The election management system at the heart of election integrity concerns in several states
On 2 October, just one month before the 2020 election, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Christopher Krebs released an official statement summarizing his agency’s ongoing efforts with public and private sector partners to protect the 2020 elections from foreign interference. He stated:
“We’re now in the final stretch of the election and tens of millions of voters have already cast their votes free from foreign interference. We remain confident that no foreign cyber actor can change your vote, and we still believe that it would be incredibly difficult for them to change the outcome of an election at the national level.”
Just one day after the election of 4 November, Krebs made this official statement to reinforce that narrative:
“Over the last four years…, we have no evidence any foreign adversary was capable of preventing Americans from voting or changing vote tallies.”
Just nine days after the election as reports of election integrity concerns were beginning to make news around the country, Krebs issued this official statement from CISA on 12 November:
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history…. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” (emphasis in the original)
No investigative reports or analyses have ever been offered by CISA, the FBI’s Election Crimes and Security division, the Dept of Justice’s Election Crimes Branch, or any US government agency to back up these claims. On the other hand, continuing reports of election integrity irregularities have been produced as a result of independent efforts by data analysts, engineers, accountants, statisticians, computer scientists, mathematicians, cyber experts, and citizen activists to ascertain what happened during the 2020 election. A small sampling includes the following:
The numerous reports completed in 2021 and continually updated at election-integrity.info detailing election irregularities in several swing states, as well as the summary results in spreadsheet format of over 90 election fraud lawsuits.
The Epoch Times reported this past January that in California
“[a]n election integrity group said 10.9 million out of a total 22.1 million ballots that had been mailed out to registered voters during the 2022 midterm elections went ‘unaccounted for.’”
Garland Favorito, head of VoterGA.org, and his cyber experts itemized fifteen categories of ballot irregularities found during their analysis of ballot images for the 2020 election acquired from Fulton County, GA, and found that “the number of unsupportable ballots found for this one county is forty-five times larger than Biden’s margin of victory for the entire state,” as reported in American Thinker in February 2023.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s disclosure on 30 May 2023 that the Pennsylvania State Dept “has been accidentally registering foreign nationals to vote for two decades.”
The Spekin Forensic Laboratories report completed 26 July 2023 that concluded that as many as 34,000 absentee ballots cast in several Detroit, MI, precincts illegally had no signed ballot application.
Gateway Pundit quoted Michigan State Senator Ruth Johnson, a former Secretary of State, stating that “over 800,000 ballot applications were sent to non-qualified voters in Michigan, including many individuals who moved or died, and even some individuals who were underage or non-citizens.”
These and other continuing reports have persuaded a large number of Americans that election integrity issues did in fact influence the outcome of the 2020 election, according to Rasmussen poll last year: “55% of Likely U.S. voters believe cheating likely affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, including 39% who think it’s Very Likely.”
But what about the CISA claim that there was “no foreign interference” in the 2020 election? Analysis recently completed by South Dakota Canvassing, a citizen activist group specializing on election integrity, has uncovered evidence that suggests otherwise.
Let us examine what has been discovered.
ELECTION NIGHT IRREGULARITIES
It was widely reported that swing states, such as Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina. stopped the vote counting in the middle of the night after which point massive numbers of newly tabulated Biden ballots subsequently tipped the election. What is less widely known is that each state in the country experienced a vote total reset to zero on election night, including South Dakota. This phenomenon was called Edison Zero, as Edison Research, which provides the election night reporting system used by the media to “call” elections, is where the votes were reset to zero, as graphically depicted for each state here. From the Edison Zero reset, the new vote tabulations erased Trump leads in several states, which resulted in Biden’s ballot victory, as described in detail here.
How did this happen – an unprecedented phenomenon that has heretofore never been adequately explained?
As the SD Canvassing team worked to assess the situation in South Dakota, the same issues were uncovered in the rest of the country by other independent researchers that were found in South Dakota on a smaller scale, including outdated voter rolls, evidence of ghost voters, dead voters, duplicate voters, stolen votes, lost votes, broken voter registrations, and more. All video surveillance of drop boxes was deleted, absentee fraud was proven, and mass evidence of perjured voter registration forms was collected.
Further detailed analysis of the publicly available election data by the team determined that voter rolls and electronic poll pads were the key to voter fraud. An investigation of the company in charge of managing the voter rolls and poll pads exposed a connection with previous SD secretaries of state and a trail of contracts, voter rolls, and supporting documentation involving several other key states, including Arizona, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon Pennsylvania, and Washington. The common denominator across all of these states was that they all used the election night reporting system, poll books, and voter roll maintenance software called Total Vote by BPro, Inc., of Pierre, South Dakota.
WHAT IS BPRO?
In 2007, South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson commissioned a project entitled the Central Election Reporting System (CERS) Case Study that investigated the benefits of replacing the existing manual reporting system with a central computerized system for election night reporting by SD counties. CERS was later renamed Total Vote, and Bpro is the company that developed the TotalVote system with funding under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to deliver the desired functionality (and more). It was implemented in South Dakota, and Nelson presented it to the National Association of Election Officials at their 25th annual meeting in San Diego, CA as detailed here.
Under a 2009 contract with the State of North Dakota, Nelson gave away the state-owned source code to Total Vote, valued at $100,000.00, as well as a sole-source contract with BPro, Inc. (solicitation available here).
Jason Gant ran for SD Secretary of State in 2010, and during his campaign, his PAC accepted funds from BPro, Inc. of $7,500 and ES&S of Omaha, NE of $10,000, as reported by the Mitchell Republic. The State of Nebraska also signed a contract for the election night reporting system with BPro in 2010.
After Gant was elected in 2011, he hosted a pheasant hunt with other secretaries of state from across the country, with Brandon Campea, who became owner of BPro, also in attendance, as reported here. These and other marketing efforts aided by Gant were apparently successful in exporting Bpro TotalVote to many other states, resulting in lucrative contracts for BPro.
For example, in 2014, Hawaii signed a sole-source contract with BPro for the voter roll maintenance and election night reporting system, as posted under Hawaii’s Uniform Information Practices Act (UIPA) here. In May of 2015, the then former Secretary of State Jason Gant “gifted” the SD state-owned Total Vote source code to New Mexico, valued at $1,000,000.00, resulting in a lucrative sole-source contract with BPro, as reported here.
BPro secured contracts with other states such as Montana, Iowa, Arizona, Hawaii, Washington ($10 million), Pennsylvania ($10 million), Oregon ($7 million) and more, as reported here. It seems this plan to give away the state-owned source code to Total Vote was a success, and BPro benefited from sole source contracts since BPro was the only company determined to be able to operate and service the product.
WHAT DOES BPRO DO?
BPro’s TotalVote Election Night Reporting and Voter Roll Maintenance System is a centralized, cloud-based election system that connects multiple election-related databases via the internet, including ballot management and design systems, ballot printing, ballot tabulation, voter registration, voter signatures, precinct management, address verification, campaign finance, election night reporting, and election management. In short, TotalVote does everything having to do with an election except run paper ballots through a digital scanner.
With a single piece of software controlling all of these functions, there would be far-reaching consequences if the system could be subverted. There is evidence that it has been. For example, researchers in New Mexico found that registrations in their TotalVote implementation appear to be injected automatically according to an algorithm, and researchers in Hawaii found that voter registrations in their database had been illegally backdated.
TotalVote is performing functionality using software that must be certified according to HAVA, yet TotalVote has no certification whatsoever. Several states, including New Mexico and South Dakota, are processing official election results using TotalVote instead of their certified Dominion or ES&S systems. States are also using TotalVote to process election night reporting even though HAVA forbids election night reporting data from being mixed with official election results. The reason that these two data streams must remain separate is that if someone wanted to fabricate election night reporting (as apparently seems to have been the case in 2020), then fake official election results could be backfilled, and no one would know.
Election officials enjoy telling the public that their election systems are not online, or that they are “air-gapped” to prevent real-time access by external systems. In reality, official election results are frequently processed via cloud-based software such as TotalVote before the results are ever certified, as was noted to be the case in New Mexico here.
BPRO CONNECTIONS TO VARIOUS EXTERNAL DATABASES
Not only is TotalVote being used illegally in elections, the system is also connected to a variety of federal and statewide databases, including Geographic Information System (GIS) (to geolocate voters), National Change of Address (NCOA) database, American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), Dept of Motor Vehicles (DMV), Social Security Information (SSA), Electronic Registration Information Center, Inc. (ERIC), Dept of Health (DOH), and other miscellaneous data bases that contain information on US citizens eligible to vote, depending on the state-specific implementation.
The ability of TotalVote to directly access these databases raises multiple red flags. The DMV connection seems to make sense, as many voters are registered at the DMV, and the connection would facilitate updating voter rolls accordingly. However, most states require information entered at DMV to be reviewed by someone at the county clerk’s office prior to being accepted into the voter registration database to ensure that the registration is not a duplicate. Concern would arise if the interconnectivity between TotalVote and the DMV system was automatic and no longer being checked by a person.
AAMVA is a private organization that administers the AAMVAnet program “is a conduit that provides access to biographical information collected by state Motor Vehicle Agencies (MVA)” in all 50 states, as described by DHS here. AAMVA also collects information on undocumented immigrants and legal aliens. AAMVA is in turn connected to multiple other federal databases and programs. If a bad actor needed to inject non-citizens into the voter rolls, connection to a database that houses information on non-citizens could be subverted to do that.
ERIC stated purpose is to cross-check databases across state lines to look for duplicate voter registrations. A less-advertised feature of this program is that it also looks for what it says are eligible but unregistered voters using DMV databases, yet it purposely does not collect information on citizenship. This means that the ERIC system could be used by county election officials to solicit non-citizens to register to vote. At least eight states have left the ERIC consortium after public outcry over its highly partisan origins and its failure to clean the voter rolls in any state.
Integration with DOH makes no sense whatsoever, but it is reminiscent of a whistleblower who came forward in October 2021 to report that Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania conducted a “secret project” where the 700,000 entries in the database from the DOH was allegedly merged with the registration database, likely injecting hundreds of thousands of false or duplicate registrations. That whistleblowe’sr statement is available here.
Why a secretary of state would need GIS data to geolocate voters makes little sense when voter rolls are not even routinely compared to the National Change of Address database to remove registrations with addresses that do not exist. Having voters distributed with GIS, however, would make purposeful sabotage of precincts that lean heavily to one party easy to determine with GIS tools, as happened in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race. It would also be easier to use GIS tools to distribute fake registrations to precincts as this process could be automated.
In examining the New Mexico SOS election night reporting map, dedicated researchers discovered an icon called Leaflet that links to a website identifying Volodomyr Agafonkin, citizen of Kyiv, Ukraine, as its creator.
Further research led to the following discoveries of foreign nationals listed as Executives of BPro, Inc. of Pierre, SD. BPro’s employee directory is available here, from which the following are individuals are noteworthy:
- Vladyslav Pelekh – Chief Executive Officer of BPro, Inc., Pierre, SD. LOCATED: Kiev, Ukraine
- Vladyslav Ryaboklyach – Tendering Manager of BPro, Inc., Pierre, SD. LOCATED: Kiev, Ukraine
- Alexey Krnaukhov – Project Coordinator of BPro, Inc., Pierre, SD. LOCATED: Ukraine
- Tyhama Qlyshi – Senior Frontend Developer of BPro, Inc., Pierre, SD. LOCATED: Homs, Syria
- Sergio Shakhov – Employee of BPro, Inc., Pierre, SD. LOCATED: Ukraine
- Abhishek Paswan – Employee of BPro, Inc., Pierre, SD. LOCATED: Gorakhpur, Haryana, India
- Kuldeep Jio – Employee of BPro, Inc., Pierre, SD. LOCATED: Pithoragarh, Uttarakhand, India.
There are other BPro executives and employees in addition to the above from foreign countries, including Vietnam and Morocco.
BPro was bought by Knowink of St. Louis, MO, in December 2020, with the acquisition announced in February 2021. Knowink retained all of the BPro employees, subject matter experts, and the original storefront office in Pierre, SD.
Upon review of at least a dozen states’ contracts with BPro (see list of states above that use Bpro), most of them contain a clause requiring the work on sensitive data be performed in the US, including by all subcontractors. For example, the Arizona clause states the following, as noted here: “Any services that are described in the specifications or scope of work that directly serve the State of Arizona or its clients and involve access to secure or sensitive data or personal client data shall be performed within the defined territories of the United States. Unless specifically stated otherwise in the specifications, this paragraph does not apply to indirect or ‘overhead’ services, redundant back-up services or services that are incidental to the performance of the contract. This provision applies to work performed by subcontractors at all tiers. Offerors shall declare all anticipated offshore services in the proposal.”
The use of all the above listed foreign nationals (and others) cannot be in compliance with these contracts which stipulated that the work on national critical infrastructure is to be performed in the US (election systems were designated as critical infrastructure by Obama’s outgoing DHS secretary on 6 January 2017). These activities would appear to be in direct violation of CISA’s mission of protecting our national critical infrastructure. There is no evidence that CISA has investigated these foreign connections to US election systems managed by BPro in several states. Were any of BPro’s foreign employees involved in operating and maintaining BPro Total Vote Systems during election night in 2020?
OTHER BPRO CONNECTIONS
BPro’s TotalVote system is a key component of Arizona’s Access Voter Access Voter Information Database (AVID) that provides predictive analytics and real time big data analysis of election information. Sutherland Global Solutions subsidiary Sutherland Government Solutions, Inc. was awarded the contract for implementing and managing AVID in 2016. Team Sutherland was comprised of Sutherland Government Solutions, BPro, and Expert Technology Services Arizona (ETSAZ).
From their website, Sutherland Global specializes in “combining human-centered design with the scale & accuracy of real time analytics, AI, cognitive technology and automation.” Why would Arizona need Sutherland’s capabilities to provide real-time analytics, AI, algorithms, cognitive technology, and predictive analytic techniques for big data analysis for simply monitoring, collecting, and tabulating election results?
Counting ballots is not rocket science. What services were being performed in conjunction with BPro TotalVote Management? Predictive analysis for the number of votes required for “selected candidates,” a mining of state databases and real-time comparison with cast vote records to find people who did not vote but could have, and the generation of ballots for those “could have” voters to put the candidates over the top? And could this process have been part of what was used in the dead of night on 3 November 2020 that led to the final election results? And was some of that near real-time manipulation performed by foreign employees from overseas locations?
More investigation and analysis are needed to confirm that informed speculation, but that possibility certainly exists, as the information provided in this article attests.
The end.
Addendum. And the hits just keep on coming! On 13 September, Joe Hoft reported a bombshell. An excerpt from a KNOWINK/BPro contract in Oregon (probably at the county level) contained a shocking statement of required performance: “The system shall allow the County Elections Staff to override results, if necessary” [emphasis added]. Election fraud we much, as Al Sharpton might say
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