Doubts about Dominion voting machines linger among some

FULTON COUNTY – Casting doubt is easy. Affirming confidence in the accuracy and security of electronic voting machines is the opposite.

Tasked with that difficult job are county board of election officials, like Fulton County’s Republican election commissioner, Lee Hollenbeck, who continues to deal with some voters who persist, despite all evidence to the contrary, in the belief that Dominion Voting Systems machines will not accurately count Republican votes during this year’s midterm elections.

“We get phone calls here about this issue, people say ‘You’ve got Dominion voting machines’, but the machine is not the problem,” Hollenbeck said. “Once they are set up, and programmed right, you can not make them so they can skip somebody, or take a vote away from someone and give it to somebody else, take it from one line or another. You can’t do that.”

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a non-profit journalism research organization, in June published an analysis of five major opinion polls taken between May 26, 2021 and June 1 of this year, which showed at least 70% of Republicans surveyed by Quinnipiac, CNN, UMass Amherst, Washington Post/UMD and Economist/YouGov believe that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020 due to voter fraud.

Some of the theories about voter fraud originate in statements made by former President Donald Trump after his defeat in 2020, alleging the election was stolen from him, and more specifically from outlandish conspiracy theories spread by some of his most vocal supporters regarding the accuracy and security of Canadian-based Dominion Voting Systems.

Fulton, Montgomery counties

Dominion, which has its U.S. headquarters in Colorado, is the New York state-certified provider of the Dominion ImageCast voting machines used in most of the state’s counties, including Fulton, Montgomery, Saratoga, Schoharie, Rensselaer, Herkimer and Hamilton.

The other company certified by New York state for election voting machines is Election Systems & Software (ES&S), which provides the voting machines for Albany, Schenectady, Erie, Nassau and Rockland counties, as well as New York City.

Dominion Voting Systems has filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit accusing MyPillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell, as well as Trump allies Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for spreading theories that Dominion voting machines in 2020 were tampered with when “algorithms” created in Venezuela were used to rig the election against Trump on behalf of the late dictator Hugo Chavez, among other claims.

The company also has filed another similar $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox Corp., alleging the TV hosts on its Fox News and Fox Business channels made defaming statements about the Dominion voting machines after the 2020 election.

The final resolution of those civil lawsuits probably won’t occur for years, but in the meantime the damage to voter confidence, particularly among Republicans, continues to be strong, many political science scholars believe. A national opinion poll released in October from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed 45% of Republicans have little to no confidence that the votes in the midterm election will be counted accurately, although 25% of Republicans do have high confidence, leaving 30% with “moderate confidence.”

During the public comment period of the Oct. 25 meeting of the Montgomery County Legislature, a man who said his name was Joe Stone, from the town of Florida, expressed some of the lingering doubts about the accuracy of electronic voting machines. Stone told the Legislature a recent audit of election machines in Torrance County, New Mexico, showed a “25% difference between machine and hand counted results.”

The Associated Press on Oct. 23 reported on the recount Stone referenced.  The article focused on how Republican election officials in Torrance County have “tried everything” in their efforts to persuade voters their election machines are secure, including a hand recount of ballots of their June 7 primary election, despite no evidence of fraud. The Associated Press said the hand recount showed “discrepancies between those tallies and the machine count in June, though not enough to change individual races.”

Montgomery County Republican Election Commissioner Terrance Smith said he’s given up on trying to explain to people that Montgomery County’s Dominion voting machines will not undercount Republican votes.

“I’ve had too many discussions with them already,” Smith said. “You can’t convince them, and they certainly can’t convince me, so I don’t really have much of a response. I just thank you for the information.”

All Local News

Montgomery County Democratic Election Commissioner Terry Bieniek said he is familiar with Stone, who he said has attempted to file a Freedom of Information Law Request with Montgomery County for access to the county’s paper ballots from 2020. Bieniek said the county can’t release the paper ballots unless there’s a court order, but he said there’s no reason to believe the ballots deviate from the official results from the Dominion machines.

Bieniek said he believes if more people understood the safeguards that exist in New York state for the Dominion voting machines they would trust the results.

“The machines are tested before every election,” Bieniek said. “We keep the machines in complete operational condition. And we test them before every election, and they pass. So, as far as we’re concerned, they’re accurate.”

VOTING MACHINE SAFEGUARDS

Smith said one of the most common concerns he hears from voters is that they fear the Dominion voting machines will be hacked from cyberspace.

“For starters, the machines and the hardware that produces the ballot files are not connected to the internet,” Smith said. “Prior to any election, and at least once a year, each machine is tested, and it’s tested not just with a couple of ballots. Because of the size of the ballot this year, we put roughly 30 ballots through each machine. Those ballots are marked with specific results, varying types of results, and — before they are put through the machine — they are tallied, so that when the results come through the machine, we know what’s supposed to be the results. [That’s to make sure] the machines are counting the ballots [accurately], the way we expect it to.”

Election commissioners in Fulton and Montgomery counties also said all Dominion machines have seals, resembling zip ties, each with its own unique serial number that are placed over the machines’ memory chips.

“There’s no way you can go in and take a memory card out of a machine and put it back in without us knowing it,” said Hollenbeck, the Fulton County Republican election commissioner. “We would know immediately if something was wrong.”

Fulton County Democratic Election Commissioner G. Jerry Ryan said some voters in Fulton County believe every Dominion voting machine starts on Election Day with a vote count of zero and after the polls close the total vote count on each machine must match the number of votes on the completely separate E-poll book system used to collect voter signatures, which tallies every in-person voter and the time the person voted.

“If in a ward in Gloversville there were 500 votes, that 500 number will come up in two places, in the voting machine and the poll book,” Ryan said. “There’s no way that some Italian satellite or somebody can get in there, nobody can get in there and stuff it.”

Ryan said when a person votes at an election precinct an election inspector asks the person what their name is, “and then, audibly, so a poll watcher can hear it or the inspector can hear it,” the person gives their name, which is then checked in the poll book. The voter then signs the electronic poll book and the signature is checked against the person’s past signature.

“The other thing we ask is, ‘Where do you live’, and you’ve got to tell us where you live, we can’t tell you where you live,” Ryan said.

Fulton, Montgomery counties

NEW YORK STATE’S 3% AUDIT RULE

New York state law requires the county Board of Elections or a bipartisan team appointed by the BOE to manually count all paper ballots from no less than 3% of each type of voting machine or system used within the county. Candidates and the general public are invited to watch the count.

Smith said in Montgomery County they’ve never discovered any discrepancies between the machine count and the hand count of ballots during the random audit.

Bieniek said another safeguard is that the room where the ballots are kept has multiple locks on it, including one padlock each for the Republican and Democratic election commissioners, ensuring that neither can access the election ballots without the involvement of the other.

“We do audit the results after every election,” Bieniek said. “We randomly pick one site, and then we do an audit.”

All Local News

Categories: Email Newsletter, Fulton Montgomery Schoharie, News, News, Saratoga County, Schenectady County