ASK ME ANYTHING

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We will talk about the research we’ve released so far, what’s coming next and how to get involved. We want you to make election reform a top priority. We’ll give you ideas about how to collaborate with us.

Link is also available at SMARTelection.us

Ask Me Anything Receives 30k Views

We did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit yesterday. Thanks to all who joined and to the thoughtful questions. Here are a few questions and answers:

QUESTION:

Were you able to get your report into the hands of any legacy press or lawmakers, especially democrats who were open to investigating discrepancies or statistical anomalies in the election results?

If so, what has the reception been and why are all of our leaders so hesitant to engage with substantive evidence that an investigation is needed.

ANSWER:

Legacy media is not receptive to the idea that U.S. elections are actually being compromised. Before an election, they are open to the idea that they COULD be compromised - for example look at this AMA from BEFORE the 2020 election from Politico, saying the 2020 election was waiting to be hacked.

But after an election mainstream media closes ranks around the results and works hard to call anyone with questions crazy. They will even misrepresent facts in that effort. Take a look at this breakdown we did of the New York Times article discussing questions about 2024 election results. The New York Times actually spread misinformation in its attempt to convince people that there are no problems with the election results. We have just started referring to this as gaslighting.

The general thinking is that if you tell people there could be problems with the results they won’t vote. We think the opposite is true. One reason people don’t vote now is because they don’t believe the results, and it’s not being openly discussed - so they find the conversation disingenuous and check out. We believe an open and honest exploration of problems with U.S. elections will be fruitful and lead to some genuine, long-overdue improvements.

QUESTION:

Whatever became of all the petitions for recounts in the various counties?

ANSWER:

We’re reviewing the audits that have been done in different states. The audits in most states are insufficient to confirm election results and we’ll be demonstrating that. We’ll be releasing that information as soon as we can. We are actively working to improve U.S. audits and hope you’ll join that work.

We were not able to file petitions for recounts in most states because by the time we had data that we felt confident in, most deadlines had passed. Also many states only allow for a candidate to request a recount and Harris chose not to request recounts. Even Senator Casey in Pennsylvania called his recount off. We filed a protest in five North Carolina counties and will follow up there.

We also filed a lawsuit in Rockland County New York where we have evidence that the Board of Elections did not report all of the votes for an independent candidate: Diane Sare. We are a plaintiff in this lawsuit through our sister organization SMART Legislation.

You can see an exhibit here, which shows that the Board did not count all the votes:

We believe that when we survey more voters we will find many more votes that were not counted there. This can be a good test case for the election. If you would like to help in Rockland County NY, please fill out our volunteer form and say “Rockland County” when you fill it out.

QUESTION: Do you believe the election results were actually manipulated?

ANSWER:

Simply put, the mechanisms are not in place to fully reassure the public that any given U.S. election is legitimate. That is why many voters for the losing candidates in the last two presidential election cycles believe the results are fraudulent. To be confident in election results, we need a more secure voting system, with robust and transparent audits.

Personally, it’s been a long time since I’ve had full confidence in U.S. election results. Every independent penetration study of U.S. voting machines has found rampant vulnerabilities. Look at this report from 2016 penetration testing

“The analysts found 269 misconfigurations on the server and 303 misconfigurations on the client standalone and the ERM workstations, as well as multiple security patches that were missing from all systems. These misconfigurations include, but are not limited to, system auditing, password policies, firewall configurations, etc … The DS850 system contained at least seven vulnerabilities with the highest criticality score (10) while the DS200 had two.”

The analysis SMART Elections has done showing the extreme and unbalanced drop-off rate between Trump and Harris and between swing and non-swing states does concern us, and we’re continuing to look at that and other data.

That being said, it’s very difficult to prove that results are manipulated since we don’t have access to the software and code of the voting machines, which are proprietary. Even audit logs and full election data by precinct are hard to come by. It takes months of public records requests and sometimes even lawsuits.

So the short answer is, we don’t know. We don’t have enough information to either confirm results are accurate, or prove that they are not.

Coming Soon

• Report on the bomb threats & technical difficulties of election equipment

• Report on 2024 election audits

• Report on internet connectivity of U.S. voting machines

These reports are taking longer than we would like to release, but it’s important that we vet our information very thoroughly. Thank you for your patience.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

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