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| Stephen Spoonamore: The mysteries behind an election hack (YouTube) |
Hundreds of registered voters in Pennsylvania say they are receiving $100 checks related to the 2024 presidential election from Elon Musk's America PAC, even though many claim they did not sign the petition -- with others stating they did not even vote. Stephen Spoonamore, one of the nation's top voting-security experts, is investigating the matter and says it might have been part of a scheme to change the outcome of the election.
Some voters now are concerned that they might have unwittingly gotten involved in election fraud. From a report at Fox43 News in York, PA:
Jeanne Fermier, who lives in Springettsbury Township, York County, said she was surprised when she received a $100 check on Election Day from “United States of America Inc.”
"I thought, 'This is strange,' so I opened it and it's a check for $100, and the memo field says 'America PAC Petition,'" Fermier said.
The America PAC petition was launched by Musk in October. In a post on X, Musk invited registered voters in Pennsylvania to sign, promising $100 for signers and anyone who referred them.
People who signed the petition didn't have to promise they would vote for a certain candidate, or even that they would vote at all. They also weren't paid to vote. They just had to be registered to vote.
Fermier says she never signed the petition and never gave anyone permission to use her name.
Fermier is a registered voter in Pennsylvania, but she is registered as "no party affiliation." She fears someone could have gotten that information and thought, "I could sign her up for this and get the referral money." Fermier has filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Department of State.
"I'd like to know who signed me up and ask the question, 'Why do you think it was okay to do that without my knowledge?'" she said.She wants answers about who signed her up and why.
FOX43 Finds Out reached out to the Pennsylvania Department of State and the Federal Election Commission about this story to ask if it was election fraud. We were told they would not be the agency involved in any investigation and that would be the Department of Justice.
We also asked the PA Attorney General's Office if they had any other similar complaints, and they would not confirm nor deny anything.
On Nov. 4, one day before the election a state judge in Pennsylvania allowed Musk's $1 million-a-day giveaway to swing state voters to proceed, after a surprising day of testimony in which the billionaire's aide acknowledged his political group selected the contest's winners.
With one day to go before the tightly contested U.S. presidential election between Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, lawyers for Musk's pro-Trump America PAC sought to persuade Judge Angelo Foglietta that the contest was not an "illegal lottery," as Philadelphia's top prosecutor alleged.
Could the Musk lottery scheme have turned the election in Trump's favor? Spoonamore is investigating that and other issues in a race that featured extraordinarily close polling numbers much of the way, but ended with Trump landing a relatively comfortable victory over Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, Pennsylvanians -- public officials and regular rolks --are raising questions about the possible illegality of the lottery, as are higher-ups at the U.S. Department of Justice.
That is one of several issues to attract Spoonamore's attention during a quiet period for the Thanksgiving holiday. At his Substack page, Spoonmore writes under the headline "Duplicate ePollBook Checks, Hand Recount Updates, Technical Notes on CVI/CVRs"
Sub-Headline: "I can't unsee that the Seven Swings output is machine made, not human. Nor can I forget the declared winner is a felon surrounded by a bunch of folks who conduct coups for fun. I'm never normalizing that."
Spoonamore goes on to write, touching on several election-related topics. His insights are particularly important because no one else, particularly someone with his credentials in the elections field, seems to be giving this kind of scrutiny to a race that featured all kinds of oddities, and was expected to be hyper close, but ended with Trump sweeping all seven swing states:
(1) Was the Musk $1 million-a-day giveway legit, or a case of election fraud?
Stephen Spoonamore
Dec 03, 2024
A huge number of people are getting $100 checks from Elon Musk's PAC. Many hundreds of them claim they never signed his pledge. Some of them even claim they never voted in the election. If you or anyone you know got a check, but did not sign up and/or did not vote, I want that person’s contact information. Dog-on-a-Bone here proving how the duplicate ePollBook was built and how I believe it was used to alter the outcome of the election. Post in comments or post at ballotbounty.com.
(2) Recounts matter in Michigan -- and in other precincts:
Big-time respect to MI SoS and MI House candidate Jim Haadsma. His race has had three different results output by the local tabulator. He has lost by 1,400, 63, and, 58 votes in three different ballot runs with two different sets of software programming. He has won a court-ordered hand recount to be held on Dec. 9. This will cover 107 Precincts in the Battle Creek, MI area. This is the largest hand recount I am aware of in a swing state.
“We trust that the hand recount will reach the correct result,” Chris Trebilcock, Haadsma’s lawyer is quoted. Yes. Yes indeed. More of this please. Hand-Marked paper ballots, hand counted. That is how a democracy confirms it is, a democracy.
Many thanks to many people working to demand their precincts get hand recounts. I will post a full list of confirmed local recounts.
(3) Is Harris in hiding?
Over Thanksgiving multiple people sent me screenshots of Kamala Harris during her thank-you Zoom with grass-roots leaders who supported her campaign. The chat column is a shrill Greek chorus of furies calling for recounts. Some of those furies are pretty big names in the Democratic organizing community. She ignored them and now joins Mr. Gore, Mr. Cleland and Mr. Kerry, in having elections riven with tabulation theft. Gore and Cleland did not at the time understand what had happened. Mr. Kerry was not caught by surprise, but seemed unable to understand the urgency and importance of engaging to demand recounts.
Ms. Harris though, is wholly different than candidates of that bygone era. Every American now likely understands hacking is a thing, and has multiple notifications of data breach in their desk drawer. Ms. Harris’ own past-self wrote whole chapters about the danger of hacked elections in her own past-selves’ own book. Some have speculated to me that she, or everyone around her, is inactive because they have been threatened. I don’t buy that. She’s from law enforcement, threatening LE folks tends to make them more agro, not less. At this point, my guess is she really does not believe she won. And maybe she didn’t. But the data now being certified nationwide, in my opinion, is hacked.
(4) A modest attack on democracy:
In the world of cyber crime, this attack is a modest effort. Forget the mostly false talking point that tabulators are not networked. They are not supposed to be network accessible WHILE they are tabulating. But they are all programmed in advance, either in person or over network access. They are updated and contacted by many persons. They have, at minimum a flash-drive access.
I think many people may not understand that tabulation machines actually are pretty sophisticated and have several core functions each with different programming, risks and functions. They scan. Interpret the scan. Tabulate the interpretation., Store the scans as CVR images. And lastly, compile the various runs and races and upload the outputs.
During the first process, the scan of the ballot, they just make an image. The votes are NOT counted directly from the ballot, but from a computer analysis of the SCANNED IMAGE. This is not a trivial distinction. There are counting devices for many things including currency, standardized tests, proxy votes etc which DO NOT make an image of the paper item to be sent on for interpretation by other software, but actually do “count” the tally directly from the paper itself. One reason this is important, it is relatively hard and much more labor intensive to add or subtract paper items being scanned. By contrast, from a hacker’s perspective, it is extremely easy to add or remove electronic images into a system designed to manage electronic images.
The paper ballots, become CVIs (Cast Vote Images), which are then reviewed by software to create CVRs (Cast Vote Records). This is accomplished by the CVI having scanned images with registry marks all around the edges, and the software compares these registry marks with any black dots it sees on a page, which it views as a reference grid. The computer has been programmed by a vendor, to know which “dots” correspond to a bubble next to a candidate's name on that election's particular points on the image grid. A dot on that correct spot on the grid, tallies a vote for that candidate or issue.
There are a number of ways to compromise this.
Part of the pitch of companies like Dominion and ES&S is their proprietary software. But both of those companies have had their software copied by GOP activists associated with Sydney Powell and others in Trump’s orbit. Copies of the software have been taken from counties in FL, GA, AZ, MI, PA, TX, and CO. You can read the legal filings, concerns, and numerous news articles. Functionally, at least 85% of the tabulation systems used in the U.S., use software duplicated by right-wing activists who make it no secret that they have this access. Why? Just for the Lolz of wearing DvsCorp08! firmware pass-code T-Shirts and offer them on Etsy?
I don’t think so.
In the hands of sophisticated hackers this software, and this system, would allow a load of possible exploits. Looking at the absurd published results, all of which appear machine-manufactured, not created by human behavior, I think votes were injected into the system during the hours after polls closed. I am sure the machines worked fine in the weeks before the election, and again hours after the election, but the code is in there and dormant. Only a complete audit will find it.
Let me share two similar hacks I personally helped uncover. One had scripts, which swapped credit- card settlement numbers from an aggregation layer of a retailer, in effect “padding” the profits of the merchant. The second had scripts written into banking check-image deposit systems which clipped parts of account numbers from check images and replaced them with alternative numbers. That was an insider embezzlement scheme, with the required insider access and knowledge of the code. I believe both of those conditions exist in the election, as well.
Either of these strategies could be applied to the presidential vote in part of all of the swing states. A script could be added at the software layer in which the Ballot Image (CVI) is interpreted into a vote total. The script would simply look for black dots at the grid reference for Kamala, clip the dot, and then move the dot into the grid reference for Trump. The IMAGE of the ballot once changed would then be counted. As the image is then permanently altered, you can review the CVRs forever, and the false result will be forever the outcome. Alternatively, there are hundreds of Gigs of storage available inside these machines allowing them to store 50,000K+ image scans of the ballots. A clever hack would be to preload sets of ballots filled out with Trump -- and/or all/other other race combinations could be included. As long as Trump is leading by a designated amount, the script sits dormant. Nothing happens. If Kamala begins leading, the script can start swapping out the right proportion of Kamala ballots with the prestored stock of ballot images. It can be substituted for one of the pre-loaded Trump ballots.
These are just two of numerous methods and scripts which could accomplish an outcome-reversing hack of the vote. A computer will output whatever it is programmed to output, by whoever has programmed it. In both cases the number of ballots, the epollbook numbers and the number of ballot images will match. BUT if you actually hand count the ballots, you will get a different outcome from the machine stored images.
Either of my two scripts, or several others suggested by friends, would only be discovered by a human recount of the original hand-marked paper ballots.
Many thanks to the hundreds of people who joined these efforts
On a personal note, my 11-year-old son was born long after my 1998-2008 battle to stop touch-screen-machines and demand #HandMarkedPaperBallots. He has been cringing at the YouTube. watching all my old videos on the subject. He says this is the best one--or the least weird. (The photo also can be viewed at the top of this post.)
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