November 6 – Allegations of Vote Fraud and Voter Suppression Embroil Ohio

Summary: Vote totals in several rural Ohio counties show signs of manipulation, according to elections experts, who say that they may be the product of hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in the 13 different voting systems used across Ohio’s 88 counties.  Independent journalists exposed a campaign to confuse voters about absentee ballots which has been linked to Roger Stone.  After winning a April 2020 Supreme Court case over counting late absentee ballots in Wisconsin, Republicans are taking the exact opposite position after a cache of ballots from right-leaning counties were found.  Protests in downtown Milwaukee were met with force from unidentified federal officers.  Former Sheriff David Clark’s “Citizen Sheriffs” were forced to withdraw from the County Courthouse after one member fired in the air, but the controversial lawman says he is negotiating with DHS Secretary Chad Wolf to redeploy to the Federal Courthouse.  End Summary

Roger Stone linked to “Right Way” “Elections Guides”

Since a ProPublica investigation found dozens of registered voters received what they believed were false ballots in the mail, another independent media organization traced their origins to “Right Way,” a marketing company linked to convicted felon Roger Stone, who denied allegations of wrongdoing.  With a wink and a nod, he told the New York Times, “the mailings Right Way sent out are intended to show first time voters how to vote; of course our elections guides looked like ballots, it isn’t our fault if people were confused by them.”   All of the “voting guides” discovered thus far, which only reveal they are not actual ballots in extremely fine print, were mailed to African Americans over the age of 60.

Allegations of Artificially Inflated Votes for Trump in Rural Ohio Counties

President Trump won Ohio’s Lake County by an 8-point margin in 2016 despite exit polls showing a race that was virtually tied.  The county is still using the same old and insecure ES&S iVotroni voting machine, a paperless machine referred to as “Flipper” by election integrity experts because of previously documented instances of votes being spontaneously changed, and a  incident where 5000 phantom votes appeared suddenly during a 2008 Colorado election.  In 2016, Trump won 64,255 (55%) to Clinton’s 46,399 (40%).  In 2020, Lake County reports For Trump 75,525 (61%) to Biden’s 45,253 (37%), despite predictions of a tight race.  Elections watchers are crying foul, but with no paper ballots to audit, there is no way to recount ballots in Lake County.  In a close race, these votes may prove decisive.

In Fairfield County an unusual number of ballots were recorded with invalid votes for President.  Trump won the county with 42,401 votes (61 % and fewer than in 2016), while just 21,434 (31%) were recorded for Biden (down from Clinton’s 34%), and 1,525 (2.2%) ballots did not record a vote for President.  While this could be people abstaining from voting in the presidential election, it is a much higher number than any other Ohio County.  Elections expert Ryan Faldwell said this could be an sign a flaw in these particular voting machines had been exploited, noting that Fairfield County uses DRE Dominion Image Cast X (ICX) voting machines with a V-PAT which "after you mark your ballot, after you review your ballot, the voting machine can print more votes on it."  The vote reading machines Fairfield County uses interpret two votes in the same election as a single invalid vote.  The county’s elections website does not report these votes, which were only noticed when elections integrity activists started looking into the data to learn why Democratic Candidate for Fairfield County Commissioner outperformed Biden in an otherwise not very notable race.

After news of the irregularities broke, lawyers from the Democratic Party have sued to impound the voting machines across Ohio pending a physical audit, but a judge has yet to rule on the order, and more than 72 hours have passed with the machines mostly unattended, giving attackers time to erase their trace, if they were indeed hacked.  However, this process if complicated by Ohio’s many different voting systems, which according to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s website, Ohio’s 88 counties use 13 different vote counting and tabulation systems.  Statistical analysis of voting patterns shows indicators of irregularities in several other counties, including Delaware County, Licking County, and Franklin County – the location of the state capital of Columbus, where DHS officers have deployed in force in response to protests over continued delays in counting mail-in ballots.  If Ohio were outside the borders of the United States, the U.S. State Department would not have certified the 2020 election results as the results of a free and fair election.

Armed Clashes in Wisconsin Amid Court Battle over Several Thousand Ballots Found in a Processing Center

A large tub containing thousands of ballots from Wisconsin’s conservative “WOW” counties have been discovered at a mail processing center in Milwaukee, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and a state senator.  In an extraordinarily similar case filed in April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Republican arguments in a 5-4 decision that absentee ballots must be in the hands of clerks by election day or postmarked by then to be counted.  However Republican lawyers have taken a different position in this case, arguing that because this is the second time this has occurred, they suspect a deliberate attempt to ensure certain voters are not heard.

As lawyers argue inside the federal U.S. District Court for Milwaukee, protesters continue to surround the Milwaukee County Courthouse, just about a mile away.  A revolving march is going back and forth between the two sites with a full drum corps.  Protesters hanging banners over several bridges spanning the Milwaukee River were shot with rubber bullets by unidentified federal officers riding in Coast Guard boats.  A spokesman for U.S. Coast Guard Sector Lake Michigan refused to acknowledge whether the Coast Guard was deployed against protesters in Milwaukee, but said “as part of the Department of Homeland Security, we are following the President’s directives to provide support to local law enforcement, and conducting our normal operations, such as regular freedom of navigation operations.”

Video from protesters live streamed through Facebook showed an increasingly large presence of irregularly uniformed but heavily armed troops surrounding both court houses.  Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clark removed his “Citizen Sheriffs” from the county courthouse after a report that one of them discharged his weapon into the air in a threatening manner.  However, he posted on twitter that he was negotiating with DHS Secretary Chad Wolf to redeploy them to the Federal Courthouse.