Aug 7 (Reuters) – The Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general is leading a team that gained unauthorized access to voting equipment while searching for evidence to support former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud, according to a Reuters analysis of court documents and public records.
The analysis shows that people working with Matthew De Pernod — the Trump-endorsed nominee for the state’s top law enforcement post — examined a tabulation of votes from the town of Richfield, a conservative stronghold of 3,600 in northern Michigan’s Roscommon County.
The Richfield security breach is one of four such incidents being investigated by current Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat. Under state law, it is a felony to seek or provide unauthorized access to voting equipment.
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DePerno did not respond to a request for comment.
A Republican attorney general nominee’s involvement in voting fraud comes amid a nationwide effort by Trump fraud supporters to win government offices that could prove critical in deciding future contested elections.
Last week in Arizona, three Trump-backed candidates who claim the 2020 election was rigged won the Republican primaries for governor, attorney general and secretary of state, the top official overseeing the election. In Pennsylvania, Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has vowed to decertify all elections he deems fraudulent through his secretary of state appointee. Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania are presidential battlegrounds.
Trump praised De Pernod in front of a large audience this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas. “He’s going to make sure you have law and order and fair elections,” Trump said, waving his fist as De Pernod stood in the audience and waved. “This is an important race.”
Reuters established the connection between Michigan’s DePerno and the Richfield voting hack by matching the township’s tab serial number to a photo in a publicly released report written by a member of DePerno’s staff. The photo showed a printed record of the vote tabulator’s activity, which also included a string of ten digits. Reuters confirmed those numbers matched the serial number of the Richfield vote tabulator through public records obtained by the municipality. State officials have previously identified Richfield as the site of a security breach in voting equipment.
De Perno submitted the report as evidence in a failed lawsuit challenging the results of the 2020 election in another Michigan county, Antrim. The report claims Dominion and ES&S election equipment is vulnerable to hacking and vote manipulation.
Reuters asked an election security expert to review the materials. Kevin Skoglund, president and chief technology officer of the nonpartisan election security group Citizens for Better Elections, said the matching numbers indicate DePerno’s team had access to Richfield Township’s tabulator or its data disks.
DePerno led the “Michigan Antrim County Elected Judicial and Investigative Team,” which included himself, Detroit attorney Stephanie Lambert, private investigator Michael Lynch and James Penrose, a former National Security Agency analyst, according to fundraising materials in July 2021 event in California sponsored by a conservative group promoting appearances by members of De Pernod’s team. Penrose, who has helped other prominent Trump allies in their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, authored the report, which Reuters linked to a tabloid involved in the city of Richfield security breach.
Lambert, Lynch and Penrose did not respond to requests for comment.
The previously unreported connection to GOP attorney general candidate De Pernod and his associates comes as Democratic incumbent Nessel moves forward with her investigation, which she began in February 2022. Nessel is running for re-election, which would create a conflict interests if her political opponent becomes a suspect in the investigation of her office.
The attorney general’s office declined to comment on the specifics of its investigation, but said Nessel would “take appropriate steps to remove himself and his department if a conflict arises.”
Those steps include asking a special prosecutor to look into election violations, according to a letter from the attorney general notifying the secretary of state of the request. The request was sent to the Coordinating Council of Prosecutors, an autonomous unit within the prosecutor’s office, which will decide whether a special prosecutor is needed.
Nessel’s office launched an investigation into the voting system’s security breaches after a request from Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. In a February statement, Benson said “at least one unnamed third party” accessed tabulating machines and data devices from Richfield Township and Roscommon County.
Jake Rollo, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said the office does not believe DePerno’s team had legal authorization to access ES&S’s voting equipment. Rollo declined to comment further on the attorney general’s investigation, but emphasized its importance. “To ensure Michigan’s elections are secure in the future, there must be consequences now for the people who have gained illegal access to the state’s voting machines,” he said.
ES&S did not respond to requests for comment.
THROWING ERROR
Voting and vote counting equipment is subject to strict chain of custody requirements to ensure accuracy and protection against fraud. Access to the tabs is strictly limited and any machine compromised by an unauthorized person is usually taken out of service.
The four cases Nessel investigated were among at least 17 incidents identified by Reuters across the country in which Trump supporters gained or attempted to gain unauthorized access to voting equipment. Michigan accounts for 11 of them, reflecting how conspiracy theorists are trying to use an error in the initial reporting of the 2020 results in Antrim County to claim that fraud is widespread in the state, without evidence.
A state review of the Antrim County incident found that a failure to properly update the software caused a computer error that led county officials to initially report Joe Biden as the winner of the reliably Republican county. Officials quickly acknowledged and corrected the error, and Trump’s victory was confirmed by a manual count of every vote cast.
De Perno took advantage of the confusion by filing a lawsuit alleging, without merit, that tabulators made by Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems were manipulated to flip votes from Trump to Biden in Antrim County.
“No evidence of machine fraud or manipulation of the 2020 election in Michigan or any other state has ever been presented, and courts in Michigan and elsewhere have rejected such allegations as without merit,” said Dominion spokesman Tony Fratto.
In early December 2020, 13th Circuit Court Judge Kevin Elsenheimer granted permission for DePerno’s legal team to take forensic images of voting equipment in Antrim County to look for evidence of election fraud. The court order was limited to Antrim where only Dominion equipment was used. The order does not cover other jurisdictions or machines made by other voting system vendors.
Yet DePerno’s team submitted two reports in April 2021 to the court that revealed they also examined equipment made by Election Systems & Software (ES&S).
The report written by Penrose, dated April 9, includes a photo of a “summary tape” of information about the tabulator’s activity on election night, such as when the results were sent to the county. Among other things, the tape showed a series of numbers: 0317350497.
This is the serial number of one of two ES&S DS200 tabulators used by Richfield Township during the 2020 vote, according to copies of documents obtained by Reuters through a public records request.
Skoglund, the election security specialist consulted by Reuters, said the matching numbers indicated that the author of the report had access to either Richfield’s tabulator or a data drive containing the results and other information in the machine.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the Penrose photo was taken from this same DS200 – that he had physical hands-on access,” Skoglund told Reuters.
A second person familiar with the operation of ES&S voting equipment reviewed records obtained by Reuters and agreed that the tab strip shown in Penrose’s report matched the machine with the same serial number.
MORE MACHINES
Penrose’s report was part of a series of submissions by De Pernod’s team that failed to convince Judge Elsenheimer. At a hearing on April 12, 2021, the judge ended De Pernod’s attempt to subpoena several Michigan counties for access to election data and equipment.
De Pernod gave an interview later that day to two right-wing websites, Gateway Pundit and 100 Percent Fed Up. De Pernod said Penrose reviewed an ES&S machine. He added that the team also looked at Dominion equipment “outside County Antrim”. The attorney said he did not consider Elsenheimer’s decision a dead end.
“Maybe there will be a county somewhere that will decide to come forward and cooperate.” That would be nice,” DePerno told the websites.
In fact, DePerno associates have already seized voting machines from local governments in Richfield Township in Roscommon County and Lake Township in Missaukee County, according to police records and text messages obtained through public records requests.
Lynch, the private investigator who worked with De Perno on his case in Antrim County, exchanged text messages with Lake Township employee Corinda Winkelman on March 20, 2021. Lynch asked for help accessing a Dominion device she provided him, according to…
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