Correspondence With Ohio Officials
Over the past year, the Coalition of Concerned Voters of Ohio (CCVO) has repeatedly raised concerns to officials about the security vulnerabilities in Ohio's voting machines. Despite these warnings, they have shown little interest in addressing the potential risks. The reason for this is they don't believe there is a problem with the machines since they have been certified and tested.
Given the magnitude and seriousness of security flaws found in machines in other states that have also been certified and tested, it doesn't make sense for our election officials to casually ignore these warnings. At a minimum, the Secretary of State should request the Governor to use the Ohio Cyber Reserves to perform an examination of Ohio's machines to determine if they are secure.
April 2023: Email to Board of Voting Machines Examiners (BVME)
In April 2023, CCVO sent an email concerning security vulnerabilities that have been found in voting machines used in other states that Ohio is currently using and asked if the same vulnerabilities could possibly be in Ohio's machines. The email went to Jeff Matthews, the Director of the Ohio Board of Examiners (BVME) and the other three BVME Board members were copied as well.
Since there is no contact information for the BVME on the Secretary of State website, CCVO sent the email to the attention of Jeff Mathews at the Stark County Board of Elections where Mr. Matthews is the Director. After waiting a month for a response, CCVO called the Stark County BOE and spoke with Mr. Matthew's assistant who promised that she would forward the email to Mr. Matthews.
To date, CCVO has not received a response.
December 2023: Letters to BOE (12 counties with Dominion), cc’d to County Commissioners and State Reps/Senators.
Forensic report findings by cyber experts who examined Dominion ICX voting machines in Mesa County Colorado in 2022 showed that the machines contained wireless modems and illegal software that created a backdoor allowing remote access to the machines and the manipulation of votes. In fact, the cyber experts made an image (copy) of the hard drive before the 2020 presidential election and a 2021 municipal election and after the Colorado Secretary of State ordered Dominion to erase all election data for these elections with a software update. In order to follow the law to preserve election data, the county clerk, Tina Peters, hired a cyber team to make before and after copies of the hard drive to ensure critical election data was not lost or altered. What they found was alarming. The forensic examination showed that not only had critical data been deleted, but an alternate data base had been created that proved votes had been manipulated which should nullify the results of the election.
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Instead of being lauded as a hero for exposing election fraud, Tina Peters was vilified by the Colorado Secretary of State as nefariously leaking sensitive state election data that was illegally obtained. The mainstream media suppressed the real story that the Dominion machines were corrupt and instead focused on Tina Peters as the villain. She has served jail time and is currently on trial in Colorado (July 31 2024 to August 12,2024). Information about the trial can be found at freetina.com.
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In December 2023, CCVO sent a letter to all 12 counties in Ohio that use the Dominion ICX machines alerting them to the findings of the Mesa County Reports and to a security advisory issued by CISA, the agency within the Department of Homeland Security charged with protecting the nation's election system. The CISA advisory was sent out in 2022 advising all Board of Elections that Dominion ICX machines in Georgia were found to have extensive security flaws. The purpose of the letter was to not only inform Ohio officials about these flaws, but to determine if Ohio's machines have similar flaws. The two cursory responses CCVO received was an indication that our "elected" officials as well as our "election" officials are not taking the security of our voting machines seriously.
March 2024: Emails and Conference call with Secretary of State's Office
Given the underwhelming response from the December 2023 letter, CCVO reached out to the Secretary of State's office. At a LaRose campaign stop in March 2024, CCVO personally spoke with the Secretary about the CISA advisory and asked if he was concerned about the Dominion machines in Ohio having security issues. He responded that the Georgia Dominion machines were a different configuration from what we have in Ohio and provided a point of contact (POC) within his office if we had further questions. The POC he identified was Brian Katz, the SOS Public Integrity Division Director.
​Our correspondence with Mr.Katz was cordial and although he responded to our inquiries, he often evaded answering our direct questions, instead giving stock talking points that emphasized how safe the machines are in Ohio and why we can trust them. When pressed about providing CCVO proof that no machine in Ohio contained wireless modems, he was unable to provide a copy of the report from the Voting System Testing Laboratory (VSTL) that supposedly performed the testing and instead told us to contact the VSTL directly. The VSTL however told us that they could not provide a copy of the report since the vendor (Dominion) owned it since they paid for it and then sent us back to Katz for a copy. In his last email to CCVO dated July 11, 2024,Katz said that he would forward our request to the SOS Public Records Request office and provided the names of two individuals who would get back withy CCVO "shortly."
To date, we have not received a satisfactory response to the simple question of whether Ohio's voting machines contain wireless modems. Until that proof is made available to the public, we must conclude that they probably do and therefore the machines cannot be certified for use in elections.
