The Tennessee Secretary of State has granted the Williamson County (Tennessee) Election Commission permission to throw Dominion voting machines out of the county. They will now be moving to ES&S voting machines. That should make a big difference for them. But the new system needs to be checked.
But a citizen election integrity group – Tennessee Voters for Election Integrity, have affirmed that there were problems in the last election. There were chain-of-custody issues, inspection issues, and election documentation issues in Williamson County, which will continue as they are using Dominion Machines.
Frank Limpus, founder of Tennessee Voters for Election Integrity. said:
“Removing Dominion was a good first step, however, there are a number of additional issues we have found in both of these recent elections that we’ve been trying for over a year to get government and commission officials to address, but to no avail.”
“Despite attempts to work collaboratively and quietly with these officials on these concerns, Williamson County Election Commission and state election officials have refused to consider or do anything about them. Our fear is that with this move to ES&S voting machines and away from Dominion, these other equally serious concerns, which can dramatically affect the outcome of our elections, will be swept under the rug. This is not the way to address legitimate problems brought to you by citizens concerned with election integrity.”
other issues they found include:
- Nineteen of twenty voting machines used in the October 2021 election were running an unknown software following September 28, 2021 pre-election machine inspections by candidates who were shown a different software version than what was used in the election;
- Multiple refusals by WCEC and the state to address a chain-of-custody concern for a voting machine scanner bin full of ballots which didn’t exhibit the required security seal at the October 27th audit;
- Blatantly factually incorrect poll officer reports from most voting centers in the 2021 Franklin Alderman election containing multiple, serious math errors and information discrepancies, yet were signed off on by election officials as accurate and official. (These paper reports back up the electronic election records and are official election reports that would be used to affirm the election if the electronics were hacked or went bad.);
- Numerous refusals by Williamson County and the Secretary of State’s/Election Administrator’s office to release all documents related to the October 26, 2021 election following three open records requests of both entities;
- Plentiful technological and process issues were found following research into the November 3, 2020 election in Williamson County whose officials did not respond when shown the problems;
- Concerns that the ES&S voting system that will replace the Dominion Results Tally and Reporting (RTR) system in the Election Management System (downstream from the precinct) will have the same confirmed vulnerability as Dominion did which allowed mass changing of votes without dual party authentication or oversight. To date, this RTR issue has not been addressed by county and state election and legislative officials, even though it was presented to them months ago. The ES&S machines could feature the same vulnerabilities.
