On Monday The Voter Integrity Project posted an article about voting machines in North Carolina. As I am sure you remember, one of the discussion points regarding the integrity of the 2020 presidential election was whether or not the voting machines were hooked up to the internet. In North Carolina we were assured that they were not. Well, not so fast.

The article reports:

April 13, 2021 (Raleigh) Demands for an audit of the 2020 elections has grown bigger after an April 9 Michigan court filing reported discovering a modem chip embedded in the motherboard of the ES&S 200, which is the same machine widely used across North Carolina.

…“A modem chip embedded into the motherboard of the the most popular voting machine in North Carolina greatly undercuts the State Board of Election’s claim that no tabulation equipment was connected to the internet,” said Jay DeLancy of Voter Integrity Project. “Now more than ever, we need the Legislature to step up and audit the 2020 elections.”

The NCSBE website says the ES&S DS200 is used all across the state, but they have never admitted the presence of modem chips.

According to evidence in a trial that included sworn testimony by aerospace engineer and former Michigan State Senator, Patrick Colbeck, the modem chip, the Telit 910 Cat. 1 Series, has the following capabilities:

• • Enable communication between voting system equipment and election servers
  • Designed to operate on a virtual private network
  • Testing has revealed that the same SIM card could be used in a separate wireless hotspot device. This device could then join the same APN as the ES&S voting machines.

“Election officials will probably deny and dismiss the presence of this capability,” DeLancy said, “and that’s we’re demanding for the Legislature to conduct their own independent audit as a function of their oversight authority.”

As New Hampshire voters have already discovered in the Windham incident, the quickest and most accurate way to see if the modem’s adjusted the vote counts is through a hand-eye recount. Such action resulted in a net vote swing of 1,300 votes, by giving one Democrat an extra 100 votes and penalizing four Republicans by 300 votes each.

According to Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers leader, Ed Naile, the machines used in Windham were NOT connected to the internet, but a motherboard modem would change everything. A forensic investigation is already underway to determine the root cause of the discrepancies.

“North Carolina lawmakers only require the presidential race to be verified in a random hand-eye recount,” DeLancy said, “so they now need to recount last year’s full ballot unless they want people to give up on the entire process.”

I am not a person who understands much about how computers work. However, I think everyone who uses a computer is aware of such things as hacking, viruses, and malware. It seems to me that a modem chip embedded in a machine could cause an endless amount of problems. The question becomes, “Why was it there?” and “Who put it there?” I think the answers to those two questions (if those questions are ever answered) would be very interesting.