Russell J. Ramsland Jr. has sold everything from Tex-Mex food to a light-therapy technology. Starting two years ago, he helped sell the notion that votes in U.S. elections were being manipulated.
If you want to understand just how Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG) group was behind most of the claims of voting machine election fraud, this article examines and debunks this sorry chapter in our nation’s history in detail.
Here are a few excerpts from the article [all emphasis added]:
“RAMSLAND AND ASOG’S ROLE WAS UNIQUE”
Many people and organizations claimed after the election to have evidence casting doubt on Biden’s victory. But Ramsland and ASOG’s role was unique, said Matt Masterson, a former senior U.S. cybersecurity official who led a team tracking the integrity of the 2020 election for DHS. [....]
“It wasn’t just that the president would tweet about their stuff. It was all these little nuggets and grist that they provided or that were cited to them in testimony or in the ‘kraken’ cases. It provided the appearance of substance and fact to something that had no substance or fact,” said Masterson, who has not previously discussed ASOG publicly. “It was like: ‘Look, these are professionals. … They have former military experience. And look at what they found.’ They gave those who wanted to push and believe in the lie something to hold on to.”
RAMSLAND’S SMARTMATIC CLAIMS WERE FALSE
Among his claims was that source code initially written by the company Smartmatic formed the basis of much of the election software used in the United States. Ramsland often pointed out, as other critics had, that Smartmatic’s founders were Venezuelan.
Representatives of ES&S, Dominion and Hart InterCivic, the nation’s three largest voting-machine companies, told The Post they do not use or license Smartmatic software. They all said their companies’ software code is not in any way based on Smartmatic code, and Smartmatic said its code is not incorporated in other companies’ software.
RAMSLAND’S SCYTL CLAIMS WERE FALSE
In his media appearances, Ramsland also resurfaced an old baseless claim about Scytl, a Spain-based election technology firm that he described as a “somewhat disturbing company” in one appearance on Freeman’s show. “They’re housing all of our votes, and they’re doing it in an insecure fashion,” he said in a September appearance.
The following month, Ramsland added a twist, claiming on an online talk show hosted by conservative Debbie Georgatos that American votes were “being held on a server in Frankfurt, Germany.”
Scytl has said that it has no servers in Frankfurt and that its systems are not used to count or “house” votes in U.S. elections. [....]
One of Scytl’s products is a platform used by some counties to publicly display unofficial vote tallies online on election night, according to the company. After polls close, as results...are published online by media outlets and state and local governments. Those unofficial election-night reports depend on tallies that are transmitted by local officials to a publishing system. In some counties, that publishing system is made by Scytl.
But Harri Hursti, a data-security expert who has spent years highlighting vulnerabilities in electronic voting technology, said that Ramsland’s claims about vote-fixing overseas were nonsensical. Even if a hacker could manipulate the numbers that are posted online, the underlying votes would not be affected, Hursti said. Those are kept separately, sequestered from the Internet, and they are — once tallied and checked for discrepancies — the official results of any election.
RAMSLAND’S AFFIDAVITS CONTAINED FALSE INFORMATION
Ramsland also contributed material to Powell’s lawsuits and to one brought by L. Lin Wood Jr., another pro-Trump lawyer, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory. On Nov. 18, a nine-page affidavit from Ramsland filed to a federal court in Wood’s Georgia case made an explosive allegation: Multiple precincts in Michigan had recorded more votes for president than what he said was the estimated number of voters.
Ramsland’s claim was amplified the following day by Giuliani and Powell at a news conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. Like Ramsland, Powell said that excess votes in some jurisdictions were as high as 350 percent.
The claim in Ramsland’s affidavit soon collapsed under scrutiny. The precincts he cited were actually in Minnesota, a mistake Ramsland blamed on “my guys” in his exchanges with The Post. Ramsland said the Minnesota numbers also showed excess votes, a claim contradicted by official results.
[....]
Another of Ramsland’s affidavits claimed a 139 percent voter turnout in Detroit — meaning the number of votes cast exceeded the number of voters. Detroit’s official election results show that about 258,000 of its 506,000 registered voters cast ballots — a turnout of just under 51 percent. Ramsland later filed an affidavit saying his original figures were based on data that was online but that “no longer exists [f]or some unexplained reason.”
RAMSLAND REPORTED FALSE INFORMATION ABOUT DOMINION
ASOG’s report claimed that audit logs for Dominion machines showed an alarming 68 percent “error rate.”
That alleged error rate — which ASOG calculated by dividing the number of perceived error messages by the total numbers of lines in the audit log — was “meaningless,” according to an analysis by J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan professor of computer science and engineering. Halderman...wrote that audit logs record multiple lines for each ballot scanned and that many of those lines are “benign warnings or errors” that have no bearing on the accuracy of the machines’ count.
For example, he said, ASOG appeared to count the warning “ballot has been reversed” as an error that showed votes had been tampered with. But that entry means that a voter attempted to feed his ballot into the machine and the machine balked and spit it out — just as a vending machine often balks at a wrinkled dollar bill. That happens all the time, Halderman wrote.
Of ASOG’s claim that many ballots were sent to electronic “adjudication,” where they were manipulated, Halderman said his examination showed that Antrim County did not perform electronic adjudication of ballots at all. Halderman said that ASOG had correctly identified some security weaknesses in the county’s election system, but there was no evidence that anyone had exploited those weaknesses.
“The report contains an extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements and conclusions,” he wrote.
County and state officials, as well as Dominion, also said key claims in ASOG’s report were baseless. [....]
Three days after the court released the report, a hand recount of the county’s ballots showed that the presidential election results were correct, off from the previously reported results by only 12 votes out of some 16,000 cast. Dominion’s machines had counted accurately.
