PRESS RELEASE: President Trump’s Address Confirms What We’ve Documented Here for Six Years

Now It’s Time for South Dakota to Act

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 17, 2026

South Dakota Canvassing Group: President Trump’s Address Confirms What We’ve Documented Here for Six Years — Now It’s Time for South Dakota to Act

Sioux Falls, SD — In response to President Trump’s address last night exposing the shadow government’s cover-up of compromised 2020 elections — including foreign data theft, voting machine vulnerabilities, fraudulent registrations, and non-citizen voting — South Dakota Canvassing Group today calls on Governor Larry Rhoden, Atty General Marty Jackley and legislative leaders to immediately review state election systems, work with DHS on all security measures, and prepare to pass comprehensive election reforms.

For more than six years, our volunteer poll watchers, citizen auditors, and election observers have documented patterns in South Dakota that match the exact vulnerabilities the President detailed. These were not glitches or isolated mistakes. They were systemic weaknesses that were designed to allow bad actors to exploit our processes and officials too often resisted transparency and accountability when we raised alarms.

What we observed in South Dakota:

• The Mail Ballot Identity Theft Scheme. In 2020 and in subsequent election cycles, voters in multiple counties claimed not to have requested or returned an absentee ballot, however, state voting records attribute a vote cast to them. This matches the national pattern of deliberate voter identity theft in which fraudulent mail ballots were cast in the names of registered voters, unbeknownst to them. No adequate investigation or explanation was ever provided at the time. Similar suspicious mail ballot patterns and chain-of-custody gaps have continued in later years.

• Voter Roll and Registration Irregularities. Citizen reviews and public records requests have repeatedly turned up non-citizens, deceased individuals, and duplicates on South Dakota’s voter rolls. Just recently, one citizen auditor in Lawrence County identified nearly a dozen deceased voters on the rolls in her precinct, and successfully challenged them for removal. These issues persisted despite the passage of SB140 in 2023, which has never been properly implemented by the Secretary of State. The President’s confirmation of industrial-scale registration fraud in other states and nationwide non-citizen findings of potentially 1–2 million underscores why South Dakota’s participation in the SAVE program is imperative.

• Voting Equipment and Transparency Failures. Observers documented machine glitches, inconsistent tabulation, limited paper trails in some jurisdictions, and resistance to meaningful post-election audits or public access to cast vote records and chain-of-custody documents. South Dakota Canvassing Group volunteers have years of documented history of encountering obstruction and outright lies about the mere existence of the federally required digital audit trail. In 2026, SB114 codified public access, however language added by Deputy Secretary of State Tom Deadrick makes redaction requirements excessive and overly cumbersome, effectively still blocking public auditing capabilities of South Dakota elections. Citizen oversight has also identified the use of uncertified EMS laptops in the four biggest counties, the use of illegally certified voting systems statewide since at least 2020, poor cyber hygiene practices at the county level, vote drops in election night reporting, and most recently – Primary election results in some races matching the vote percentage spread of the test results or mock elections – which is not statistically possible.
  
  Recently declassified CIA documents reveal electronic election equipment is built to run virtual machines which alter real election data, undetected. A September 2020 CIA memo on Venezuela and the Maduro regime’s ability to perfectly compromise machines — swapping real voter data at upload and erasing traces so the intrusion would not be detected even by hand audits or ballot counts.

All of our South Dakota voting equipment is source in Communist China.

• Centralized, Internet Connected, Cloud Hosted Voter Roll and Election Night Reporting Software. South Dakota’s voter data is hosted by Knowink on the Microsoft Azure Government Cloud platform. This platform has been identified as compromised by Communist China by the Secretary of War – Pete Hegseth. Anomalous data has been identified in this system, such as brand-new voters having 11/3/2020 votes backdated into their records for up to three years after the 2020 election. In every election we have been monitoring since 2021, votes have been recorded for voters BEFORE the election has even occurred – which means the system is performing functions it is not programmed to do. And in 2024, the statewide Total Vote system crashed. A Microsoft outage was blamed, however there was no federally required Microsoft Azure outage reported by Microsoft for the date the crash occurred.
  
  DHS Secretary Mullin stated today: “They can change your voter registration records and your vote.” And that these facts are not up for debate.
  
  These problems align with the multiple intelligence assessments confirming foreign capabilities to exploit U.S. voting systems.

• Resistance to Accountability. When citizens and poll watchers flagged anomalies, many were dismissed, and records requests were slow-walked or denied. This created an environment where problems festered rather than being investigated and fixed — exactly the dynamic the President described at the national level.

“Last night the President provided the American People with legitimate receipts that validated what we have been documenting and warning about in South Dakota since 2020,” said Jessica Pollema, President of the South Dakota Canvassing Group. “The shadow government knew. They lied and hid the truth. They are the real election deniers. We have been telling the truth all along. Now we must repair the damage they caused — so every citizen in our state can believe in our elections again.”

Fortunately, states are not starting from scratch. Resources such as the The Model Election Laws Handbook was designed to address each of these vulnerabilities with specific statuary language based on the ten principles of the U.S. Citizens Elections Bill of Rights. It directly addresses the problems we have seen:

• Strict mail ballot qualification, public processing, no curing, and Election Night results reporting (Principle III).

• Proof of citizenship, rigorous ongoing voter roll maintenance, and database verification (Principles I & IV).

• Secure hand-marked paper ballots, bans on vulnerable/foreign technology, and real independent audits (Principles V & VI).

• Full transparency of all records and citizen standing to enforce the law with real penalties (Principles VII & X).

These reforms close the exact vectors exploited in 2020 and beyond.

Also, South Dakota election law was built around the hand count process, and South Dakota can immediately move to hand counting paper ballots in the precinct on election night in the midst of this National Security Crisis. There are currently ZERO electronic election systems certified for use in the United States that are not foreign sourced or vulnerable to foreign adversaries.

The South Dakota Canvassing Group has already been a driving force for election reforms for years, and stands ready to provide model bill language, expert testimony, coalition support, and public education. We urge the Governor, Attorney General and Legislature to convene an immediate review of South Dakota’s election infrastructure, election code, and prepare to secure our elections system from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

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The South Dakota Canvassing Group is a nonpartisan grassroots network of citizens committed to honest, transparent, and accurate elections.