Dear Professor Reich,
First things first: we had a mutual friend in Professor William Slesnick. Though I knew him many years after you did, he often spoke to me of his admiration for your mind, your drive, and your character. He was fond of saying that if you had set your sights on playing center in the NBA, you would have succeeded. Bill did not grade on a curve, as you may remember, and that was indeed high praise
Second, I see that you have taken to living under a rock. Your recent essay, “Robert Reich: A Personal Question To Powerful People Who Continue To Deny Results Of 2020 Election” (Eurasia Review, October 9, 2022) has been brought to my attention. In it, you write:
“I have a serious question for people who have power in America and who continue to deny the outcome of the 2020 election and enable Trump’s Big Lie: What are you saying to yourself in private? How are you justifying yourself in your own mind? I don’t mean to be snide or snarky. I’m genuinely curious…. I’m asking you, Peter Thiel, and you, Stephen Schwarzman, and Ken Griffin and Steve Wynn and Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne and others: Is this really the way you want to spend your fortune? Is this your legacy to the nation?“
I accept your invitation, Professor Reich, to bring you up to speed on what it is that we of the election integrity movement believe we are doing.
On June 3, 2022 DHS – CISA issued a 5 page report that could have been titled (I facetiously suggested), “Patrick Byrne was right again. Again.” In five succinct pages, it explains that the most common election system in use in the USA turns out to be riddled with nine major security “vulnerabilities” so gaping that in my view it is more appropriate to call them security “failures” than “vulnerabilities”. As apparently you missed this development, I will quote their descriptions of nine hacks of Dominion equipment that tabulate 43% of ballots cast by Americans on November 3, 2020:
1. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to install malicious code, which could also be spread to other vulnerable ImageCast X devices via removable media.” 2. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to disguise malicious applications on a device.” 3. “…which could be leveraged by an attacker to gain elevated privileges on a device and/or install malicious code.” 4. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to escalate privileges on a device and/or install malicious code.” 5. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to spread malicious code to ImageCast X devices from the EMS.” 6. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to escalate privileges on a device and/or install malicious code.” 7. “An attacker with physical access may use this to gain administrative privileges on a device and install malicious code or perform arbitrary administrative actions.” 8. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to gain access to sensitive information and perform privileged actions, potentially affecting other election equipment.” 9. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to print an arbitrary number of ballots without authorization.” – DHS-CISA ICS Advisory (ICSA-22-154-01)
So this past summer, DHS-CISA acknowledged that Dominion boxes are hackable nine ways from Sunday.
In addition, if one clicks through to the CVE database where one would normally find patches for software vulnerabilities such as have been announced here, one finds that there are no patches available and that all these gaping failures are simply, “Under Assessment”.
That is to say, the same federal organization that 20 months ago boldly praised itself for overseeing “the most secure election in history” now meekly reports:
“While these vulnerabilities present risks that should be mitigated as soon as possible, CISA has no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in any elections.” – ibid
That is a considerably weaker statement. They have gone from saying We know it did not happen to the much weaker claim: We have no evidence that it happened, but we are not going to tell you if we looked, how much we looked, and the machine vulnerabilities must be “mitigated” but there are as yet no patches.
It is my burden in life that from time to time I interact with a life-form called, “journalists”. Some, after reading this DHS-CISA litany of horrors, have had the gall (I-shit-thee-not) to reply along the lines, Well this shows that they can be hacked, but it is not proof that they were hacked!
That logic may pass in an undergraduate Lesbian Dance Theory seminar at Berkeley, but as a fellow who built a $2 billion eCommerce company that faced 1,000 daily cyber-attacks for 20 years and was never defeated, I assure you, it is an absurd response. One cannot release such porous code into the wild and hope it is not hacked. Given the prize (US elections) and the shit-code, there is no realistic chance these vulnerabilities were not exploited.
In case there is any question about that, however, perhaps we should just examine the election databases stored on the hard-drives of election equipment in question. Just to be sure. Just in the six places which saw odd activity on that election night, the unprecedented act of vote counting being shut down, things like that…. Perhaps we should just look at the election databases of those six machines, so we know for certain.
For some reason, since November 4, 2020 that suggestion has sent the intellectual class into paroxysms of outrage. No one will explain why. But massive legal efforts have been mounted to prevent anyone from getting access to those six hard drives in those six counties. Massive, expensive legal efforts. And in the one county of the six where legal authority to examine was granted (in the form of a subpoena issued by the Arizona Senate and enforced by a court), the county workers deleted the election database the night before turning the machine over.
And yet, a media which normally would waste not an instant in reading meaning into that chain of events, is so disinterested in it now, one would think it was Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Thanks to the work of an American hero named Tina Peters, the County Recorder for Mesa County, Colorado (roughly speaking: “Grand Junction”), the election database of that county for November 2020 was recovered. Analysis of it revealed (in Mesa County Forensic Report #3) to have a cloaked script that created an illegal database, shifted thousands of votes, and generated thousands of others. This is exactly what the DHS-CISA warning is about: that such “malicious code” and “malicious applications” could be installed on a machine without its operators’ awareness.
In Williamson County, Tennessee, the October, 2021 municipal election produced such extraordinary anomalies (e.g., 163 ballots fed into a machine generating only 79 votes counted) that the State of Tennessee investigated…. and found 7 out of 18 machines generating remarkably erroneous miscounts. Feed the machine 167 paper ballots, and only 19 get counted. In one machine, 330 ballots were inserted, but only 98 votes were counted.
Tennessee called the federal EAC, who called the Pro V&V and SLI, who called Dominion…. And their consensus is that there is indeed “erroneous code” in the machines but that they cannot find that bad code.
Which, incidentally, is not a Root Cause Analysis, though they try to pass it off as one. It is a failure of a Root Cause Analysis. They are saying, in effect, Yes the machine generates fake tabulator counts, and we cannot find the cause, but it is still certified.
The corruption is being noticed by Democrats as well as Republicans. In Cherokee County, Georgia, Michelle Long Spears, running for a seat in the US Congress, placed 3rd in the Democratic Primary earlier this summer. She noticed that though she had received 24% of the vote, there were many precincts where she had received 0 votes. That itself was statistically improbable, she knew. Then she noticed that in her own precinct she had received 0 votes, which she knew was impossible (Michelle had voted for herself, as had, presumably, her husband). Michelle demanded a hand-count, and it turned out she had in fact won with a landslide 60% of the votes.
Fulton County, Pennsylvania has had their equipment tested by a Michigan forensics lab named, “Speckin”. The Speckin Report shows that the Dominion machines in Fulton, PA generate fake results like the machines in Williamson, Tennessee (as is admitted now by the EAC and Dominion itself). In addition, the Fulton machines’ logs show that during the November 2020 election they had not just outside connectivity, but international outside connectivity (in this case, to Canada), which is significantly illegal. Now Fulton County, Pennsylvania is suing Dominion for their money back. Eight other counties have similar lawsuits in the works, I hear.
In an August 2022 primary in Cherokee County, Kansas, Dominion equipment was discovered to have taken thousands of votes from District 1 County Commissioner Myra Frazier and given them to her opponent, Lance Nichols, who was initially declared the winer then stripped of it once the vote-flipping was exposed.
Tests have been performed in 67 Georgia counties, and erroneous code spitting out fake results has been found to exist in 65 of the 67 counties. This past week, emergency relief was sought.
Ongoing examination of the much-maligned Maricopa Audit’s preliminary results (which in fact proved that the election database had been erased and there were hundreds of thousands of votes lacking chains of title) continues to surface clear proof of criminal activity in Maricopa’s election administrations:
I could go on and on, Professor Reich. Outside of intellectual backwaters such as Berkeley, citizens are paying attention. Citizens know of such developments and dozens more like them across the nation. In over 3,000 counties across the country, citizens are digging into the US election systems like they never have in my lifetime. Everywhere they do they are finding causes for deep concern, while being met by Government Fundamentalists challenging the right of citizens to seek transparency (though a fundamental principle elections globally is that an election lacking transparency has zero credibility). In a further sign of the corrupt times in which we live, the investigators are themselves being investigated by authorities rather than the horrific data they have unearthed.
So let us turn, Professor Reich, to those six locations which experienced blackouts/shutdowns while counting ballots on the night of November 3, 2020. The six counties have been the center of our attention since the morning of November 4. All six of those counties fought letting their election databases be examined. In one of those counties (Maricopa), the Arizona Senate got a subpoena to examine the election database, Maricopa County fought the subpoena for five months, and then when a court declared it valid and enforceable, deleted their database the night before turning over the equipment.
No one will explain why, for the first time in my lifetime, such a constellation of facts is not supposed to raise suspicion. Perhaps you can try, Professor Reich.
What we of the Election Integrity movement believe we are doing is saving our nation from a soft-coup perpetrated through sophisticated long-term exploitation of our election systems and the corruption of institutions which we citizens created and funded to protect us from such an event. That is our reality. We are peacefully saving the America republic from a tragic fate.
Of course, in your paradigm, citizens’ attempts to have transparent elections is disrupting American democracy. (Incidentally, would it hurt you to use the more accurate term, “republic”? It shows that you understand it is about both consent of the governed as well as constitutionally limited government. You would not want it to be thought of Democrats that you secretly support mob rule, would you?)
Fortunately for our nation, this does not have to continue as though we were debating the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. This whole matter can be resolved in a matter of a week or so. Perhaps in just a few days. All that needs to happen is that the computer science professors who wrote Mesa County #3 get a chance to inspect the election databases of those six counties. in question. Now that we know what to look for, I believe they can even do it in a few hours. When set against the tragic national fate about which you are so concerned, Professor Reich, surely letting sophisticated cybersecurity professionals access images of six hard drives for a few hours each… surely that does not strike you as unreasonable?
You who are so concerned with what fate may befall our nation, surely this seems like a reasonable request to you, right? So may we count on your voice to join ours in saying, Let the citizens’ experts inspect those six hard drives for a day!
If experience is any guide, I can make two predictions comfortably:
You will quickly say, “No that’s a horrible idea.”
Then you will search for a reason to rationalize why it is a horrible idea. I have heard them all. I have heard that we cannot resolve this by conducting an afternoon’s inspection of six hard drives because:
We don’t want to set the precedent.
If we give you an inch you will take a mile.
Why should we? Let citizens look at pieces of paper but they cannot inspect the machines that count them. For this, there will be no good reason adduced to explain why, for the first time in history, citizens can have transparency to some arbitrary level but not beyond it.
And so on and so forth.
So I challenge: I predict you will not join me in this call to look at six hard drives and resolve this dispute in a day, rather than face the risk to our nation of which you have written. Whatever your reasoning, that will be its conclusion.
And that is how we know you do not really believe what you have written.
Sincerely,
Patrick Byrne
Read more HERE.