Forensic Copies of Voting Software Were Made. The Machines Are Still in Use.
An investigative report connecting election breaches, certifier failures, and the quiet collapse of public trust.
This is a long-form article, but it is very important. This is an “mega article” connecting all of my previous election integrity articles and how they all tie together.
So, if you can’t take the time to read, please take the time to listen. On your drive. On your walk. During breakfast. There is an audio option for most Substack articles. Just look for the play button on your screen. Thank you.
What you're about to read isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a documented unraveling of public trust. Given the "approved” stamp by our very own federal agencies, carried out by private contractors, and buried in old records nobody was supposed to read. But as many of you know, I did.
I read the contracts. I traced the shell companies. I filed the FOIAs (many of which are still pending) and cross-checked the ECOs. I followed reports about missing ballots, the fake audits, the untested machines, the quietly removed safeguards. I read what the watchdogs ignored and what the certifiers signed.
This is not one story. It’s all of them. So far.
It’s the reason a private lab can rewrite how votes are counted in 40% of U.S. counties and call it “minor.” How a Pennsylvania county can certify an election on a machine that was never tested and face no consequences. It’s how a lab owned by a man with a disqualified past can operate inside a military missile park and approve voting software… unchallenged.
You’ve seen my other pieces. Now you’ll see the machine itself.
But before I show you how it works, you need to understand something:
The “Stop the Steal” movement was Donald Trump’s creation. A weaponized lie designed to turn his loss in 2020 into a rallying cry. He used it to fundraise, to pressure lawmakers, to incite violence. But whether by accident or design, it did something even more powerful: it poisoned the well.
It made any conversation about election integrity sound like MAGA fiction. Like a delusion. Like someone just couldn’t get over their candidate losing.
So when journalists, watchdogs, or even voters started asking real questions in 2024 (about software changes, vanishing audits, strange vote totals) they were already branded as conspiracy theorists by their colleagues. So, their concerns? Dismissed. Their reputation? Discredited.
But you can’t help but wonder… was that the point of the “Stop The Steal” movement all along?
The truth is, election integrity concerns didn’t start in 2020. They didn’t even start with Trump. You can trace them back to the early 2000s. I do not have time in this specific article to go in depth about this, but I highly encourage you to look into the work of Bev Harris in the meantime.
So, while the public was trained to roll their eyes at anyone who said “election fraud,” Trump and his allies were laying out an actual blueprint to overturn an election. And not just with speeches, but with forged documents, coordinated pressure campaigns, and a plan that stretched across at least seven states.
And that blueprint came to a head on January 6, 2021.
The day the lie came to Washington. The day a sitting president tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
But what most people don’t realize is that the attack on the Capitol was just the loudest part of the plan.. not the beginning, and definitely not the end.
The Coup You Didn’t See On The News
What the public saw on January 6 was a riot.
What they didn’t see was the other attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Months before the election, in October 2020, Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro outlined a plan to submit false slates of electors in key battleground states if Trump lost.
That plan was executed in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and New Mexico, where Trump allies signed and mailed forged certificates that instead named Trump as the winner. They were sent to the National Archives, some using fake state seals, in an attempt to fraudulently and illegally place Trump in office.
At the same time, Trump pressured the DOJ to send a letter to Georgia falsely claiming fraud, drafted by mid-level official Jeffrey Clark; when leadership refused, Trump tried to appoint Clark as acting Attorney General, backing down only after threats of mass resignation.
With the courts rejecting his cases and DOJ leadership resisting the scheme, Trump incited a violent mob to storm the Capitol and pressure Mike Pence to intervene in the count. When Mike Pence wouldn’t sign the fake elector slates, they called for him to be hung.
But the real threat was what came after.
After all of that, ultimately Donald Trump faced no legal repercussions or real accountability, and so, in the years that followed, the same network of his operatives shifted from trying to contest the elections to compromising them.
MAGA Has Forensic Copies of Election Software & Hardware:
Beginning in 2021, Trump’s allies launched a quiet, calculated operation to get inside the machines. They broke into county election offices.
They posed as “experts,” flashed badges that meant nothing, and walked out with the digital backbone of U.S. elections … forensic copies of official voting software and hard drives. This didn’t just happen in Georgia.
It happened in Michigan, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, too. In each case, they cloned the same systems that scan your ballot, count your vote, and report the totals to the state.
In one state, they stole election tabulators (counters) and tore them apart, sharing copies of hardware and software amongst the network.
And then they passed all these different copies around like trading cards to anyone in their network. They were spread at conferences, online, and with other private corporations.
There is no telling how many copies there are, and who has gotten their hands on them at this time.
In Colorado, clerk Tina Peters helped orchestrate a breach of her own county’s election system. She was indicted. In Coffee County, Georgia, surveillance footage caught Trump operatives unlocking the elections office, accessing Dominion servers, and cloning the drives. In Michigan, private investigators and Trump loyalists linked to Trump’s legal team extracted data from multiple counties.
They only got caught because they couldn’t keep their mouths shut.
One loyalist involved in Michigan, Doug Logan, bragged to his friends. That’s the only reason they were caught.
Meanwhile, Mike Lindell shouted it from stages. Trump Attorney Sidney Powell’s team left a trail of emails. These weren’t master hackers they were movement loyalists who believed they were above the law.
But if they hadn’t broadcast their crimes? We might never have known. So ask yourself this… how many breaches never made it to court because they didn’t come with a livestream or a press tour?
Now I want you to remember this:
The software they stole is still in use.
As of 2024, both Dominion’s Democracy Suite and ES&S’s ElectionWare systems were still being used in nearly half the states, according to data from Verified Voting.
Some counties have since applied software updates or minor reconfigurations, but that doesn’t undo the breach. Once full forensic copies are made (of the system software, ballot definition files, tabulator configurations, and reporting structures) the damage is permanent.
You can patch a file. You can swap out some code. But the attackers already have the full blueprint of how it works inside and out.
Changing parts doesn’t matter when they know exactly how the election software system works… how it was programmed to behave, how to mimic it, or how to exploit it. It just takes the right person to find a back door that the software developers don’t know about and use that to alter our voting machines.
Now I am not saying that is what happened. I can’t prove that. So, I can’t claim that. But I want people to know this election was not secure by any means.
So, to recap, here’s what we do know:
We know they have loyalists. We know they have loyalists in the government. Just look at Tina Peters. We know from the fake elector slates that they also have loyalists in the U.S. government and boards of elections in all the swing states.
The very ones that Trump just so happened to win by statistically impossible margins in 2024. We know that there are forensic clones, exactly the same, of real election software in the hands of MAGA loyalists.
Some of those systems still in use in 2024. Some changed. Some not. Take that as you will.
Also… this wasn’t the first time something like this happened.
Back in the early 2000s, before Trump, before “Stop the Steal,” before most Americans had even heard of Dominion, the voting machine industry was already compromised. Not just insecure or buggy. Compromised.
In 2003, the source code for Diebold’s voting machines was leaked online and discovered by Bev Harris after it was accidentally published on an open FTP server by Wyle Laboratories and CIBER Inc., the two federally approved testing labs responsible for certifying U.S. election systems.
That leak gave researchers a front-row seat into how elections could be tampered with, and how the people charged with testing the systems weren’t actually doing their jobs.
And just like after MAGA operatives cloned entire election systems, the U.S. government insisted everything was fine… that the software was patched, the systems were “secure.”
So, it’s important that you know that in 2005, cybersecurity expert Harri Hursti proved that Diebold optical scanners could be manipulated using nothing more than a tampered memory card. According to a 2006 UC Berkley research paper, this was only possible because of the leaked software.
So maybe, just maybe, when the government tells you a breached system is still “secure,” they’re not giving you the whole truth.
Because once source code is leaked, the game changes. It hands attackers the blueprint and with that blueprint, they don’t need to guess how to break in.
They can study it. Find the cracks. Exploit the logic. Build a backdoor so precise it looks like it belongs there. That’s not speculation. It’s been proven it can happen, and the data is out there.
Let’s talk more about Wyle/CIBER Inc..
In the early 2000s, CIBER was one of only a few federally approved labs trusted to test voting machines. But they didn’t act like watchdogs. They acted like partners to the very companies they were supposed to be auditing.
Then came the software leak scandal.
As we know from above, CIBER and another lab, Wyle, accidentally leaked the source code for Diebold voting machines onto an open internet server in 2003. That leak gave researchers everything they needed to understand how the machines worked and how they could be hacked. It was a gift to anyone trying to cheat an election.
So what happened to CIBER and Diebold?
Well eventually, CIBER INC was finally stripped of their federal accreditation. The government said they weren’t documenting their tests. They were recycling old procedures. And they weren’t independent from the voting machine companies they were supposed to oversee. They were testing machines with software the companies gave them.
It’s like your teacher letting you* write the test, and then grade your own paper after..
But the people behind CIBER didn’t go away. They just changed the name. Jack Cobb, one of CIBER’s lead engineers, started a new company - Pro V&V.
He opened shop in Huntsville, Alabama.. right next to defense contractors and missile testing labs. That’s not a metaphor. His lab literally sits in the middle of a military tech hub. Oh, and somehow, Pro V&V got federal approval, too.
Now Cobb’s new lab is responsible for certifying the very machines still used in 40% of U.S. counties. Machines that decide elections. Machines that are still vulnerable. Same man. Same playbook..
And just like CIBER before it, Pro V&V signs off on voting software changes without full retesting. They call those changes “minor” or “de minimis,” even when they affect how votes are counted and reported. The only difference is the EAC is signing off on them, too… despite never actually testing any of the changes themselves and relying only on the word of Pro V&V…
One of the most recent and concerning changes? September 2024.
ECO 1188. It modified the software on ES&S voting machines… the part that adds up the vote totals. The update removed a built-in alert that was supposed to go off if the machine started running unfamiliar software. Now, that warning is gone.
And Diebold?
To the public the name just… disappeared… but not the company.
In 2009, Diebold quietly rebranded their election division as Premier Election Solutions, a PR move to shed the scandal. It didn’t work. A year later, they sold it off entirely. So, guess who bought it?
ES&S… Election Systems & Software… the other dominant voting machine vendor in the U.S.
So no, Diebold didn’t die. It just got swallowed by a bigger giant. Ironically, the Department of Justice stepped in shortly after and forced ES&S to sell off most of (but not all) of Premier/Diebold’s assets due to antitrust concerns.
And guess who bought those assets? Dominion Voting Systems.
So now, the old Diebold software (the same kind that was exposed, hacked, and exploited) is split between two of the biggest voting vendors in America. Some of it lives under Dominion. Some of it still lingers inside ES&S.
Diebold may be dead in name, but its software still lives… chopped up, rebranded, and running under ES&S and Dominion. Certified by the same players who approved it the first time. Nothing really changed but the letterhead.
So where did all this take us in 2024?
Across Pennsylvania and New York, the red flags didn’t just wave they practically lit the sky. In Cambria County, PA, a high-speed scanner tallied over 15,000 ballots without ever being tested. The director who signed off on the machines quietly retired. Internal emails contradicted public records. Meanwhile, a forensic model flagged over 210,000 suspicious votes across the state — precincts reporting more ballots than voters, or zero registered voters somehow casting hundreds of votes. Not a single official audit touched the presidential race.
In New York, voters swore they cast ballots for Senate candidate Diane Sare, but the machines reported fewer than the number of affidavits. In districts where Gillibrand surged, Harris mysteriously underperformed or vanished from the tally entirely. Federal certification lab Pro V&V, the common thread tying these machines together, quietly approved sweeping software updates as “de minimis,” then vanished for months.
While voters were lining up, bomb threats shut down polling places across the country. And when the results came in? The audits started late, skipped races, or ignored the anomalies completely.
So here’s where we are (a recap):
The same movement that tried to overturn the 2020 election with fake electors and mob violence went on to steal and copy the software that runs our elections and they didn’t keep it secret.
They passed it around. Meanwhile, the same voting machine companies with a history of security failures are still in power.
The same labs that got disqualified for cutting corners are back, just using new names. They’re approving changes that weaken safeguards, with little to no oversight.
And the government keeps saying everything’s fine… even though nearly half the country is still voting on systems that were cloned and compromised years ago. It’s not just one bad decision.
It’s a pattern of negligence and denial that’s left the door wide open. If your gut says something’s wrong, trust it. You’re not imagining things…
I will keep looking into the voting machines, election integrity, and the results of not only the 2024 election but others. Feel free to subscribe to stay in the loop.
Note From The Author:
I don’t put my work behind a paywall. These stories are too urgent, too raw, too real to keep locked away.
When 90% of mainstream media outlets are owned by 6 billionaires, it’s becomes hard to know who to trust. I don’t take checks from billionaires, and I don’t take notes from PR firms. I just tell the damn story because I’m not part of the mainstream media.
My belief is that almost everyone has their angle, their agenda. The truth is usually hiding somewhere in between. And that’s what I’m chasing.
I don’t need to sanitize what’s happening. I’ll just tell it like it is.
But independent journalism takes real time, risk, and resources. If you value reporting that doesn't cower, that names names and shows receipts, please consider subscribing.
To stay in the loop, you can subscribe for free. It helps build awareness and keeps the pressure on a paid subscription helps me keep digging, filing FOIAs, verifying sources, and staying on the story long after the headlines fade.
Thank you for being here.
— Dissent ♥
In Canada we use paper ballots and scrutineers. Can’t be hacked. As a citizen who has taken part in a recount as a scrutineer, I really really trust this system. Every party is represented fully in watching over the electoral process. Just a suggestion.
Dissent, I am a proofreader. You have several errors. Looks better if they get fixed. “It’s like your teacher letting write the test, and then grade your own paper after..”