DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) - On Wednesday, attorney Sidney Powell filed a lawsuit alleging rampant election fraud in the state of Georgia.
Every county in Georgia uses electronic voting software provided by Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion Voting Systems sells its software and equipment to local governments throughout the United States, as well as countries around the world.
But the company is now coming under major scrutiny, with numerous allegations that Dominion's products have been exploited for large-scale election fraud.
This article will explore each of these four points about Dominion.
After people cast their vote, the election officials have the ability to change the results in Dominion.
This feature would be useful in cases where the system doesn't read the ballot correctly. For instance, the contract between Dominion and Santa Clara County in California says Dominion's system "allows staff to adjust tally based on review of scanned ballot images" (page 39, section 2.29).
But some fear this leaves room for fraud by election officials — since it gives them the ability to manually alter the vote tally. (That fraud, however, would likely be exposed in a hand recount of the ballots.)
Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly shed light on this concern during a Nov. 17 interview with Sidney Powell.
Citing the relevant section from the Santa Clara County contract, Kelly remarked to Powell, "Look, you're the lawyer. I'm no tech expert. But that sounds very funky to me."
Alongside Dominion, another company facing renewed skepticism is Smartmatic.
Smartmatic was founded in 2000 by Venezuelan businessmen Antonio Mugica, Alberto Anzola and Roger Pinate. The company's website states it was simply founded in Florida. But the full truth is far more complex.
For starters, the three men began collaborating when they were coworkers in Venezuela.
In 2006, a staffer at the U.S. embassy to Venezuela classified a government memo about the Venezuelan roots of Smartmatic. Now obtainable via Wikileaks, this document states:
Smartmatic has claimed to be of U.S. origin, but its true owners — probably elite Venezuelans of several political strains — remain hidden behind a web of holding companies in the Netherlands and Barbados. The Smartmatic machines used in Venezuela are widely suspected of, though never proven conclusively to be, susceptible to fraud.
Just a few years into the company's existence, Smartmatic obtained a huge contract with the Venezuelan government. Furthermore, election officials "bypassed normal procedures and initiated a closed bid process."
It goes on to say, "Smartmatic won the contract, which totaled at least U.S. $128 million, including the delivery of 20,000 touch-screen voting machines (re-engineered lottery machines) yet to be built. There were immediate questions about how a virtually unknown company with no electoral experience could have landed such a large contract."
The machines were used in a 2004 referendum, which many believe was rigged by Venezuela's socialist government.
The embassy memo came about a year after Smartmatic purchased a California-based company, Sequoia Voting Systems, in 2005. This meant Smartmatic was "working in a dozen U.S. states" through Sequoia.
There were concerns at the time about the risk of foreign interference in U.S. elections, due to Smartmatic's ties to Venezuela. Smartmatic sold off Sequoia about two years later in 2007.
Then, in 2010, Sequoia came under the control of Dominion.
Powell claims Smartmatic's "bad DNA" — of vulnerabilities for tampering — spread into Sequoia and three years later from Sequoia to Dominion.
In 2014, Dominion donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Amid scrutiny, the company recently admitted it made a donation during a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in 2014.
In Toronto, Ontario (Canada), Dominion's offices were on the same floor as the Canadian branch of Soros-funded group Tides.
Earlier this month, conservative Canadian news source Rebel News was on the scene at the office building where Tides and Dominion shared a floor.
After the video's release, Tides contacted Rebel News to say it moved out of the building last year. (This is stated in the description beneath the YouTube video.)
A subsequent video from Rebel News referred to the office building as an "incubator" of leftist ideology.
Regardless of the alleged problems specific to Dominion, there are vulnerabilities in every electronic voting system.
At DEF CON, the world's largest annual hacking convention, hacking into computer voting systems and other voting technologies has yielded surprising results.
In 2018, an 11-year-old boy hacked into a replica of a state election website in under 10 minutes. (However, the data affected by this type of hacking appears to be limited to unofficial results for the media.)
In 2019, DEF CON hackers found a slew of vulnerabilities in voting machines — some of them problems that had been reported for years but left unaddressed. They also found a number of oddities in the equipment. Politico reported, "Testers found a machine hard-coded to ping an overseas IP address with no explanation," to name just one of many problems.