The user manual for Dominion Voting Systems machines guides users on how to connect to the Internet, and the machines, used by multiple states, were connected to the Internet during the election, a cybersecurity expert said Monday.
“The Dominion suite user manual is about an inch and a half thick. My team went back through the user manual and looked at all the instances where in the user’s manual, it tells operators to connect the ethernet cords to the router, and it is, the systems are connected to the Internet,” Phil Waldron, a cybersecurity expert and retired Army Colonel, told a public hearing in Arizona.
“Our teams looked at spirographs on the Dominion network on Election Day and showed the increased web traffic, Internet traffic on Election Day for Dominion servers,” he said, adding later: “In a nutshell, these systems are not what you’ve been told, if you’ve been told anything. They are connected to the Internet. There is no transparency of how the voter information is processed, moved, and stored. And, as a matter of fact, these companies have refused to allow any type of inspection into their code and they always decry, it’s our IP, it’s IP protection.”
Dominion didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A similar charge was made by Patrick Colbeck, a poll watcher in Detroit, in a legal case. He said election systems there appeared to be connected to the Internet on Election Day.
Waldron told state legislators and others at the hearing, an unofficial event held at the Hyatt Regency in Phoenix, that voting systems from Dominion and several other companies used by state and local governments “were built to be manipulated.”
“They’ve been used in elections around the world with questionable results. We believe that these same questionable results are present in this election,” he said.
Votes can be adjusted by administrators or hackers who can easily get access to the systems by grabbing login credentials through malware, according to the expert. At Def Con last year, hackers hacked into voting machines in just minutes.
BY ZACHARY STIEBER
Jack Phillips contributed to this report.
