The Election Assistance Commission Helped Rig the System. This Is the Proof.
How federal officials, corporate vendors, and private labs conspired to legitimize flawed voting systems.
In 2017, the official federal lab responsible for certifying the security of U.S. voting machines (Pro V&V) quietly lost its accreditation. It expired.
Then, for four years, that VSTL (voting system test lab) — which greenlights the software and hardware used in every one of our elections — operated without valid credentials. The same lab owned by a man who let voting machine vendors (manufacturers) do whatever they wanted during his time at CIBER INC.
This information was initially brought to the attention of the public through several lawsuits in GA regarding election integrity.
This was in 2021. Long after the damage was done, the lawsuits made prompted a public outcry and the government officials who sign off on changes to our elections had no choice but to respond.
Their response? The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) claimed Pro V&V had "always" been in good standing. Their evidence? Backdated paperwork. They just wrote the delay off as "clerical error” in an official “clarification” document from the EAC. Signed only by “program director” who, at the time, was life-long GOP member Mark Robbins.
You'd think this would be the headline on every news site in America. That a federal agency fabricated records and rewrote policy to retroactively approve uncertified machines used in a national election. But you probably never heard a word about it.
Because this isn't just a scandal. It's a cover-up. The EAC is corrupt.
“Since our founding in 2011, we have always had one focus: our clients.”
“Pro V&V exists to help its clients comply with regulations in systems and software testing in the most efficient and professional manner possible, and will always be dedicated to verifying your products to your satisfaction.”
— Provandv.com, Feb 2018.
Note: This has since been removed from their website but can be found in the internet archives.
Who’s Elections Are These, Anyway?
Let’s not forget who Pro V&V serves. In their own words:
“Since our founding in 2011, we have always had one focus — our clients.”
And those clients? They’re not you or me. Not American voters. Not people who’s heart is in remaining and fair and functioning democracy. Instead, their clients are the people who make the voting machines — corporate voting machine vendors.
The companies like ES&S and Dominion, who make billions selling fragile black boxes wrapped in bad code.
These machines run on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows XP Embedded. These are computer operating systems so obsolete that even Microsoft stopped supporting them years ago.
You’d get fired for running this setup at a midsize office. But in America, it runs our elections. Security researchers have repeatedly demonstrated how easily these systems can be hijacked.
Every year at DEF CON, hackers pop open these machines like tin cans for fun.
One year, a voting machine had the admin password hardcoded as “admin.” Another had a physical access port wide open on the back with no key, no seal, no alarm. A WinVote machine (used in Virginia until 2015) ran on Windows XP, had Wi-Fi enabled with WEP encryption, and its password was literally “abcde.”
This isn’t “high integrity.” This is high school project-level garbage.
And yet, these same companies claim their proprietary software must be shielded from public scrutiny that cast-vote records, audit logs, and even source code are corporate secrets. They’ve convinced courts time and time again that your vote becomes their intellectual property the moment you touch the screen.
But when Trump’s team cloned entire voting systems and passed them around like thumb drives they still swore their “proprietary private election software” was safe to use with a few “minor upgrades”
We were told to believe the elections were fair and safe even after J. Alex Halderman hacked a Dominion machine in court using nothing but a pen and the government sealed the report. The public didn’t hear about it until long after the election, and it wasn’t on every headline like it should’ve been.
Even after year after year, hackers at DefCon have torn through our “safe” election machines like wet cardboard.
So no, this isn’t about “election security” and it never was.
It’s actually about protecting corporate monopolies and the government contractors who profit off vulnerable, unaccountable infrastructure. It’s about keeping the public out, and letting the worst actors in.
And the EAC? Our election “protectors?” They’re not guarding the gates. They’re handing out the keys to the highest bidder.
If you’ve read my previous articles, you’ll get this reference:
I’d easily say that they are the CIBER INC of the American government. It appears when they shut them down in the early 2000’s, they took some ideas, too.
America, Meet Your Tax-Payer Funded Election Assistance Commission (EAC).
The gatekeepers of corporate interests… or uh, I mean democracy.
The EAC was created after Bush v. Gore to restore public trust in elections. Instead, it's become a Trojan horse for vendor control, far-right operatives, and partisan actors disguised as bureaucrats.
The commissioners have four year appointments. They legally can only be reappointed once. A maximum of eight years.
The commissioners are:
Donald Palmer (Trump appointee, Federalist Society mouthpiece)
Christy McCormick (conspiracy theorist, still in power two years after her term expired)
Thomas Hicks (Democrat, surprisingly appears clean)
Ben Hovland (Democrat, surprisingly appears clean given Trump nominated him)
While I will eventually post more about the democratic nominations, I really feel like the limited time we have here, we really need to talk about the blaring red flags that are EAC commissioners — and partners in crime — Christy McCormick and Donald Palmer.
Christy McCormick
The Republican ‘sleeper cell’ inside the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, has sat at the helm of our election machinery since 2015.
Her placement not by public demand, but by bureaucratic design. Originally nominated by GOP official Mitch McConnell and confirmed under Obama in 2014, she was reappointed by Trump in 2018.
Let’s talk a little bit about her background and why it’s a problem:
According to the biography provided by the EAC, Christy McCormick earned her B.A. from the University of Buffalo, her J.D. with honors from George Mason University School of Law (now renamed Antonin Scalia Law School), and also attended William & Mary Law School.
Both institutions are heavily tied to the Federalist Society pipeline. A pipeline funded by dark money. The same one that helped place almost every single SCOTUS justice there is today.
Need proof? George Mason’s law school was renamed in 2016 after receiving a $30 million donation $10 million from the Koch Foundation and the rest from anonymous conservative donors linked to the Federalist Society.
Now, her term expired in 2023 during the Biden administration, but like a mold in the walls of democracy, she’s still there. Not because the people wanted her. Because the system lets her fester.
It’s been two years since her term expired. But because GOP officials have not senate a nomination to the president she remains in a “hold over” position indefinitely.
Let’s talk about what she’s Christy McCormick has done for the American public during her time at the EAC:
She appeared on True the Vote’s podcast along with her EAC colleague Donald Palmer.
This is a dark money funded podcast notorious for election lies; part of the reason questioning election integrity is now frowned upon. On this podcast, she repeated Trump’s false claims about ballots being mailed to the dead.
The video’s since been scrubbed from YouTube and the True the Vote site.
Funny how these things disappear… it would be a shame if you watched it here on the internet archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20230506141205/
What else?
Yes, the same "audit" that made a mockery of election security protocols and resulted in forensic copies of voting machine software being spread among the MAGA network. The same audit that laughed out of court.
McCormick, meanwhile, kept her lips sealed and her title intact.
She was part of Trumps “Voter Fraud Commission” in 2017 that hat scrapped its own findings of no fraud but pushed baseless claims to justify vote suppression.
She (and EAC official Donald Palmer) got sued by a non-partisan watchdog group American Oversight for secretly working with with The Heritage Foundation, Rudy Giuliani and more.
They were using their federal positions to push election fraud narratives and undermine what is supposed to be non-partisan oversight.
She even refused to attend federally required election security briefings.
Former DHS official Neil Jenkins called her out for skipping them or showing open hostility when she did show. Let that sink in.. a woman tasked with safeguarding federal elections refused to be briefed on threats to federal elections. I guess it makes since that when you are the threat you wouldn’t want to be there.
One of the Biggest Sins: The Political Assassination of EAC Watchdog Matt Masterson
She and Heritage Foundation operative Hans von Spakovsky orchestrated the removal of one of the EAC’s only nonpartisan watchdogs…not through formal process, but by quietly asking Speaker Paul Ryan’s office to replace him. No hearing, no justification, just a backdoor purge of someone too committed to facts.
Masterson was widely respected for his bipartisan, fact-driven work on election security, especially his collaboration with DHS and CISA. But to McCormick of The Federalist Society and Hans von Spakovsky of The Heritage Foundation, he was a threat,, too independent, too focused on truth over narrative..
If someone can lie to the public, spread conspiracy theories, sabotage watchdogs, refuse security briefings, collude with extremists, and still hold power years after their term expires what does that say about oversight in this country?
More to the point: what does it say about the complete lack of accountability over the very people certifying our elections?
Donald Palmer
The other half of the federalist duo quietly steering America’s election systems from the inside… Donald Palmer currently serves as Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission as of 2025.
Appointed by Donald Trump and confirmed by unanimous Senate consent in 2019, Palmer was handed the keys to America’s voting infrastructure. And much like McCormick, he hasn’t let go since.
Let’s talk about his background and why it’s deeply alarming:
Palmer is no apolitical bureaucrat… he sits on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society’s Free Speech & Election Law Practice Group and co-hosts their podcast, The Voting Booth.
That’s the same group responsible for flooding the judiciary with right-wing ideologues and shaping the legal playbook for voter suppression across the country.
But it doesn’t stop there. . .
As Designated Federal Officer (DFO) of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), Palmer quietly took control of the group that writes the technical standards for all voting machines.
So what’s the problem? Well… VVSG 2.0 weakened multiple election security safeguards, including:
Allowing internet-capable devices in voting systems
Removing requirements for comprehensive cast-ballot reports
Relaxing standards for logging external system connections
Scrapping mandates for physical locks, cryptographic transparency, and long-term machine reliability
Dropping the 10-year lifespan rule for machines and even permitting vendor ads on ballots
This wasn’t just incompetence. It was captured policy. This is the same guidelines Cobb and others have been using to certify out voting machines. So, in the end, the vendors use money to control not only the private voting test labs.. but the EAC, too.
So, as a result a watch-dog group and election security analyst filed a lawsuit.
In 2021, Palmer and the EAC were sued in Stark v. EAC, a federal lawsuit alleging the VVSG 2.0 standards were quietly edited at the urging of voting machine vendors behind closed doors and in violation of public notice laws.
Emails and redlined drafts released in discovery confirmed: private corporate owned vendors met with the Election Assistance Committee days before and helped rewrite the rules.
Even after the public release of those documents, the lawsuit remains active.
As of March 2024, the court has still not ruled on the EAC’s motion to dismiss or for partial summary judgment.
The people writing our voting machine rules weren’t public servants. They were literally the people who get paid with our tax dollars by the U.S. government. Their only concern is a profit margin that grows every year. Greed. Pure greed.
And Palmer is the gatekeeper of it now.
He also appeared on True the Vote’s podcast alongside Christy McCormick
A dark-money megaphone for election fraud conspiracies. On this show, both commissioners repeated Trump’s false claims about mail-in ballots and voter fraud. The episode has since been scrubbed from YouTube and True the Vote’s own website but archived versions remain.
You can find the link to the full episode in the archives above.
He was also named in the FOIA lawsuit by American Oversight
Along with McCormick, Palmer was sued in 2022 for secret coordination with far-right political operatives, including The Heritage Foundation, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Cleta Mitchell, and ALEC.
The internal emails we talked about up there? They revealed behind-the-scenes efforts to block absentee voting and promote voter suppression narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic all while using their federal roles to cloak partisan strategy in the language of “election integrity.”
He never should’ve been anywhere near the rulebook
Palmer’s quiet appointment to the TGDC was never publicly announced. There was no transparency about how he gained control over the group that sets voting machine policy.. just internal documents casually mentioning him as the official who helped finalize VVSG 2.0. That’s how election security gets gutted without anyone noticing.
And yet, here he is in 2025… running the entire commission.
So again I ask, if a man can secretly rewrite our election machine rules in coordination with vendors, appear on conspiracy-peddling podcasts, collude with coup plotters, and still be Chairman of the EAC… what does that say about the integrity of our oversight process?
So, this was a lot of information.. let’s recap:
Christy McCormick and Donald Palmer aren’t just partisan bureaucrats. They are embedded operatives installed at the highest levels of election oversight, rewriting rules, spreading disinformation, and protecting the very vendors they’re supposed to regulate.
There’s more to these two, and more to the the EAC as a whole. But we have limited time and space.
The lab certifying our voting machines, Pro V&V, ran without accreditation for years. Its founder, Jack Cobb, has a history of rubber-stamping machines for cash back when he worked at CIBER Inc. a lab so corrupt it was shut down. When that scandal faded from the headlines, Cobb just opened a new shop and picked up where he left off.
The EAC covered for him. They backdated documents. Lied to the public. Enabled uncertified systems to run our elections and when caught, they called it a “clerical error.”
This isn’t a bug in the system. It is the system.
The corruption runs deeper than one lab or one commissioner. It’s a network. It’s coordinated. And it’s been built to keep you from seeing how fragile, how rigged, and how vulnerable our election infrastructure really is.
Stay with me. I'm going to expose all of it and when I say it’s all connected… I mean it.
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. I will never charge you to read my articles:
But 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 I want you to know that 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.
But 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 ♥
This entire article is the primary reason why, although deemed archaic by most standards, I would much rather put my faith in a manual counting system for votes. It’s what we have here in Canada and there have never been (in my recollection) any errors. The only time recounts are necessary is when a margin of victory is extremely slim…like within 10 votes. To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have or ever had voting machines. The only machines we have are the ones used to store all the ballots until individual polls are closed!!
In my humble opinion, I say if the system works so well here, why not in America?? It might take extra time counting all the ballots but I think it would be worth it!!
It doesn't matter. No one who has a say will EVER say no to that belligerent freakpig.
They all line up to kiss his ass, and tuck him in with hot milk and a brutal, violent, and perverted bedtime story.
As long as he threatens, belligerently sneers, and throws his crybaby tantrums they'll cower in terror and ask if they can have the honor of his having someone inconvenient killed for them.
Then they lovingly undo his diaper and kiss his ass.
I'm about done caring. No one else does.