John Poulos, the founder, president, and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems responded to allegations of fraud by the Trump campaign in this article in the Wall Street Journal. Various spokespeople for the Trump campaign have asserted that the Dominion voting machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden, that the machines were designed by someone in the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela, that Dominion was tied to a worldwide Communist plot to oust Trump, and that the Dominion machines were hooked up to the Internet to facilitate counting votes to favor Biden.
He wrote:
Accurate, transparent and accessible elections—this is the objective that motivated me to create Dominion Voting Systems 18 years ago in Canada. From the start, the company was focused on improving paper-based voting, and it continues to pursue vote-tabulation solutions that enhance accuracy and transparency through audits and reviews, as well as by allowing voters to create, verify and privately cast a marked paper ballot. But if you’ve heard about our role in the U.S. election on Twitter,it’s likely you’ve heard something different.
The allegations against Dominion are bizarre, but I’ll set the record straight. Dominion is an American company, now headquartered in Denver. Dominion is not and has never been a front for communists. It has no ties to Hugo Chávez, the late dictator of Venezuela. It has never been involved in Venezuelan elections. None of Dominion’s systems use the Smartmatic software that has come under attack, as any state certification lab could verify.
There is no secret “vote flipping” algorithm. Third-party test labs, chosen by the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and accredited by a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, perform complete source-code reviews on every federally certified tabulation system. States replicate this process for their own certifications. Postelection canvassing and auditing also exist to provide additional assurance of the vote totals’ accuracy.
The part of the election process on which Dominion focuses is highly regulated and certified. The company doesn’t work in noncertified areas such as voter-registration systems, poll books or signature-verification software, and it doesn’t provide vote-by-mail printing. Dominion voting machines do one thing: accurately tabulate votes from county-verified voters using a durable paper ballot controlled and secured by local elections officials.
Some of the main counties where results have been contested, like Philadelphia and Allegheny (Pittsburgh), don’t even use Dominion voting systems. In fact, across the 14 Pennsylvania counties that use Dominion systems, President Trump received 52.2% of the vote.
Despite the company’s limited role in elections, it has been the target of a stream of outrageous statements since Election Day—increasingly reckless and defamatory allegations that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Dominion is never able to affect the outcome of an election. The entire certification process makes sure of that. Regardless, the company’s focus has always been to be nonpartisan and respectful of all views. Dominion’s customers are election officials from both parties in the 28 states where it operates.
Unlike its critics, Dominion has had to attest to every part of its business ownership and operations to governmental agencies and in courts—under oath and penalty of perjury. We believe it is important to welcome the highest degree of scrutiny and transparency in the election process. This builds trust and leads to more resilient and robust elections. The widespread disinformation campaign America currently faces, however, does the opposite. Baseless and ludicrous smears are presented without evidence and amplified across social media.
These attacks undermine the tens of thousands of state and local officials who run our elections. When it comes to counting ballots, officials have established a distributed, multilayered system with checks and balances, in which robust safeguards ensure that no one needs to trust blindly any person, company or technology. Here are some of the safeguards in place in Georgia, where the Trump campaign has contested the result:
• Tabulation machines are tested publicly, before bipartisan witnesses, before and right after Election Day.
• On Election Day, poll workers—not Dominion systems—verify voters’ identities, including a signature check.
• Voters mark a paper ballot to vote. Absentee voters use pens, while in-person voters use “ballot marking devices,” which display a digital ballot for voters to make a selection and then print a paper record. In both cases, voters verify the marked paper ballot before casting it in a secure ballot box through an air-gapped scanning tabulator.
• After polls close, results are tallied by local officials. Paper ballots are safeguarded by thousands of poll workers distributed across 2,656 precincts.
• The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office certified election results after hand-auditing five million ballots, which showed that the paper-ballot voting system counted and reported results accurately. The small change to the final tally was due entirely to the addition of ballots that had been uncounted due to human process errors.
• The state also enlisted Pro V&V, a certified third-party testing laboratory, to audit a random sample of Dominion machines. No tampering was found.
The wild allegations of recent weeks have fueled the harassment of election officials and Dominion employees across the country—including stalking and death threats. The lies and smears have no basis in fact, but they do real damage to our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral process. The false allegations should be retracted immediately.
Citizens should know that America’s rigorous, layered and transparent electoral process—in which Dominion is proud to participate—ensures its elections are secure, accurate and credible.
Mr. Poulos is president and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
It is goof to see that this statement was published in the Wall Street Journal. I hope John Poulos’ statement does not result in more death threats to the really crazy people who are continuing to conjure conspiracy theories, and spew lies about election frauds. January 20 cannot come soon enough. Every Republican whose silence has enabled Trump’s attempt’s to overthrown the election is not worthy of our trust on any matter.
Not goof, but good.
Hate not being able to correct on WP once posted!
And: “I hope John Poulos’ statement does not result in more death threats FROM the really crazy people who are continuing to conjure conspiracy theories”
A lot of words there, but the key issue is independent verification, which the Dominion system was apparently subjected to.
“Third-party test labs, chosen by the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and accredited by a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, perform complete source-code reviews on every federally certified tabulation system. ”
“The state also enlisted Pro V&V, a certified third-party testing laboratory, to audit a random sample of Dominion machines. No tampering was found.”
I was teaching about the Maji Maji Rebellion i German East Africa in 1905 today (among other things). In the midst of an imposition of forced labor on a large population, a man had a vision that washing ceremoniously in water (Maji) would make the population impervious to European bullets. Rebellion followed with catastrophe.
I raised a question to my classes: What makes people believe outlandish things are true? One student opined that the desperate situation led the people to accept the story. Perhaps he is right. Still, what of the vast hoard that believes that there was fraud in the past election? Great Depression Germany saw a nation in economic collapse, so it is easy to see how they accepted Hitler’s warning of this or that Jewish conspiracy, Bolshevik takeover, or whatever else crossed his twisted mind. But The US is n pretty good shape. It is hard to believe that the caravan of Trump pickup trucks that paraded through the parking lot of the strip mall near my home were piloted by men of desperate economic circumstances.
What lies at the base of the belief i these wild conspiracies?
Interesting questions: why do people believe charlatans? Why do they believe conspiracy theories? Why do most of Trump’s voters think the election was fraudulent? Usually, frauds are perpetrated by those in power to remain in power. Why do they not believe conservative Republican governors like Kemp and Ducey? Why do they not believe conservative judges, even those Trump appointed?
Jane Fonda was fooled by the North Vietnamese. ☹️
Jane Fonda, Willie Brown, Jerry Brown, Harvey Milk and Diane Finestein were all fooled by Jim Jones. And some California politician gave Jim Jones orphans. All those above named people praised Jones, like he some sort of messiah. ☹️
“What lies at the base. . . ?”
I contend it is that 75% or so of the people in this country are brought up HAVING to believe the faith-beliefs of their parents. From day one they are conditioned to believe insanities on faith alone beliefs that defy rationo-logical thinking. Not many escape the acceptance of mythical, chimerical, fantastical faith beliefs as being not only okay but the sole source of truth.
Most cannot break out of that mode of thinking and it shows in 60 million or whatever who voted for Trump this past election.
I’m sure Atheists and Agnostics voted for Trump too, as faith believers voted for Biden too. 🙂
Thanks for these responses. I feel that it has to do with some of the things you say. I concur with Duane that there are some whose religious and philosophical training is basically authoritarian. This I have noticed mostly on the right side of the political spectrum. Choosing authority is an important part of our lives. Historians are taught not to accept authority claimed without a research trail in footnotes, so the wide-eyed acceptance of people like Glenn Beck and his like on the right makes me uncomfortable.
Eddie makes a good point. Credulity is certainly not a trait seen totally on the right or in religious families.
I think the answer to Diane’s questions about why some do not accept the statements of conservative republican leaders in politics and on courts goes to the reason we have seen this country move so inexorably to the right in the last 40 years. Nothing on the right is allowable in the form of a question. You cannot question the authority of trump because he protects the flag and unborn babies. Erzatz patriotism and easy answers to difficult problems have bred a form of anti-intellectualism that infects 20% of the population.
To me, the key issue is that votes have paper receipts, which can be compared to the vote count.
One of the big problems in 2016 was that there were touch screen machines where there was no receipt. In other words, once a person voted, there was no paper record of their vote to check. I do think if that had been the case this year, it would be much harder to debunk Trump conspiracy theories.
I don’t particularly trust Dominion, but I do trust a system that means that paper ballot receipts can be compared to the votes that are registered on the machine.
The Trump campaign doesn’t question the Dominion votes when the Republicans won based on votes on Dominion machines, only when Democrats won.
That’s a good point.
But in this case, they are talking about vote tabulation which occurs after the vote is recorded (either manually with a paper ballot or through an electronic machine, which should always have a paper receipt)
There have been issues with vote tabulation machines used in the past which allowed for manipulation of results.
The way that you ensure that the machines don’t have any back doors to allow secret manipulation by anyone is to have the source code subjected to inspection by independent experts.
That was apparently done in this case.
This talks about the problems (as of 2016) with a different vote tabulation system (GEMS)
https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/2016/11/04/how-to-protect-against-election-day-hacking
Though it appears that the Trump claims which apply to an entirely different system are bogus, the potential issues are very real and must be guarded against through independent verification.
It is somewhat reassuring to read that the Dominion system underwent such verification, although I would have to know the details of what was done before I would bet the farm on it.
SomeDAM Poet,
Yes, that inspection is a very important safeguard.
But I think that it is also important to be able to compare the tabulation with results done by hand counting the receipts.
I thought I read somewhere that there is “auditing” done post-election where randomly it is checked that machine vote tabulation matches a hand count. If not, I would absolutely support that.
I would have liked that to be have been done in 2016, but I recall there weren’t even paper ballots to check!
Without a doubt, there should always be a paper trail back to the individual votes.
While they have made things easier, the electronic systems have made voting less secure than the old fashioned methods of hand counting and tabulation of votes cast with paper ballots.
fact vs fiction. When a person or now a significant proportion of a country cannot tell the difference or won’t see the difference, the person or country is bound to fall apart.
I HOPE Dominion takes Trump and his rabid, loyalist mouthpieces to court and charge them for libel and/or slander.
Boy you should find Christ, it’s your kind of people that make this country a bad place. Your a sorry soul
That’s a very nasty comment. Lloyd’s religion is his business, not yours. I am Jewish, so I don’t expect to find Christ except as an honored rabbi in my religion.
Can we wait to see what Sydney Powell has learned please? Of course, Dominion will always plead innocence. Why has Texas refused to use those machines several times now?. There are factual inconsistencies all over the country and tec geniuses showing how the machines can be corrupted.. You have to be blind not to see it or totally taken in by media lies. In Wa State the auditor is being investigated for 800,000 irregular ballots and we have had mail in voting for at least 15 years. The “loosing” governor candidate has not conceded yet. Yes, Lloyd, I am guessing that we will see Dominion in court along with lots of other RINOs and Democrates. Stay tuned
Sidney Powell? She was so ridiculous that Trump fired her from his legal team.
Ha! Even Trump has limits.
😂🤣😁
Eddie, I have yet to see any limits to Trump’s vanity, narcissism, and lies. Have you?
Diane, no I haven’t seen any limits to Trump’s vanity, narcism and lies. 😟
Some of the first words out of Sydney Powell’s mouth in GA was how thrilled she was to be getting so many donations that she did not have time to set up her donation page or cash the first check.
posted the WSJ article at OEN. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Fake-Claims-About-Dominion-in-General_News-Truth_Truth-201208-740.html#comment781211
Supenbna is a law and some how someone is getting paid off to keep the machines from being checked out you are liars cheaters and frauds. You need to be investigated and all who are involved should be put in jail now and machines should just be taken, If you have nothing to hide you would give up the machines. MAY GOD PUNISH ALL OF YOU .HOPEFULLY YOU ALL GO TO HELL. Tired of people making comments that their was no Fraud I hope people do what ever they feel necessary to all who are hiding the truth .You should be punished harshly.
I don’t have any machines. Do you? Remember that the Republican governors of Georgia and Arizona both swore that the results were accurate.
I guess you don’t believe in democracy or the Constitution.
Just remember this guy you admire, this Trump, looks on you as riffraff. He only likes his fellow billionaires. Folks like you are trash to him.
You people are a disgrace to our nation!!! Pack up and go to China!!!! You don’t deserve having a business in the USA!!! You are a bunch of corruptors!!!!!! My Pillow Will win!!!!!