UPDATE: Jan 24, 2007 – CLEVELAND: Per the above article;  “Two election workers in the state s most populous county were convicted today of illegally rigging the 2004 presidential election recount.

The prosecution accused the employees of secretly reviewing pre-selected ballots before the recount in order to avoid a more costly, time-consuming hand count of all votes.

Jacqueline Maiden, the elections coordinator who was the board s third-highest ranking employee when she was indicted last March, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee. The felony conviction carries a possible sentence of six to 18 months.

Maiden and Dreamer also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty.

The employees were accused of working behind closed doors three days before the public Dec. 16, 2004, recount to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand.

Ohio gave Bush the electoral votes he needed to defeat Democratic Sen. John Kerry in the close election and hold on to the White House in 2004″.

2016 ELECTION RIGGED

Republicans used Crosscheck to illegally purge thousands of voters off the voter roles, Trump conspired with the National Enquirer to smear political opponents, and Putin / Russia helped Trump’s campaign. Therefore the 2016 election was rigged for Trump using unscrupulous, underhanded means.

2016 Election Rigged for Trump

When Donald Trump said, “This election is rigged”—he should know. His buddies rigged it.

Rolling Stone investigative reporter Greg Palast busted Jeb Bush for stealing the 2000 election by purging Black voters from Florida’s electoral rolls. Now Palast is back to take a deep dive into the Republicans’ dark operation, Crosscheck, the secret purge list that helped steal the 2016 Election.

Crosscheck is controlled by a Trump henchman, Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State who claims his computer program has identified 7.2 million people in 29 states who may have voted twice in the same election–a felony crime. The catch? Most of these “suspects” are minorities—in other words, mainly Democratic voters. Yet the lists and the evidence remain “confidential”.

In 27 states, a program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck suppressed and purged enough minority voters to swing the election for Donald Trump.

The rigging was a simple process: in 27 Republican-controlled states (including critical swing states) hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people showed up to vote, but were mysteriously blocked from voting for allegedly being registered with the intent to vote in multiple states.

The above video recorded on November 26, 2017 with MSNBC Host Joy Reid interviewing Greg Palast is the only interview done about this on any Television Network.

Millions of Black, Hispanic & Asians Voters Have Been Purged

Greg Palast, Al Jazeera, BBC News, The Guardian/Billionaires & Ballot Bandits joins Thom Hartmann. Jim Crow-style voter suppression has returned to America. That’s the conclusion of a shocking new report from investigative journalist Greg Palast for Al Jazeera America that takes a deep dive into a controversial program known as Interstate Crosscheck. According to his investigation “election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk.”

Per the above article: The massive election-rigging scandal the media ignored. In 27 states, a program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck suppressed and purged minority votes

The election of 2016 may well have been stolen — or to use Donald Trump’s oft-repeated phrase — “rigged,” and nobody in the media seems willing to discuss it.

The rigging was a pretty simple process, in fact: in 27 Republican-controlled states (including critical swing states) hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people showed up to vote, but were mysteriously blocked from voting for allegedly being registered with the intent to vote in multiple states.

Greg Palast, an award-winning investigative journalist, writes a stinging piece in Rolling Stone magazine (August 2016 edition), predicting that the presidential election had already been decided: “The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters.” He also wrote and produced a brilliant documentary on this exact subject that was released well before the election, titled The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

He said a program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck had been quietly put together in Kansas and was being used by Republican secretaries of state in 27 states to suppress and purge African American, Asian and Hispanic votes in what would almost certainly be the swing states of the 2016 election.

Crosscheck was started by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach back in 2007 under the guise of combating so-called voter fraud. In the ultimate thumb in the eye to the American voter, the state where Crosscheck started was the only state to refuse to participate in a New York Times review of voter fraud in the 2016 election, which found that, basically, there wasn’t any fraud at the level of individual voters. Turns out, according to Palast, that a total of 7 million voters—including up to 344,000 in Pennsylvania, 589,000 in North Carolina and up to 449,000 in Michigan (based on available Crosscheck data from 2014)—may have been denied the right to have their votes counted under this little known but enormously potent Crosscheck program.

Here are examples of Crosscheck in action:
Trump victory margin in Michigan: 13,107
Michigan Crosscheck purge list: 449,922

Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257
Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824

Trump victory margin in North Carolina: 177,008
North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: 589,393

“University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer found that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law”. Link to full article below.

That’s way more than enough votes to swing the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

There’s more…

Exit polls in key states, FLORIDA , NORTH CAROLINA and WISCONSIN showed Hillary Clinton the winner.

Using exit poll totals compiled by election researcher Theodore de Macedo Soares, seen in the table below on this page as well as available at this link, compared to an ongoing tally of raw votes totals posted at this link by Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report, here is the discrepancy that has caused the suspicions of what Trump himself would call a “rigged election.”

Note that actual vote totals are compiled as of November 16.

FLORIDA — 29 Electoral Votes

(numbers equal percentage points)

Exit Polls: Clinton 47.7, Trump 46.4 — Clinton wins by 1.3

Actual: Clinton 47.8, Trump 49.0 — Trump wins by 1.2

Trump gain between exit polls and actual results: 2.5

NORTH CAROLINA — 15 Electoral Votes

Exit Polls: Clinton 48.6, Trump 46.5 — Clinton wins by 2.1

Actual: Clinton 46.1, Trump 49.9 — Trump wins by 3.8

Trump gain: 5.9

WISCONSIN — 10 Electoral Votes

Exit Polls: Clinton 48.2, Trump 44.3 — Clinton wins by 3.9

Actual: Clinton 47.6, Trump 48.8 — Trump wins by 1.2

Trump gain: 5.1

Full story at: heavy.com/news/2016/11/2016-exit-polls-did-hillaty-clinton-win-presidential-election-voter-fraud-donald-trump-lose-rigged/

OTHER SOURCES CLAIM THE 2016 ELECTION WAS RIGGED

The League of Women Voters claim “The 2016 Presidential Election Was Rigged” in their article at lwv.org/press-releases/2016-presidential-election-was-rigged by Voter Suppression.

Chris Carson, president of the League of Women Voters stated “In Wisconsin, President-elect Trump beat Secretary Clinton by roughly 27,000 votes, however according to federal court, 300,000 registered voters lacked the proper photo ID.

Details regarding 300,000 registered voters lacked photo ID at thenation.com/article/the-gops-attack-on-voting-rights-was-the-most-under-covered-story-of-2016/

“We are not talking about vigilante voter intimidation,” said Carson. “We are talking about official, legal voter suppression by state legislatures and election officials.”

Like the 2000 & 2004 Elections, this matter is not being reported by the mainstream media.

Mapping Donald Trump’s Many Ties To Vladimir Putin’s Russia

The US intelligence community found that Russia tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 US election by boosting Donald Trump and harming Hillary Clinton, according to the declassified intelligence report released by the Director of National Intelligence.

Click the link below to read and download a copy of the report;

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3254237/Russia-Hack-Report.pdf

Trump was complicit in Espionage when he said; Russia: “If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”. It’s clear Russia was listening because within hours, Wikileaks released 8,000 DNC emails. The DNC was hacked by two groups that linked to senior levels of the Russian government.

Rachel Maddow reviews some of the highlights of a lengthy report from The Washington Post that Vladimir Putin was directing a cyberattack on the U.S. election.

Russia used Manafort, WikiLeaks to help Trump in 2016: Senate report

Senate Intelligence Committee releases final report on Russian interference in 2016

The report concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign had repeated contacts with Russian operatives, and said campaign chairman Paul Manafort “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”

New evidence on Russian interference in 2016 election

A Senate Intelligence Committee report details how Russia targeted voting systems across the U.S. and warns the threat persists today.

13 Russians Indicted With Charges Of Interfering In 2016 U.S. Election

Vladimir Putin not only engaged in tactics to influence the US 2016 election, but according to President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili has a history of interfering in elections in the Ukraine and Georgia

Many themes of Trump dossier have borne out over time

Rachel Maddow reviews how recent revelations and admissions by Trump team members have shown many of the themes of the Trump dossier to have merit.

More Pieces Of Donald Trump Russia Dossier Check Out

Rachel Maddow notes that while the dossier of intelligence about Donald Trump ties to Russia remains unconfirmed, pieces of it have checked out upon investigation by the press, though the primary government investigators are former Trump campaign officials.

More about the Trump dossier at; https://republicanreports.org/trump-dossier-explained/

Per the above Wikipedia Article:

“The Republican Party’s efforts to disrupt the 2024 United States presidential election involve a series of coordinated actions intended to influence election outcomes at both federal and state levels. These efforts, which were preceded by Republican efforts to restrict voting following the 2020 presidential election, are characterized by legislative, legal, and administrative strategies that sought to affect voter access, election oversight, and post-election certification processes. This initiative grew out of widespread claims within certain Republican Party circles about election integrity, many of which trace back to the 2020 United States presidential election and Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, including the election denial movement in the United States, despite a lack of substantial evidence supporting these allegations.

Key elements of these strategies include attempts to modify voting laws, with a focus on restrictions that could disproportionately impact demographics more likely to vote for the Democratic Party. Additionally, Republican-led states saw a push to place partisan figures in election oversight positions, which may influence how election laws are interpreted and enforced. There is also a significant legal component, with numerous court cases challenging aspects of the voting process and aiming to set precedents for handling election disputes. These efforts sparked intense debate across the political spectrum, with proponents arguing that the measures “are necessary to ensure election security”, while critics contend that they could undermine democratic processes by restricting voter access and eroding public trust in election fairness.

For decades, Republicans sought evidence of what they allege is rampant voting fraud in the United States. Multiple studies during this time found that election fraud is extremely rare. In 2024, an election fraud database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, showed evidence of 1,513 instances of fraud over the preceding 42 years, although many of those instances have been challenged as dubious. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he falsely asserted the election had been rigged and stolen from him; the false allegations came to be known as his big lie. Many of his followers developed an election denial movement to advance this false narrative. As of August 2023, a large majority of Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents continued to believe Joe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020.

In a 1980 speech, Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation said, “I don’t want everybody to vote … our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” As president, Trump falsely claimed that millions of undocumented migrants illegally voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election, depriving him of the popular vote victory.

As a result, Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017; the commission was disbanded several months later, with member Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state, writing to commission chair Mike Pence and vice chair Kris Kobach that, contrary to public statements by Trump and Kobach, the commission did not find “substantial” voter fraud. Critics said the commission’s intent was to disenfranchise or deter legal voters. Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, had a history of making false or unsubstantiated allegations of voting fraud to advocate for voting restrictions. The commission did not find a single instance of a noncitizen voting.

The Conservative news outlets Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN promoted false election fraud allegations in the weeks following the 2020 election, including conspiracy theories that voting machines had been rigged to favor Biden; in response, voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic filed defamation lawsuits against those three networks, some of their employees and others. Fox News agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement to Dominion in April 2023 after it was revealed that top on-air personalities and executives knew the allegations were false but continued to promote them anyway. The 2022 Dinesh D’Souza film 2000 Mules falsely alleged that Democratic Party operatives engaged in an illegal ballot harvesting operation across five swing states during the 2020 election.

By April 2024, dozens of Republicans in four states were under indictment for their alleged involvement in the Trump fake electors plot and related Pence Card conspiracy, parts of wide-ranging efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Those indicted included Trump and several of his close associates, including Christina Bobb who leads the Republican National Committee (RNC) election integrity legal efforts in the 2024 presidential election. In September 2024, Hanna Rosin published an article about the aftermath of the January 6 attack in the lives of the insurrectionists, which mentions how they have created “a new mythology on the right”, which could lead to a new attempt at overturning the election should Trump lose it.^[22][23] The Justice Department planned to monitor compliance with voting rights laws on Election Day in 27 states.

Since at least 2003, journalists, election security experts, and activists have repeatedly warned about security vulnerabilities and other flaws in the election infrastructure of the United States.

Commentators have repeatedly accused the Republican Party of applying deceptive methods in order to win elections. The New Republic alleged that Republican Party political campaigns have a history of applying “voter intimidation techniques, more direct threats of violence, foreign disinformation, and super PAC and dark money skullduggery” as strategies, citing the possible sabotage of Vietnam War peace talks during the 1968 election; the Watergate scandal during the 1972 election; the 1980 October Surprise theory; the tactics of Lee Atwater during the 1988 election; the “butterfly ballots”, actions of Katherine Harris, Brooks Brothers riot, and Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case during the 2000 election; the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal; and the swiftboating of John Kerry during the 2004 election. Truthout cited the Volusia error during the 2000 election; voter roll purges during the 2000 and 2004 elections (in Florida and Ohio, respectively); false information about voting logistics by election boards controlled by Republicans; voter intimidation; and voter ID laws. Truthout also cited “voter irregularities” in Ohio during the 2004 election involving a Republican-connected company SMARTech, and also noted that Anonymous claimed without evidence that Karl Rove unsuccessfully attempted to use Mitt Romney’s ORCA get-out-the-vote system to rig the 2012 election in Ohio in a similar fashion as alleged to have occurred in 2004.

In Al Jazeera America, Greg Palast warned in 2014 of the impact that the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which he accused of over-representing Black, Asian and Hispanic voters in its efforts to purge potentially millions of names from voter rolls, could have on the 2014 and 2016 elections. Palast assessed that 1.1 million voters were removed from voter rolls by the 2016 election, while the Brennan Center determined that nearly 16 million voters were removed by states between 2014 and 2016. Crosscheck had been criticized by journalists and researchers for poor accuracy.

Craig Unger documented ties between the Republican Party and the Russian government dating back to at least 1997, including Tom DeLay visiting Moscow to meet Viktor Chernomyrdin, Ed Buckham’s U.S. Family Network being funded $1 million by Russians to influence DeLay’s vote on bailing out the Russian economy, and Paul Manafort’s ties to Russia (among others). Manafort had given polling data to a Russian intelligence officer in 2016. The Washington Spectator traced these ties back to a 1995 visit to Russia by Allan C. Carlson, who subsequently formed the World Congress of Families after observing commonalities between American and Russian conservatives. Nafeez Ahmed has also noted the ties between the Heritage Foundation and the Danube Institute, which is funded by the government of Viktor Orbán and is supportive of the Russian government. Paul Dans, the former leader of Project 2025, appeared on a podcast from Tenet Media, which was accused by the Department of Justice of being operated by Russian agents.

Tom Nichols theorized that the Republican Party’s overall affinity for Russia and Vladimir Putin in particular may be due in part to questions about the party’s long-term viability which could be addressed by “nationalist appeals, combined with electoral fraud and selective use of the prison system” that were modeled by Putin.

The Republican Party is a member of the International Democratic Union (IDU), which The Tyee described as a global group that is “dedicated to electing right-wing governments around the world”. According to a 1985 CIA memo, the Republican Party and the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan had provided half of all funding for the organization at the time. Other members include the Conservative Party of Canada, the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, Fidesz in Hungary (led in 2025 by Viktor Orbán), Likud in Israel (led in 2025 by Benjamin Netanyahu) and (until 2023) the Bharatiya Janata Party in India. Several of their leaders had gained political power with help from Arthur J. Finkelstein, such as Orbán, Netanyahu and Trump. The IDU shares resources with its members on “campaign technology, fund-raising techniques, opinion polling, advertising and campaign organization”. The Conservative Party of Canada and the Republican Party had closely collaborated on resources and strategy during the 2000s and 2010s.

Under the leadership of Stephen Harper, Mike Roman was the treasurer and then assistant chairman of the IDU until Roman was indicted for allegedly participating in attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. During the 2008 United States presidential election, Roman had shared a video of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, which Richard Hasen had alleged to be an example of a false or exaggerated claim of voter fraud. Roman had written in a 2008 blog post, “If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it.”

Allegations of rigged elections

During the 2024 campaign, Trump often referred to “election integrity” to allude to his continuing claim that the 2020 election was rigged, as well as predictions of future mass election fraud. As he did during the 2020 election cycle, Trump claimed that Democrats would try to rig the 2024 election. Many Republicans reported to believe that Democratic Party have and continue to engage in systemic election fraud, with some being concerned regarding election integrity. By 2022, Republican politicians and conservative talk radio cable news outlets echoed the statement of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon that “if Democrats don’t cheat, they don’t win”.

The Heritage Foundation has been closely aligned with the Republican Party since its founding in 1973. In 2023, the foundation published Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second presidency. In July 2024, Mike Powell, the group’s executive director for its Oversight Project, said that “as things stand right now, there is a zero percent chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America”, adding, “I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.” Heritage released a report predicting without supporting evidence that Biden might try to retain power “by force” if he were to lose in November. Election law expert Rick Hasen remarked that “this is gaslighting and it is dangerous in fanning flames that could lead to potential violence.”

The Heritage Oversight Project produced videos for distribution on social media and conservative media outlets that made false or misleading claims about the extent of noncitizen voting registrations. In one video that was sent viral by an Elon Musk repost, Heritage falsely claimed that 14% of noncitizens in Georgia were registered, concluding that “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy”. Heritage based their findings on an extrapolation of hidden camera interview responses from seven residents in a Norcross, Georgia, apartment complex. State investigators found the seven people had never registered. During the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump’s campaign and its allies revived allegations from 2020 that voting machines were rigged. The claims were widespread on social media and were frequently mentioned in lawsuits filed by Republicans. Trump and Musk repeated baseless claims of fraud and “cheating” in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in the days before Election Day.

Claims by Trump and Republican allies of election fraud persisted up to Election Day on November 5. After Trump was declared the winner, these claims had largely stopped, with his “election integrity” allies crediting his victory to their efforts.

The New York Times reported in July 2024 that “the Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system” by systematically searching for vulnerabilities. The effort involves a network of powerful Republican lawyers and activists, many of whom were involved in the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It involves restricting voting and short-circuiting the certification process should Trump lose. The Republican strategy involved first persuading voters that the election is about to be stolen by Democrats, despite lacking evidence. After the election, if Trump were to lose, lawyers would attempt to challenge decades of settled law as to how elections are certified. The New York Times reported the efforts had “been quietly playing out in courts, statehouses and county boards for months, and is concentrated in critical battlegrounds”. In October 2024, The Washington Post identified as vulnerabilities leading to a possible attempt at overturning the election’s results the following: widespread false information, weeks-long recounts, lawsuits delaying final results, breakdown in certifying results, disruptions at elector meetings, Congress stalling the certification, and a wild card (“something new could be tried that attorneys and election officials haven’t yet gamed out”).

Nebraska is one of two states that does not have a winner-take-all system of awarding electoral college votes but rather allocates the votes by its three congressional districts. One district contains the Omaha metro area, which can tend to lean Democrat (Obama won the district in 2008, as did Biden in 2020), while the other two are more rural and vote solid Republican. During 2024, some Nebraska Republicans sought to change the state’s 1991 law that created its electoral college allocation system to winner-take-all and remove the likely elector for Kamala Harris. The proposal was blocked by Republican state senators; by September 2024, it was revived with pressure brought by Trump, all of the state’s Republican representatives, and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.

During the 2024 Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump revealed that he and House Speaker Mike Johnson had a “little secret”, stating: “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over.” Johnson confirmed the existence of the plan. Commentators speculated that they were referring to a contingent election, in which the United States House of Representatives elects the president; or a plot to convince Republican state legislatures or Republican governors in states that Trump would lose to not certify the results or submit slates of electors before the deadline, reducing the number of electors needed to win the electoral college vote.

At an August 2021 event organized by Mike Lindell, copies of software from Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Colorado and Michigan were distributed and posted to the public Internet. Election security experts warned that the release undermines trust in election security and allows for hackers to conduct vulnerability assessments, counter defenses, “sabotage the system, alter ballot design or even try to change results”. Three vendors dominate election technology in the United States, limiting the ability for election officials to replace an existing system. Mike Lindell stated that his goal is to remove voting machines entirely and switch to paper ballots, a process that election officials warned would be tedious, time-consuming and prone to errors.

CNN reported that in text messages to Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, which conducted the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit, Michael Flynn expressed a goal to “fundamentally change the way votes are counted at the state level”.

In August 2023, Matthew DePerno, the former Republican nominee for the 2022 Michigan Attorney General election, and former Republican state representative Daire Rendon were charged with “undue possession of a voting machine, willfully damaging a voting machine and conspiracy”. DePerno spread false claims about the 2020 United States presidential election.

Election denial activists had spread a password that they alleged to be used in Dominion voting machines in Georgia, including wearing the alleged password on t-shirts.

In 2020, J. Alex Halderman, a computer science and engineering professor, discovered a software vulnerability in Georgia’s voting machines which made it possible for hackers to change votes. While Dominion developed a patch to address these vulnerabilities, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that the machines would be updated after the 2024 election, dismissing Halderman’s findings as “theoretical and imaginary.”

In December 2022, election experts sent a letter to the United States Department of Justice that described a “multi-state conspiracy to copy voting software” that was at least partially funded by notable Trump supporters such as Sidney Powell and asking for a federal investigation. In December 2023, a follow-up open letter from computer scientists, election security experts and voter advocacy organizations listed repeated attempts by allies of Donald Trump to access voting system software in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada and Colorado, again calling for a federal investigation, noting that the software is used nationwide. Entire election databases from multiple counties were also copied. Electronic pollbooks, ballot scanners, servers for vote counting, USB flash drives, and memory cards were also copied in Coffee County, Georgia. At least one breach had also occurred in North Carolina. In at least four cases, election officials had to decertify or replace voting equipment. Voting experts expressed alarm over the breaches due to their breaking of the chain of custody over ballots and tabulators; as well as invasion of voter privacy. On November 13, 2024, a third open letter was sent by the same organization, Free Speech for People, to Kamala Harris, warning her of “serious election security breaches that have threatened the security and integrity of the 2024 elections” and urging her to request hand recounts in at least four swing states. The letter noted that voting system breaches have allowed for access to main servers, tabulators and election databases for both Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software, election vendors which collectively count approximately 70% of votes across the United States.

Between at least June and October 2024, partial passwords for election machines were exposed in a hidden tab in a spreadsheet on the Colorado secretary of state’s website. According to the secretary of state’s office, the machines are still protected by requiring two distinct passwords for each system, which are stored separately, by not connecting the machines to the Internet, and by storing the machines in rooms that can only be accessed with ID badges and are continuously monitored by video cameras. An investigation by a law firm concluded that the hidden tab was created by an employee who worked in the office between 2020 and 2023. A second employee, who, according to the office, was unaware of the hidden tab, posted the spreadsheet online. As a witness in a lawsuit by the Libertarian Party of Colorado, a co-founder of election vigilante group U.S. Election Integrity Plan (see Election vigilante groups below) testified that he had viewed the hidden tab three times between August and October 2024, before the state was aware of the breach.

In October 2024, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced that voter access terminals (VAT) from Dominion, which assist persons with disabilities with ballot marking, had an issue with split ticket votes. She said that this issue affected Dominion machines nationwide.

The Voting Machine Hacking Village (a hacking event co-founded by Harri Hursti) at DEF CON 32 in 2024 discovered “new vulnerabilities … in several widely-fielded ballot-marking and DRE voting machines.” Due to the complexities of upgrading election equipment, election and cybersecurity experts found it unlikely that vulnerability findings from the conference would have been fixed prior to Election Day.

SMART Elections (a nonpartisan election integrity advocacy group that includes academics and activists) noted that Pro V&V, a voting system test laboratory, had approved software and hardware updates for Dominion and Election Systems & Software voting systems between March and September 2024, categorizing those updates as de minimis, which do not require testing. SMART Elections argued that this lack of testing for what it described as comprehensive updates risked malware entering the voting systems.

Election Systems & Software (ES&S) was founded by Republicans, was financed by the families of Howard Ahmanson Jr. and Nelson Bunker Hunt, is owned by a private equity firm, McCarthy Group and its investors are unknown as of December 2019. Chuck Hagel was chairman of a predecessor company to ES&S, and the treasurer for Hagel’s campaign during the 1996 United States Senate election in Nebraska, Michael McCarthy, was the founder of McCarthy Group. According to Bev Harris’ book on black box voting, ES&S is tied to Kiewit Corporation, which as of 2004 was involved in a number of bid rigging scandals; advocated for privatization of highways in the United States; owned CalEnergy, and was heavily involved in telecommunications via its ties to Level 3 Communications and installations of fiber-optic cables underneath highways and video surveillance cameras on roads. The Omaha World-Herald newspaper owned a stake in ES&S between 1986 and 2011. The Peter Kiewit Foundation in turn owned the Omaha World-Herald as of 2004.

As of October 2019, ES&S controls about 50% of the election system market of the United States; makes most of its money from long-term maintenance contracts; has filed lawsuits when it fails to win contracts or has them taken away; hired former election officials as lobbyists; donated to political campaigns and lobbied politicians; and threatened lawsuits against voting rights activists and security researchers.Between 2013 and 2020, ES&S has donated at least $30,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee.

Various issues with ES&S systems have been reported since at least 1998, including missing votes potential duplicate votes, poor calibration of touch screens leading to misinterpreted votes, names missing from voter rolls, incorrectly printed ballots and outdated technology. Concerns have also been raised by Ron Wyden about the security of its supply chain, as many parts were made in China and the Philippines.ES&S claimed that they had worked with Idaho National Laboratory for vulnerability testing, but as of December 2019, those findings have not been made public. In August 2018, Kamala Harris, Mark Warner, Susan Collins and James Lankford sent a letter to ES&S asking about their stance on independent security research after the company dismissed and discouraged such research on their systems. After the 2016 election, Jill Stein alleged that ES&S machines were vulnerable to hacking and difficult to audit, points supported by researchers. Issues with ES&S machines have also been reported during elections in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

“For example, during the 2024 elections, ES&S voting machines in Cambria County, Pennsylvania had issues scanning ballots due to a “ballot printing error”, “[causing] voter confusion, long lines of voters, and many individuals [leaving] the polling locations without casting a ballot”. The county’s election director had retired on the same day that the election results were certified. State Representative Frank Burns called for an investigation by the Pennsylvania Department of State, and had asked for records about the ballots, voting machines, testing and internal communications, but his right to know request was denied by county election officials. By April 2025, the new county elections director had found a certification document stating that pre-election tests on voting machines were successfully completed in September 2024. Burns expressed concern why election officials were not aware of this document.”

“The Navajo Nation in Apache County, Arizona reported issues with voting machines and ballot printers on Election Day, leading to long lines that resulted in some voters being turned away. According to the Verified Voting Foundation, all voting equipment used in that county on Election Day 2024 was manufactured by ES&S. Similarly, there were issues with voting machines on Election Day in Queens, New York, a county that also used ES&S at the time.”

“In January 2020, NBC News reported that election security experts found at least 35 voting machines that were connected to the Internet as of the summer of 2019. While ES&S, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic have all admitted to adding modems in some of their tabulators and scanners (for the purpose of quickly sharing unofficial election results), all of the voting machines that were accessible online were manufactured by ES&S and located in 11 states (including Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan) and Washington D.C. Some of these machines have been connected for months or possibly years at a time. Critical systems connected to the Internet via a firewall include vote tabulators and “the election-management system that is used in some counties to program voting machines before elections.” Other security vulnerabilities – including missing firewall security patches, outdated SFTP server software, remote-access software, outdated operating systems, exposed passwords, exposed data of registered voters, no logging of some events, hash verification issues (noting that the hash verification was performed by ES&S instead of its customers), ballot marking device/scanner “hybrid” systems that can be changed with fake votes on machine-marked ballots after those ballots are cast, accessible SD and USB ports, plain text encryption keys for voter data, no set BIOS passwords, disabled Secureboot, presence of bloatware, no tamper-evident seals, immediate root access, unencrypted hard drives, use of simple default passwords, immutable passwords set such that “the same two passwords were used for every machine manufactured”, susceptibility of central scanners to vote flipping, and “poor physical security protections that could allow undetected tampering” – were also reported. Free Press also warned of multiple vulnerabilities from electronic pollbooks manufactured by ES&S, including the possibility of compromised network infrastructure, voting machines, registration servers, voter data and/or the privacy of votes, as well as the risk of voter suppression.”

“A December 2020 investigation by DCReport found that the 2020 re-elections of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins had all occurred in states where votes were primarily tabulated by ES&S, arguing that their wins were improbable due to low or close pre-election polls. In the case of McConnell, DCReport found large vote leads in counties that had typically voted for Democrats (including in counties in which he had not previously won); discrepancies related to split-ticket voting; and issues with Kentucky voter records. McConnell had blocked legislation in the Senate for election security in 2019, the same year that his campaign committee received at least $2,000 from ES&S. A further investigation by the same outlet later that month found that multiple ES&S executives and lobbyists are connected with Republican party politicians and election officials (such as Sandra Mortham, Marci Andino and the office of Brian Kemp); that Chris Wlaschin, the former chief information security official at the United States Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration, had joined ES&S to lead their security team; that 40 out of 50 states partially use ES&S for casting and counting votes; and that during the 2020 election, all but three of the 25 states that Trump had won had partially or fully used ES&S voting machines. A 2021 article also noted that several Republican officials had refused to purchase equipment from Dominion due to false claims of fraud during the 2020 United States presidential election, alleging that ES&S would benefit by increasing its market share. Similarly, The Daily Dot reported that election security advocate Jennifer Cohn accused Republicans who falsely alleged that Dominion had helped commit fraud in the 2020 election of attempting to put Dominion out of business.”

“The Institute for Southern Studies reported that, during the 2000 Venezuelan general election, Hugo Chávez and Venezuelan election officials accused ES&S of interference due to widespread issues with the company’s voting machines.”

“Beth Clarkson, a Wichita State University statistician, filed an open records lawsuit for paper tapes from electronic voting machines in Sedgwick County, Kansas from the 2014 election, naming then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as a defendant. She alleged that there were statistical anomalies that favored Republican politicians in vote counts in large precincts in multiple elections across the United States, assessing that this pattern was due to either voter fraud or a demographic trend unexplained by polling. According to the Verified Voting Foundation, all voting equipment used in that county on Election Day 2014 was manufactured by ES&S.”

“Between February 26, 2024 and February 24, 2025, Chris Wlaschin was appointed as a member of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee as a technical expert.”

Vulnerabilities of electronic pollbooks

“Journalists have noted security vulnerabilities with electronic pollbooks (e-pollbooks) in the lead-up to the 2024 election, such as many being designed to be connected to the Internet, the lack of national standards for security and reliability, the lack of a system that tracks incidents with e-pollbooks, past efforts by hackers from Russia and Iran to obtain voter data, and the subsequent risk of voters being deleted from the voter rolls by unauthorized users.”

“They have also been blamed for delays in the voting process. As of 2018, they are used by 36 states. ES&S is one of the main manufacturers of e-pollbooks and they, along with Diebold Election Systems, had lobbied for election officials to use them after the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002. Free Press reported that some ES&S e-pollbooks could communicate via Bluetooth to voting machines.” Vulnerabilities in mail-in voting

“Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general since June 2020, has donated at least $685,230 to the Republican Party between 2018 and 2020, has donated $1.2 million to Trump, and implemented policies that were primarily responsible for the 2020 United States Postal Service crisis.”

“Between 2020 and 2024, the United States Postal Service (USPS) changed its goals for first-class mail delivery from a three-day maximum to a five-day maximum, and had raised the price of first-class postage by 33%. The Washington Post stated that these changes had little impact on the service’s finances, which included a $2.1 billion net loss during the first quarter of fiscal 2024. Gerry Connolly stated in response to these changes that “any effort to degrade service while raising prices is a recipe for a death spiral at the Postal Service”.

“In July 2024, the USPS inspector general published a report noting that some service workers were not following proper procedures for mail-in ballots in some places, and that some mailed ballots were missing postmarks, which are required in many states. The report further warned that some ballots were at risk of not being counted due to both current USPS policies for processing mail as well as changes by DeJoy’s Delivering for America plan. Some changes were made within days of the 2024 primary elections in Georgia and Virginia.”

“Lawmakers such as Mark Pocan were concerned about plans by the USPS to consolidate regional hubs, arguing that mail delivery would slow down. Significant slowdowns had been observed throughout the United States as of April 2024. Some of these regional hubs were located in states such as Virginia, Oregon, Texas and Missouri as well as swing states Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin. These consolidations have been paused until January 2025, following criticism from lawmakers.”

“In September 2024, the National Association of State Election Directors and National Association of Secretaries of State sent an open letter to DeJoy supporting the inspector general report, warning that the USPS has marked election mail to voters as undeliverable at “higher than usual rates, even in cases where a voter is known not to have moved” and that ballots that were processed in some places arrived at election offices 10+ days after the postmark date. In some states such as Utah dozens or hundreds of ballots for 2024 primary elections had arrived over 10 days after being postmarked. Other problems highlighted in the letter include “lost or delayed election mail, and front-line training deficiencies impacting USPS’s ability to deliver election mail in a timely and accurate manner. These issues have been described as “systemic”. There is the risk that, if mail is returned to the original sender, voters may miss their mail-in ballots or removed from voter registration rolls.”

“Republicans have filed lawsuits to stop states from counting postmarked mail-in ballots that are received by election officials after Election Day. About 20 states, plus Washington, D.C., accept and count mail-in ballots received after Election Day as long as they are postmarked on or before that day. As of August 2024, these lawsuits have been filed in Nevada, Illinois, North Dakota and Mississippi. Plaintiffs include the Republican National Committee, Mark Splonskowski (the Burleigh County Auditor who is supported by Public Interest Legal Foundation) the Mississippi Republican Party and a county election commissioner.”

“Several issues were reported during the 2024 election with mail-in ballots, including discarded ballots, stranded or delayed ballots, undated ballots (which were not counted in Pennsylvania following lawsuits by the Republican National Committee, the Pennsylvania Republican Party and David McCormick), stolen and/or forged ballots,ballots misdirected between and within states, unprocessed ballots, and destroyed ballots.”

“Issues had also occurred with voter registration forms, including damaged or incomplete forms and potentially fraudulent forms or mail-in ballot applications.”

Challenging registrations, ballots and certifications

“Following Trump’s 2020 loss amid his false allegations of fraud, Republican lawmakers initiated a sweeping effort to make voting laws more restrictive in several states across the country and to take control of the administrative management of elections at the state and local level. By 2023, organizations funded by dark money had met quietly with officials in Republican-controlled states to create an incubator of policies that would restrict ballot access and amplify false claims that fraud is rampant in elections. Led by the Heritage Foundation, the groups include the Honest Elections Project, which is among a network of conservative organizations associated with Leonard Leo, a longtime prominent figure in the Federalist Society.”

“The Washington Post reported in June 2024 on indications that county-level Republicans in swing states might be preparing to challenge and delay their certifications of voting results in 2024. Such delays might cause a state to miss deadlines that ensure its electoral college votes are counted in Washington on January 6, 2025. In four state elections since 2020, county election officials withheld certifications, citing mistrust in voting machines or ballot errors, though they could not produce evidence of actual voting fraud; the certifications proceeded after state interventions, which included warnings of potential criminal charges. Two Cochise County, Arizona, officials were criminally charged for refusing to certify, not because of doubts about Cochise results but as a protest against other counties voting for Democratic state candidates. Project Democracy found that since 2020 members of state and local election boards had voted against certification more than twenty times in eight states. Voting rights activists were concerned that the continuing false allegations of election fraud since 2020 might lead to social unrest if efforts to delay certifications at the local level were overruled by state officials or courts. The failure of a state to have its electoral college votes counted on January 6 could result in neither presidential candidate reaching the minimum 270 electoral votes, causing the election to be thrown to the United States House of Representatives. In that scenario, the election outcome would be determined by a simple majority count of state delegations; Republicans hold a majority in 28 of 50 delegations in the 118th United States Congress and thus Trump would win in such a scenario. The Guardian confirmed that “experts have been particularly alarmed by efforts to try and halt certification at the local level – something that could cause delay and chaos after the presidential vote in November.”

Cleta Mitchell speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference

“Cleta Mitchell was a key figure in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, participating in the January 2021 Trump–Raffensperger phone call that attempted to change the certified 2020 presidential election results in Georgia That year, in association with the RNC, she launched the Election Integrity Network (EIN) to recruit, train and deploy election deniers as poll workers in eight key states for the 2024 presidential election. In recordings of spring 2022 organizing meetings obtained by Politico, RNC National Election Integrity director Josh Findlay, referencing EIN, was heard to tell others that the RNC would support efforts to provide staff, organization, and “muscle” in key states The New York Times reported that the EIN “has done more than any other group to take Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action”. Gaining access to over 400 hours of Zoom meetings, The New York Times reported that EIN had closely coordinated with the RNC, four Republican secretaries of state, and a dozen state legislatures. The group was funded by multiple Republican megadonors associated with Trump, and had successfully spread conspiracy theories about voting with several right-wing media outlets and had installed activists on election boards and thousands as poll monitors and workers. EIN has also been collaborating with other groups to challenge voter rolls, including VoteRef (run by Gina Swoboda and funded by Restoration PAC, a Super PAC predominantly funded by Richard Uihlein) and Check My Vote. EIN has also been collaborating with the Election Transparency Initiative, headed by Ken Cuccinelli. The Pennsylvania Department of State described these voter registration challenges as “an attempt to circumvent the list maintenance processes that are carefully prescribed by state and federal law,” which would result in “disenfranchisement, unnecessary litigation, and a harassing diversion of already-stretched county resources.”

“The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a bipartisan nonprofit that helps elections officials in some 30 states manage their registration rolls with the use of software to maintain election integrity. In 2022, ERIC faced criticism from election deniers and right-wing media after the far-right blog The Gateway Pundit published a series of stories falsely suggesting it is part of a left-wing election conspiracy funded by George Soros to register Democrats. Several Republican-controlled states soon severed their association with ERIC. Members of the EIN had lobbied to have the system removed, and their activism was publicized by The Gateway Pundit and other right-wing media outlets. To supplant ERIC, Mitchell led an effort to deploy the EagleAI NETwork election software in the 2024 presidential election. NBC News reported in August 2023 that “election experts and voting rights advocates warn that an activist-led strategy risks overwhelming election workers with reports of problem registrations generated by amateurs using unreliable data. And those reports may, in turn, intimidate voters or require them to jump through hoops to maintain their voting rights.” After months of testing, by July 2024 some conservative activists found the EagleAI system was unreliable. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law called EagleAI “a vehicle to disenfranchise voters and spread disinformation”. The Associated Press reported in June 2024 that EagleAI “is funded and used by supporters of Trump, some of whom worked to overturn the 2020 vote, and entwined with the Republican’s campaign.” AP reported EagleAI was pursuing deployment in several states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Nevada and Ohio.

During an internal meeting about the system, Cleta Mitchell said, “The left will hate this — hate this. But we love it.” Despite its name, the software does not employ artificial intelligence, and though it is pronounced “eagle eye”, its creator denied it was named after Operation Eagle Eye, a 1960s Republican Party voter suppression effort. As of July 2024, at least one county in Georgia signed a contract to use EagleAI for voter roll maintenance.”

“EagleAI is funded by Ziklag, an American Christian organization which includes the Uihlein family and whose goals include as part of “Operation Checkmate”: “[securing] 10,640 additional unique votes in Arizona (mirroring the 2020 margin of 10,447 votes), and [removing] up to one million ineligible registrations and around 280,000 ineligible voters in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin.” Citizen AG, a group self-described as part of Operation Checkmate, announced its intention to file lawsuits against counties that do not accept voter challenges from EagleAI. Ziklag also funded an effort by the American Legislative Exchange Council to share talking points about “election integrity” with Republican party state lawmakers in 2022. Ziklag has also funded right-wing Christian groups and televangelists such as Lance Wallnau to increase turnout of evangelical voters for Trump, especially in swing states.” “Julie Adams, an EIN regional coordinator, sits on the Fulton County, Georgia, elections board and has promoted the use of EagleAI in Georgia. In May 2024, she abstained from certifying the recent county primary results, though no issues of error or misconduct had been raised. State law says that election boards “shall” certify elections if no problems were identified; the four other board members voted to certify. Adams started a lawsuit, backed by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute (AFPI), seeking a court ruling to grant election board members more discretion in certifications. Congresswoman and Georgia Democratic Party chair Nikema Williams alleged that Adams was attempting to set the stage to block certification of results in the November presidential election. Fulton is the most populous county in Georgia with a plurality of Black residents. A Fulton County superior court judge ruled against Adams in October 2024, finding that her actions were unconstitutional and violated state law. The legal arm of AFPI was led by former Florida attorney general and Trump attorney Pam Bondi who filed voting lawsuits in battleground states.”

“Omega4America, initially funded by Mike Lindell, has been promoted by election denial activists as a potential replacement for ERIC. The program has been touted by those activists as being computationally faster, but election experts have cautioned that, without motor vehicle department data, its reliability would be compromised.”

“In August 2024, the Trump-aligned majority of the Georgia State Election Board approved a new rule allowing county election boards, before certifying their election results, to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” to verify the results are “a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in that election”; another vote days later required that county election officials be given “all election related documentation” before certification. Opponents asserted the new rules violated state law and more than a century of state court precedent, and might lead to post-election delays or rejections of certifications in an important swing state. During a campaign rally three days before the board vote, Trump called out by name the three board members who later approved the rule, describing them as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”. One of them was in the rally audience and stood for recognition of Trump’s praise.

On August 26, Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp said he had asked Republican Georgia attorney general Chris Carr if the governor had the authority to remove election board members, citing ethics concerns expressed by some. That same day, national and state Democrats filed a suit alleging the rules changes were illegal and would create chaos. The board majority also approved a rule in September requiring all counties to hand-count their ballots for comparison to machine counts, which critics said might cause errors and confusion while also disrupting the custody of ballots, which typically remain sealed unless a recount is demanded in a challenged election. The recounts could also significantly delay the reporting of election results. In October 2024, a Fulton County superior court judge temporarily blocked the board’s hand counting rule, finding it was “too much, too late” to implement in the 2024 election. The next day, another Fulton County superior court judge found that seven new rules established by the State Election Board were “illegal, unconstitutional and void”, ordering the Georgia State Election Board to inform all state and local election officials that the rules were to be disregarded. An appeal of the latter ruling by the RNC was unanimously rejected by the Georgia Supreme Court days later.”