Capitol News

A bipartisan group of software engineers has come out with initial findings from the 2020 elections in Michigan showing anomalies suggesting a computer algorithm was functioning inappropriately in voting machines.

The group was led by Shiva Ayyadurai, an inventor and software engineer who recently lost the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts, Bennie Smith a Democratic Party elections official in Shelby County Tennessee and Phil Evans who is a software engineer and entrepreneur.

The group's findings were clear, the election integrity in many jurisdictions across the country is vulnerable. 

“This is not a Republican, Democrat, independent issue – this is an American issue,” Ayyadurai said. “It's an engineering issue.” 

In Michigan, the group said 2020 election results from four counties they studied appear to show evidence of an algorithm improperly influencing the outcome of the voting machines tally.

In particular, the group pointed to a feature on voting machines that allows for votes to be weighed. In other words, the vote loses its value as a single vote once entered into a voting machine. 

Weighted voting takes a person’s vote and allows it to have varying degrees of influence, such as allowing the voter to rank candidates. Proponents of weighted voting believe that this way, a vote is never “wasted.”

“The documented feature of a weighted election is such, such a bad idea,” Smith said. “The only thing that can verify to us in a black box is the input and if we don't know, we don't know. We can't know if a weighted election was conducted. It's a feature, it's not a bug. So the only way we could get back to that is for the citizens to be able to remove the computers from the situation.”  

In 2002 Diebold added the weighted option to its election systems, something the group said has been duplicated by other voting machine systems manufacturers. 

Smith added that while a weighted election is easy to detect it is not as easy to determine if the setting was selected improperly or if there was bad intention from those with access to voting machines. 

The group said they believe Trump votes were transferred to Biden and that their analysis backs up such a claim, but that there simply is no way to properly verify the election. 

“Did (Biden) have such a massive landslide that we analyzed one county based on someone saying that they saw some switches and it being confirmed that votes did switch?” Smith said. 

Ayyadurai said that is part of the problem. 

“The reality is the United States voting systems, the inputs and outputs to our voting systems are unverifiable,” he said. “That means the evidence is ambiguous.” 

The group analyzed data from Oakland, Macomb, Kent and Wayne counties finding what looks like weighted voting within each of the counties.

In Oakland County, Ayyadurai said Evans looked at data for the county and found that it looks like 20,000 votes were taken from Trump and given to Biden.

Ayyadurai said once Trump hit 20% of votes, it looked like his votes became linearly reduced.

In Macomb County, the data showed that this happened when Trump hit about 25 percent of the votes, meaning 14,000 votes were taken from him and given to Biden.

In Kent County, Ayyadurai said the data showed that around the 25 percent mark, Trump leveled out again and it looked like 22,500 votes were taken from him and given to Biden.

In Wayne County, the algorithm wasn’t applied. It showed that Trump was doing better in Democratic precincts.

Right now there is a lawsuit going on in Wayne County where a Detroit employee alleged that she was instructed to pre-date absentee ballots for the election.

The employee, Jessy Jacob, claims ballots that were received later were being backdated in the system and she observed other election workers and employees coaching people to vote for Biden. 

“Is there any doubt in your mind what percentage chance is it that what we're seeing is not a computer algorithm?” Evans asked Smith. 

“I really would say zero percent. So I maybe say one percent. If you get in trouble, if you don't leave a little little room for error. It's just not something you would see,” Smith said. 

 Smith said there is an easy solution going forward. 

 “The handmarked paper ballot is such a viable solution to this, because if at any point you want to remove the computers from the process, you can still arrive at an output that is a true input. The voter intent is enshrined,” Smith said. 

“The issue that everyone needs to understand, we need to fire the Democrats,”  “We need to fire the Republicans. We as people need to unite.”