The Machines Were Changed Before the 2024 Election. No One Was Told.

A private lab quietly altered voting machines used across the U.S. Then it vanished.

Jun 07, 2025

In the leafy suburbs of Rockland County, New York, democracy tripped on a loose wire and hit its head. What started as a small lawsuit over a few missing votes may be unraveling into one of the most damning election integrity scandals in years.

At the center of it all: missing votes, statistical anomalies, and a federally accredited testing lab called Pro V&V.

In 2024, voters in Rockland County, NY, filed sworn legal affidavits claiming they had voted for independent Senate candidate Diane Sare. But the machines told a different story. In one district, nine people said they voted for her. The machines recorded five. In another, five claimed to vote for her but only three were officially counted by the machines.

At the same time, In districts where voters clearly favored Democrats (evident by strong support for democratic Senate candidate Kirsten Gillibrand) Kamala Harris’s name either underperformed or seemed to disappear from the top of the ballot completely. They’d found that in some of the counties people where voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate Kirsten, Kamala Harris somehow got no votes at all.

(Correction): Trump outperformed Republican Senate candidates by 2.1 million votes nationwide. In 33 states, over 750k more people voted for president than Senate, a drop-off that might be normal, or might mean votes vanished before they were counted. That data shows over 2.1 million people voted for him & skipped the rest of the Republicans on the same ballot?

My opinion? That kind of pattern doesn’t scream voter preference. It whispers something went wrong in the vote count itself.

That’s not split-ticket voting. That’s a mathematical anomaly.

SMART Elections, a nonpartisan watchdog group, uncovered serious discrepancies in New York, including a reported drop-off of over 314,000 votes between presidential and Senate contests, and filed suit. and filed a lawsuit. And on May 22, 2025, Judge Rachel Tanguay agreed: the allegations were serious enough to warrant discovery. The lawsuit, SMART Legislation et al. v. Rockland County Board of Elections, moves forward, with a hearing scheduled for September 22, 2025.

Everything after this point does not reflect SMART Elections. These are findings from the EAC found independently by DIB after learning of the lawsuit, and reflect this publication only. You can find SMARTElections information at the bottom of the page.

The Silent Middleman

Between March and September 2024, Pro V&V signed off on a series of hardware and software updates to ES&S voting machines. These updates were all waved through under the label “de minimis,” a technicality supposedly meant for small, insignificant tweaks. Replacing a cable. That kind of thing.

In 2024, Pro V&V and the EAC quietly approved significant changes to voting systems, including new hardware components, software updates, and a revamped Electionware reporting module. These weren’t minor tweaks. They touched ballot scanners, modified audit files, and even affected machines flagged by CISA. But by calling them “de minimis,” they avoided full testing, public scrutiny, and transparency.

These changes? I do not believe they qualify as “minimum” and the rules generally do not allow this. Software changes are not supposed to be considered minor. But Pro V&V Since they were filed as de minimis they were not subject to any independent external oversight, testing, and lacked any public-facing explanation.

These programs need more oversight. If the system can be changed in the shadows, marked simply as “DeMinimis” without any actual testing, even something as small as hardware, then every vote cast on those machines was at risk of miscount or manipulation.

The ES&S systems that received these shadow approvals are used in over 40% of U.S. counties. Pennsylvania, Florida, New Jersey, California, all rely on machines that Pro V&V signs off on. The ExpressVote XL, implicated in the Sare vote discrepancy (missing votes) is already being used in battleground states.

Even worse? There's no independent watchdog in this process. No backup. No outside review. Two private companies (V&V & SLI Compliance) get to decide whether our national voting infrastructure is safe and they get to make that call in secret. What we’re left with isn’t quality assurance. It’s a rubber stamp masquerading as a security check.

The Disappearance

PROV&V? The private company certified to change our voting system? Their website, once home to testing logs, certification documents, and contact information, collapsed into a hollow shell shortly after the 2024 elections.

As of June 2025, is still just a single barren page. One phone number. One generic email.

This is the lab responsible for certifying the very machines that count our votes. No one’s checking their math. No one’s checking their judgment. And when the heat turns up, right around the 2024 elections, they vanished from public view. A private company, backed by federal accreditation, with the power to alter national election infrastructure is operating in total darkness.

Behind this fog stands Jack Cobb, the elusive director of Pro V&V. He’s never run for office, never faced public questioning, and yet every major voting machine must pass through his private lab before it reaches a ballot box.

He is the unelected gatekeeper of election infrastructure, a man accountable to no one but his clients and the architecture that shelters him.

A Fatal Flaw In Our Voting System

Federal law all but guarantees labs like Pro V&V stay in power. Under the Help America Vote Act (2002), they're accredited by the Election Assistance Committee (EAC) in conjunction with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). But once a lab is in, it stays in.

There’s no built-in decertification path. No process for public challenge. Not even a hotline to flag concerns. So Cobb and his team continue operating under a veil of technical legitimacy, certifying changes to voting machines from inside a sealed chamber where no one can see what’s really going on.

The EAC is the federal agency that approves which voting systems can be used, while NIST helps write the technical rules those systems must follow. Together, they decide which labs get to test and certify the machines that count our votes.
They approve the labs, set the certification process, and are supposed to enforce standards. Nominations come from party leadership in Congress. So the President technically picks from a short list provided by House and Senate leaders.
Two of the four EAC commissioners were placed by Donald Trump during his first presidency: Benjamin W. Hovland & Donald L. Palmer.

So, this means, even if these companies commit blatant fraud, the federal rules offer no clear pathway to remove them. The EAC themselves has no teeth to revoke accreditation unless there's proof of total failure or criminal wrongdoing and even then, the process is vague, bureaucratic, and opaque.

To remove a lab like Pro V&V, EAC has to first document “significant evidence” of noncompliance or misconduct. But the kicker is, they don’t have real-time oversight. There’s no routine audit. So unless someone files a formal complaint, and the EAC chooses to act, nothing moves.
If they do decide to investigate, they conduct an internal review: think paperwork, interviews, more paperwork. Then the EAC would have to initiate a formal vote to suspend or revoke the lab’s accreditation. That process can drag on for months, and there’s no public hearing requirement, no outside watchdog, and no clear timeline.

So, this means Cobb and his team continue operating under a cloak of legitimacy, quietly certifying election-altering changes while shielded by federal inertia & structural silence.

Now, knowing this I want you to remember:

Just when scrutiny was needed most, Pro V&V’s online presence vanished. Watchdogs looking for documentation found an empty shell. For months, there were no posted reports, no visible activity. The lab that certifies machines for national elections essentially evaporated from the internet.

And no one in federal government has intervened. Not the EAC. Not NIST. Not Congress.

So What’s Next?

This lawsuit won’t undo the 2024 election. That chapter is closed. Congress certified the results, and the machinery of power has already shifted into its next gear. But if what SMART Elections is uncovering turns out to be true, it could set off a political earthquake. Legal challenges. Demands to decertify voting systems. State-level probes. Mounting pressure on the EAC to finally do its job.

This wasn’t just a glitch in some sleepy county. It was a stress test of our entire system and possibly nation wide system fraud in the presidential election. And the real tragedy? Almost no one noticed.

If nothing changes, 2024 won’t be remembered as the worst-case scenario. It’ll be seen as the warm-up. And here’s the kicker: if one underfunded watchdog group can dig up this much from a quiet New York suburb, what else is rotting in the shadows of this country’s ballots?

You can help them keep digging: visit smartelections.us or Substack.

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