication machines that were used during the absentee ballot counting process.
“Regardless of our political affiliations, we should all agree that we must do more to restore the public’s trust in our voting procedures,” state Rep. Triston Cole, a Republican, said. “We can begin that process by conducting a thorough and complete investigation that gets to the bottom of these reports and delivers the answers voters deserve. The Oversight Committee needs full access to accurate information to make sure that happens.”
Tom Ozimek and NTD’s Penny Zhou contributed to this report.
