Canadian voting machine company Dominion is embroiled in a fraud scandal in the 2020 U.S. election, but this isn’t the first time the company has sparked such controversy.
In 2014, an alleged software glitch at Dominion delayed the counting and reporting of votes in Canada’s New Brunswick election; two years ago, Dominion’s online voting system crashed during a municipal election in Ontario.
While the company has apologized for both incidents, it has blamed external interference for both. They claimed that the New Brunswick outage was caused by third-party software added by the local election authority, while the Ontario incident was caused by unauthorized restrictions on broadband traffic.
Aleksander Essex, an associate professor of software engineering at Western University, published a report on the use of online voting technology in Ontario in 2019, using the Ontario incident as a case study.
The report begins by stating that online voting “is not governed by any federal or provincial cybersecurity standards,” and cites potential vulnerabilities of online voting, including privacy breaches, “results being officially determined” due to a lack of paper records, and no contingency measures in the event of a partial or total system crash.
Essex told the Chronicle, “I want to be very clear that there’s a difference between having vulnerabilities and election fraud, and one thing doesn’t mean the other.”
The report found that on the night of the Oct. 22, 2018, election, 43 Ontario municipalities had problems with their voting websites, such as very slow web pages and some content loading overtime.
Faced with unusable voting websites and several affected municipalities not having paper ballots as an alternate option, many staff made the extraordinary decision to declare this a state of emergency and extend the voting deadline. In some cities, voting was delayed by one to two hours and continued into the night; most affected cities extended voting for a full 24 hours.
Later that evening, Dominion issued a statement blaming the Web site’s problems on the fact that its Toronto Internet hosting provider had “unauthorizedly limited the input voting traffic to 1/10th of the system’s designated bandwidth. Dominion was the only one of the four providers of online voting technology at the time of the problem.
Essex said that after the report was released, he received calls from losing candidates across the province. They thought there was a problem with the results, but couldn’t investigate because there was no auditable evidence, only a final tally.
“What happens if a candidate says, ‘I think there was fraud, I don’t think I lost the election.’ We have candidates like that in Ontario who are living in misery right now, who don’t know what’s going on and don’t want to go public with their allegations and their sour grapes mentality for fear that doing so would be harmful to society.” He said, “In the long run, that’s not the way we should be going.”
Essex’s research also uncovered other problems, including the number of municipalities where Dominion offers online voting services. 51 Ontario municipalities using its portal experienced slow traffic, but Essex found that 43 of Dominion’s 49 municipal clients in Ontario experienced the problem, Dominion said in a statement.
Dominion, which has offices in Toronto and Denver, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, particularly about whether Canadian voters can trust the integrity of its product.
Dominion was also responsible for counting votes in the last two federal Conservative leadership elections: in 2017, when Andrew Scheer narrowly defeated Maxime Bernier; and in August, when the announcement of the results was delayed for several hours due to compromised ballots.
On November 16, Elections Canada, which is in charge of elections for the Canadian federal government, stated on their official Twitter account that they do not use the Dominion voting system. The tweet said, “We use manual counting of paper ballots with scrutineers at our heels; we have never used voting machines or electronic tabulation to count votes in our 100-year history.”
President Donald Trump (Trump) shared the tweet, writing, “This says it all!”
Dominion Accused of Manipulating U.S. Election Vote
In the 2020 U.S. election, Dominion was involved in multiple election irregularities, including in Antrim, a traditionally red county in Michigan, where 6,000 ballots cast for Trump were transferred to Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Officials initially blamed the problem on software glitches and human error, and later blamed it all on human error. The Michigan Department of State said it was the staff involved who failed to update the software used to collect data from the voting machines.
Early in the morning of the election, two of the company’s voting machines placed in two Georgia counties also malfunctioned, leaving voters unable to cast their ballots for several hours.
On November 12, Kawakami tweeted that “Dominion deleted 2.7 million ballots for Trump nationwide,” citing a report that states using Dominion had “switched ballots”. “Transferring 435,000 Trump votes to Biden”. That claim has not been confirmed.
Dominion said in a statement that the company “categorically denies false assertions about conversion voting and software issues with our voting system.”
However, the company has acknowledged donating to the Clinton Foundation, run by Bill Clinton and Hillary, and has not disputed the hiring of a former staffer for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as its lobbyist.
Former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, a lawyer on the Trump legal team, said the team has received mounting evidence that the Dominion voting system was designed to rig elections. It helped Venezuelan dictators Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro tamper with ballots to win the election.
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