Stephen Spoonamore (right) greets a voter (Mother Jones)
Part One of Two
A widely respected election-security expert named Stephen Spoonamore has informed Vice President Kamala Harris via a "duty to warn" letter that the 2024 presidential election has shown strong signs of being hacked, and he recommends she do the following:
(1)You should reverse your concession, call for both a full investigation of criminal activity, and demand hand recounts in all seven swing states;
(2) Spoonamore obviously is taking peculiar data surrounding the election seriously. Why? He explains: "In my professional view there are multiple and extremely clear indications the Presidential vote was willfully compromised."
(3) "I wholly agree with the public letter of Duncan Buell, et. al. of Nov. 13 stating they believe there is a possibility of hacking and calling for hand-recounts.
https://freespeechforpeople.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/letter-to-vp-harris-111324.pdf
This letter’s clear call to action is commendable, but its cautious tone may belie the severity of what I believe has happened. In my view it is a near certainty the results have been changed at a scale which reversed the US Presidential Election. They imply there is a chance a hand recount will show you won more votes. I am stating a hand recount will most likely show you did win. Both letters call on you to act.
The contents of the Duncan Buell letter dated Nov. 13, 2024, and referenced at the link above contains insightful information, and we will run that immediately below, highlighting key segments in parenthesis.
After that, we will begin Spoonamore's letter, highlighting the material we believe is most important for the American people to understand at this time.
----------------------------------------
November 13, 2024
The Honorable Kamala Harris
The White House
Office of the Vice President
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Vice President Harris,
We write to alert you to serious election-security breaches that have
threatened the security and integrity of the 2024 elections, and to identify ways to
ensure that the will of the voters is reflected and that voters should have confidence
in the result. (The most effective manner of doing so is through targeted recounts
requested by the candidate. In the light of the breaches, we ask that you formally
request hand recounts in at least the states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and
Pennsylvania. We have no evidence that the outcomes of the elections in those
states were actually compromised as a result of the security breaches, and we are
not suggesting that they were. But binding risk-limiting audits (RLAs), or hand
recounts, should be routine for all elections, especially when the stakes are high and
the results are close. We believe that, under the current circumstances. when
massive software breaches are known and documented, recounts are necessary and
appropriate to remove all potential doubt and to set an example for security best
practices in all elections.)
(In 2022, records, video camera footage, and deposition testimony produced
in a civil case in Georgia1 disclosed that its voting system, used statewide, had
been breached over multiple days by operatives hired by attorneys for Donald
Trump.2,3 The evidence showed that the operatives made copies of the software that runs all of the equipment in Georgia, and certain other states, and shared it
with other Trump allies and operatives.4
(Subsequent court filings and public-records requests revealed that the
breaches in Georgia were part of a larger effort to take copies of voting system
software from systems in Michigan,5 Pennsylvania,6 Colorado7 and Arizona,8 and
to share the software in the operatives’ network. According to testimony9 and
declarations10 by some of the technicians who have obtained copies of the
software, they have had access for more than three years to the software for the
central servers, tabulators, and highly restricted election databases of both Election
Systems & Software (ES&S), and Dominion Voting Systems, the two largest
voting system vendors, constituting the most severe election-security breach
publicly known.
(Combined, their equipment counts nearly 70% of all votes nationwide.
Ninety-six percent of Arizona voters use Dominion and ES&S equipment; 100% of
Georgia voters vote on Dominion machines; 98% of Nevada votes on Dominion machines and the remainder uses ES&S; 69% of Michigan voters’ ballots
are counted on Dominion or ES&S equipment; 89% of Pennsylvania voters ballots are counted on Dominion or ES&S equipment; ES&S counts 92% of North
Carolina ballots; and either ES&S or Dominion counts 97% of Wisconsin votes.11
1 No. 17-cv-02989-AT (N.D. Ga. filed Aug. 8, 2017).
2 Emma Brown, Jon Swaine, Aaron C. Davis, Amy Gardner, “Trump-allied lawyers pursued voting
machine data in multiple states, records reveal,” The Washington Post, (August 15, 2022). Available
at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/08/15/sidney-powell-coffee-county-sullivan-
strickler/
3 Kate Brumback, “Video fills in details on alleged Ga. election system breach,” The Associated Press,
(September 6, 2022). Available at: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-technology-
donald-trumpthat runs all of the equipment in Georgia, and certain other states, and shared it
with other Trump allies and operatives.
4 Emma Brown, Jon Swaine, “Inside the secretive efforts by Trump allies to access voting machines,”
The Washington Post, (October 28, 2022). Available at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/10/28/coffee-county-georgia-voting-trump/
5 Clara Hendrickson, “Did data from Georgia voting machine breach play a role in alleged Michigan
election plot?”, The Detroit Free Press, (August 31, 2023). Available at:
https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2023/08/31/michigan-and-georgia-voting-machine-breach-
connection/70702597007/
6 Jeremy Duda, “Group led by ‘kraken’ lawyer Sidney Powell hired the firm recounting AZ’s election
to probe election in Fulton Co.” Pennsylvania Capital-Star, (May 24, 2021). Available at:
https://penncapital-star.com/government-politics/group-led-by-kraken-lawyer-sidney-powell-hired-
the-firm-recounting-azs-election-to-probe-a-pa-election/
7 Christina A. Cassidy, “Georgia election indictments highlights wider attempts to illegally access
voting equipment,” Associated Press, (August 15, 2023). Available at:
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-trump-indictment-voting-machines-conspiracy-theories-
bc3db57cabd25fd8e335f85ed299e79c
8 Maritsa Georgiou, “Arizona voting system data sent to Montana lab as part of the latest audit,”
NBC Montana, (June 3, 2021). Available at: https://nbcmontana.com/news/local/arizona-voting-
system-data-sent-to-montana-lab-as-part-of-latest-audit
9 See eg., Lenberg Dep. No. 17-cv-02989-AT Document 1613, page 101-102. Available at:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t9pkebeb44dg3it/Ex%2024%20%201613%20Depo%20Jeffrey%20Lenberg.
pdf?dl=0
10 Michigan 6th Circuit Court Oakland Case No. 2023-285759-FH, MTN to Quash, Sep. 30, 2024.
Pages 188, 240-241, 295 and 298. Available at: https://freespeechforpeople.org/wp-
content/uploads/2024/11/20240930_motion_fld_to_quash_indictment
(Possessing copies of the voting system software enables bad actors to install
it on electronic devices and to create their own working replicas of the voting
systems, probe them, and develop exploits. Skilled adversaries can decompile the
software to get a version of the source code, study it for vulnerabilities, and could
even develop malware designed to be installed with minimal physical access to the
voting equipment by unskilled accomplices to manipulate the vote counts. Attacks
could also be launched by compromising the vendors responsible for programming
systems before elections, enabling large scale distribution of malware.
(In December 202212 and again in 2023,13 many of us, concerned by the
security risks posed by these breaches, wrote to the Attorney General, FBI
Director, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director
outlining the security concerns and urging an investigation. Though there have
been limited, localized investigations,14 there is no evidence of a federal
investigation15 to determine what was done with the misappropriated voting
software.
(Other relevant parties have pointed to the serious risks posed by the
misappropriation of the voting software. Before it was known that partisan
operatives had taken the software, Dominion Voting Systems objected vehemently
to providing its software to the same partisan actors who ultimately got copies
through voting-system breaches, stating that to give its software to biased actors
would cause “irreparable damage” to the “election security interests of the
country.”16
(Before the breaches in Georgia had been confirmed, the Georgia Secretary
of State’s chief information officer testified that having copies of the software
would provide a “road map” to the ways the system could be accessed.17 The
Georgia Attorney General opposed providing copies of the software to lawyers for
the Trump campaign in a late 2020 election challenge, arguing that images of the
voting system software would provide “the keys to the software kingdom.”18
Notably, U.S. elections are potentially resilient because there are paper
ballots recording the voters’ intent in most states, meaning that even if the voting
system is at risk, the will of the voters can be determined reliably by recounting the
paper ballots by hand (although we are aware that not all paper ballots are verified
by the voter, and not all states take adequate care to protect the ballot chain of
custody.
(Audits will be conducted in some of the most scrutinized states, but in key
states they will not be conducted in a timely way that could reveal any concerns
with the vote count. In addition, in most states the audits are insufficiently rigorous
to ensure any potential errors in tabulation will be caught and corrected, and they
cannot be considered a safeguard against the security breaches that have occurred.
Specifically, Georgia’s audits are non-binding, and Michigan, Nevada and
Wisconsin laws do not provide that the audit be conducted before certification.
Therefore, it would be impossible to know for these critical states if the audits
uncovered errors or miscalculations before the state deadlines to seek recounts.19
(Among swing states, only Arizona’s audit laws ensure that, if enough
discrepancies are identified, the audit hand count will be expanded to correct a
potentially incorrect result. In other words, aside from Arizona, in contested states,
there is no legal mechanism for the audit to correct the outcome, no matter how
much error the audit uncovers. Given these facts, the only guarantee for rigorous,
effective audits of the vote in the swing states will be through candidate-requested
statewide hand recounts.
(The facts around the voting-system breaches are not disputed; it is well-
documented that there were severe, multiple voting security breaches before the
2024 election. To ensure that voters can have confidence that the breaches in security did not taint the results of the 2024 election, we recommend pursuing hand
recounts in, at minimum, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania as they
will provide insufficient safeguards against threats posed by the breaches of the
election software and will not provide important information in a timely way.)
Thank you for your time and consideration of this important matter.
17 See:. No. 17-cv-02989-AT Beaver Dep Document 1368-3 Page 157-158.
18 No.1:20-cv-04809-TCB (N.D. Ga filed Nov. 30, 2020), Document 23, page 13. Available at:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xlvuqfqroogx7vg1sa4p9/Pearson-transcipt-
gov.uscourts.gand.284055.23.0-Clean.pdf?rlkey=aghdw5w34rwqxugdxhnk8ij5b&e=1&dl=0
19 See: Verified Voting Audit Law Databasesecurity.
Sincerely,
Duncan Buell Ph.D.
Chair Emeritus — NCR Chair in Computer Science and Engineering
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Carolina*
David Jefferson Ph.D.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory* (retired)
Election Integrity Foundation*
Susan Greenhalgh
Senior Advisor for Election Security
Free Speech For People
Chris Klaus
Founder
Internet Security System*
William John Malik
Malik Consulting, LLC*
Peter G. Neumann Ph.D.
Chief Scientist,
SRI International Computer Science Lab*
John E. Savage
An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science
Brown University*
*Affiliations are listed for identification purposes only and do not imply
institutional endorsement.
(To be continued . . .
(Our next post will focus on Stephen Spoonamore's "duty to warn" letter to Vice President Kamala Harris. The letter provides significant detail on how the 2024 election was hacked -- It raises this question: Did Donald Trump really win, and did Kamala Harris really lose -- and if Trump did not secure a victory under honest and lawful circumstances, how could such a breach happen?
(Spoonamore's letter suggests Donald Trump might not lawfully be America's president-elect, and he indicates there is more than enough evidence of hacking to demand, at a minimum, a through investigation of the vote-tabulation procedures. The Spoonamore letter is the most detailed analysis we have seen so far of the 2024 presidential election -- and we believe every American, regardless of political affiliation, should read it. Key points in the letter will be revealed in our next post, and we invite you to stay tuned. The future of our democracy might depend on informed and caring Americans becoming intimately familiar with the evidence spelled out in the letter.)