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In 2014, a software malfunction in Dominion delayed the counting and reporting of elections in New Brunswick, Canada; Two years ago, Dominion’s online voting system collapsed during municipal elections in Ontario.
Although the company apologized for the two incidents, it attributed the blame to outside interference. They claimed that the failure in New Brunswick was caused by third-party software added by the local election agency, and the accident in Ontario was caused by unauthorized restrictions on broadband traffic.
Aleksander Essex, associate professor of software engineering at the University of Western Ontario, published a report on the use of online voting technology in Ontario in 2019 and took the above incident in Ontario as a case study.
At the beginning of the report, he noted that online voting “is not regulated by any federal or provincial cybersecurity standards.” The article also mentions possible loopholes in online voting, including privacy disclosure, lack of written records, and “the result is officially determined,” and If the system fails locally or as a whole, there is no emergency measure.
Essex told The Epoch Times: “I want to be very clear. There is a difference between loopholes and voter fraud. One thing does not mean another.”
The report found that on election night on October 22, 2018, there were problems with voting websites in 43 Ontario cities, such as very slow web pages and wait times to load some content.
Faced with unavailable voting websites and many affected cities without paper ballots as a backup option, many staff members made extraordinary decisions, declared this state of emergency, and extended the voting period. In some cities, voting was postponed for 1 to 2 hours until evening; most of the affected cities extended voting time by a full 24 hours.
That night, Dominion issued a statement blaming its Toronto Internet host provider for “arbitrarily restricting inbound voting traffic to 1/10 of the system’s designated bandwidth.” Of the four vendors providing online voting technology at the time, Dominion was the only company that had problems.
Essex said that after the report was released, it received calls from losing candidates across the province. They think the results are problematic, but cannot investigate because there is no auditable evidence and only a final statistical result.
“What if a candidate says, ‘I think there is fraud, and I don’t think I lost the election’? We have such candidates in Ontario. Now they live very painfully. They don’t know what happened. I don’t want to reveal my accusations and my bitterness, for fear that doing so would be detrimental to society. ” He said: “In the long run, this is not the way we should go.”
The Essex study also revealed other issues, including the number of cities where Dominion offers online voting services. Dominion said in a statement that 51 cities in Ontario using its portal are experiencing slow traffic, but Essex found that Dominion has 49 municipal customers in Ontario, and 43 of them are experiencing this problem.
Dominion, which has offices in Toronto and Denver, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from reporters, especially regarding the question of whether Canadian voters can trust the integrity of its products.
Dominion was also responsible for the vote counting of the Federal Conservative Party leader’s first two elections: in the 2017 elections, Hill (Andrew Scheer) defeated Bernier (Maxime Bernier) by a narrow margin; Ballots were damaged and election results were delayed for several hours.
On November 16, Elections Canada, which is responsible for the election of the Canadian federal government, stated on their official Twitter account that they do not use the Dominion voting system. The tweet said: “We use manual counting of votes on paper, and the tellers are there; we have never used voting machines or electronic tables to count votes in 100 years of history.”
US President Trump (Trump) shared this tweet and wrote: “This says it all!”
Dominion accused of manipulating votes in US elections
In the 2020 U.S. election, Dominion was involved in multiple ballot violations, including in Michigan’s traditional red county Antrim, where 6,000 votes cast by Trump were transferred to Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Biden).
Officials initially attributed the problem to software failures and human error, and later attributed the problem to human error. The Michigan State Council stated that relevant staff did not update the software used to collect data from the voting machines.
Early in the morning on Election Day, the company’s two voting machines in two Georgia counties also malfunctioned, preventing voters from voting for several hours.
The Trump campaign alleged that many swing states using the Dominion voting system had changed their votes. On November 12, Trump cited a report on Twitter that said “Dominion knocked out 2.7 million votes for Trump nationwide” and states that used Dominion “transferred 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden. “This claim has not been confirmed.
Dominion said in a statement that the company “resolutely denies false claims about vote conversion and software problems in our voting system.”
However, the company admitted that it had donated money to the Clinton Foundation led by Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, and did not question the hiring of a former employee of Speaker Pelosi as a lobbyist.
Sidney Powell, an attorney for Trump’s attorneys and a former federal prosecutor, said the team has received increasing evidence that the Dominion voting system is designed to rig elections. He once helped Venezuelan dictators Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro falsify votes and win elections.
Editor in charge: Lin Yan #
