FILE - This screenshot shows MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on his online show.

FILE - This screenshot shows MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on his online show.

A second report attempting to show that Mesa County’s election equipment could be accessed remotely has been released, and immediately debunked by election officials.

The report, written by a member of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s cyber investigation team, Doug Gould, and supported by Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, claims that the now decommissioned election server that the county had been using had 36 wireless devices that would allow “any computer in the world” to connect to them.

But the 146-page report, which Peters turned over to Mesa County commissioners and others last week, fails to provide any evidence that those devices were activated, or if the machines also had the necessary hardware to allow for remote access, such as modems or Wi-Fi capabilities.

Mesa County election officials said those machines were not accessible from outside the clerk’s secure election office, and the newly replaced machines don’t have any hardware that would allow for that.

Gould, however, said in his report that those old machines could have been exploited by someone from the outside, but stops short of providing evidence that they actually were.

Gould said he based his forensic audit on before and after images — but not the actual hardware — that Peters and others made last May when the machines were undergoing a routine software upgrade known as a trusted build. The audit focuses on the Election Management System installed by the manufacture of the machines, Dominion Voting Systems.

“(The system) is configured with 36 wireless devices, which represent an extreme and unnecessary vulnerability, and which may be exploited to obtain unauthorized access from external devices, networks and the internet,” Gould wrote in the executive summary portion of the report. “(The system) is configured through firewall settings to allow any computer in the world to connect to the Election Management System (EMS) server.”

But Mesa County Treasurer Sheila Reiner, who used those same machines when she was clerk and recorder just prior to Peters getting elected to the job in 2018, said there was no way to remotely access those machines.

Reiner had been named the election supervisor to help oversee the 2021 Coordinated Election along with former Secretary of State Wayne Williams, who was appointed as the county’s designated election official when a court removed Peters in that role.

“The equipment in 2020 and 2021 had the wireless capacity disabled,” Reiner said. “This disabling is part of the trusted build. Then, when the new equipment was installed, Wayne negotiated that we get machines without the (remote access) hardware.”

Despite its length, most of the report includes pages and pages and numerous appendices of detailed background and explanatory material about how computers store information and how software programs are used to access it.

Gould goes on to say in the report that unauthorized software had been installed in the EMS server in 2017, and was still present last year in violation of federal and state election laws.

He wrote that software created an “unauditable ‘back door’” to the election system.

Gould is an expert in cybersecurity, but not election software. His report, however, cites someone who is, University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman, who has testified in years past before Congress warning of the potential for hacking into election systems nationwide.

Halderman, however, was quoted by FactCheck.org in a November 2020 article saying a conspiracy theory claiming that a supercomputer was used in the 2020 election to switch votes away from former President Donald Trump was “nonsense.”

He said most election systems, including those used in Colorado, are counted by computer scanners, the results of which are copied onto a separate removable device, such as a thumb drive, and then downloaded into an election management system.

Each time that is done, election workers routinely compare a physical printout of election results from the tabulation machines, and compare that to what’s recorded in the system.

“If an error or fraud affected the reporting process, it will be caught during this process, before the results are declared official,” Halderman told FactCheck.org. “These routine checks both add an extra layer of security and help deter attacks from targeting the reporting process in the first place.”

The county’s director of elections, Brandi Bantz, who also has been appointed as designated election official instead of Peters for the remainder of her term, agreed, saying Halderman may have been referring to election machines no longer in use.

Still, the process currently used is essentially the same, Bantz said.

“The election management scanners tabulate the vote,” she said.

“Then results are placed on a clean removable thumb drive from the Election Management System (EMS), and uploaded to the Secretary of State’s Election Night Reporting (ENR) site using a computer that is connected to the county network outside of the secure tabulation room,” Bantz added.

“Election staff review a paper report produced by the EMS and verify it matches the information that is brought over from the thumb drive, and then verify the results uploaded to the ENR site once it is posted to ensure accuracy.”

A first report released in September, also written by Gould, claimed that 29,000 election files were destroyed during the trusted build, but state and local election officials said those files were mere computer logs that have nothing to do with elections.

Even if they were election files, local election officials have repeatedly said they separately backed up all election files before that trusted build, as required by the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office to ensure nothing is lost. To aid them in doing that, each county was given detailed instructions on how to do so.

In a cover letter to the report that Peters gave to the county, the clerk said the Dominion software, called Democracy Suite, is untrustworthy.

“From my initial review of the report, it appears that our county’s voting system was illegally certified and illegally configured in such a way that ‘vote totals can be easily changed,’ ” she wrote, citing the report. “We have been assured for years that external intrusions are impossible because these systems are ‘air gapped,’ contain no modems, and cannot be accessed over the internet. It turns out that these assurances were false.”

Like Gould, however, Peters provides no proof that any voting results were changed in 2020 in the county, where Trump, former U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner and U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert — all Republicans — won with 62% or 63% of the vote.

Peters and several others are the subjects of state and federal criminal investigations into election tampering and wire fraud, including by a local grand jury.

She also is facing a lawsuit seeking to remove her permanently as the county’s chief election official as a result of her alleged actions last year, two misdemeanor charges for obstruction, a campaign finance lawsuit for failure to report donations, two ethics complaints for receiving gifts in excess of state limits, a possible contempt of court citation and a lawsuit filed by her former husband, Thomas, over a Grand Valley home he owns that she had transferred to herself.

Peters dropped out of her reelection bid for another term as county clerk, opting instead to seek the GOP nomination for Secretary of State.

Go to www.gjsentinel.com and click on this story to see a letter from Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters about the report, and the executive summary of the 146-page report.

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