Questions and Answers with a County Commissioner

I hope your day is going well. I am Travis Lasseter a County Commissioner in Pennington County. Recently I gave a presentation on election integrity and was seeking any information on any evidence of fraud. The presentation I gave was at CFL and after the presentation I was told to watch SD Canvassing's presentation and go from there. So now after watching your presentation, I am reaching out to you for specific information.

Was your presentation video recorded?  If so, can you send that to us for examination and rebuttal?  We have heard from attendees about your presentation and Cindy Mohler’s reluctance to answer questions.  If you have the recording, please forward.

Also, this is the first email to ever arrive in our inbox from you.  Many people have heard you say that you have reached out to us, and we never replied.  Either you had invalid contact information or that was not true.  We have never had problems with others being able to find us.

Do you have source data (screen shots etc) for the data presented on slides 6-9 of the West River presentation? I would like to view that source data, and I would like to see the chain of custody of such data?

Of course, we have source data for our research.  We have spent over $10,000 of donated money purchasing voter rolls from the Secretary of State.  Sadly, the voter roll system seems to be the only computerized data base in the history of the modern world that has no daily back up taken, so one cannot request a back dated voter roll.  There is no accurate voter list available for any election day in the state.  It’s a shame that we can’t go back and get the same data to review it.  

It’s interesting that you are concerned with the chain of custody of our data, yet Pennington County has no chain of custody for thousands upon thousands of no-excuse absentee ballots sent out all across the country and overseas to voters on the rolls, whom your auditor admitted on video tape, that their voter registration forms were not reviewed for accuracy and completeness, as mandated by state law.  We would suggest your county commission request a printed copy of all the original voter registration forms from 514 Americas Way, Box Elder and Timmons Market, 316 Villa Drive, Box Elder to see for yourself.  Then make these publicly available on your county website and hold a public meeting as to what the commission will do about the thousands of perjured voter registration forms on file in your county, and the clear violations of the law by the County Auditor.  Any violation of the law by an elected official with no specific penalty attached is a Class 2 Misdemeanor.  

3-16-1. Willful failure to perform official duty as misdemeanor.

Where any duty is or shall be enjoined by law upon any public officer, or upon any person holding any public trust or employment, every intentional omission to perform such duty, where no special provision shall have been made for the punishment of such delinquency, is a Class 2 misdemeanor.

Please refer to the slide show for a few references to the state law on voter registration.

Your county has a proven chain of custody problem that no one will address. 

The chain of custody for our data is this:  Request sent to SOS, SOS sends link to dropbox for retrieval of data, data is retrieved and saved in a locked format in multiple locations.  All analysis verified by a second party before publishing.

On slide 9, concerning the voter registration date and last voted date, have you reached out to the County Auditor on that issue? When we pull up those names we do not see the same data? So I would like to know the source of that file and the chain of custody for it.

This question demonstrates the lack of understanding as to what the cloud-based, internet-connected TotalVote System can do and is doing to election results and voter registration.  We recommend reading all of the articles produced on TotalVote by election experts and researchers in states that use this software. 

The data changes on a daily basis.  The votes change, voter ID’s change, names and addresses change, voters appear and disappear.  Virtually every data point in the system changes without the knowledge of the auditor. 

We just spoke with a State Senator from Montana who has spoken with the Secretary of State and the Auditors.  Data is changing inside their TotalVote system that the Auditors and the SOS deny changing.  The question is, who is doing this?  The auditors we sent this information to did not respond with an explanation.

For Example: 

During the November 8, 2022 general election, absentee voting began Friday, September 23, 2022.  We purchased a dataset on September 26, 2022.  Over 1,000 Absentee votes had already been recorded and assigned to a voter before the election even happened.  County Auditors were questioned as to how this was happening.  The answer was “it must be a glitch.”  We brought this to multiple legislators also.  Shortly after our discovery of this “glitch” the absentee votes were removed across the state – and it was not the auditor’s who did it.  We have email documentation from an auditor of this also.  Our October 19, 2022 dataset shows 154 absentee votes cast prior to the election.  The 1,000+ were removed and 100+ were able to come through after the purge.

Anyone who looks at the TotalVote system today to “verify” the validity of our claims would be looking at a modified data set. 

We have analyzed multiple datasets by absentee requests and returns.   One of our purchased data sets compared with a manual spreadsheet kept by the Minnehaha County Auditor’s office shows major discrepancies between the county’s manual record and the state’s record of requested and returned absentee ballots. 

There are also voters on the rolls with absentee votes cast with no record of requesting or returning them.  We encourage you to download data from your auditor multiple times per year and do a comparative analysis of your own.  What you find may surprise you. 

We believe each county should be taking daily back-ups of the voter rolls along with the Secretary of State.  Every county office and the Secretary of State should be able to produce a list of the voter roll as it was on election day.  The absence of such records only adds to the distrust of the system.

On slide 17, you have a list of stolen votes, phantom votes etc. Will you submit those affidavits to me for review and research? If there is evidence of fraud, did you turn those affidavits, or copies of them into the local sheriff so they could investigate the crime? If so will you let me know the outcome and the point of contact?

Those affidavits were already brought to your County Auditor Cindy Mohler and her election officials.  A two-hour meeting took place where all the affidavits were reviewed, some complete with attached obituaries, and the response was that the Auditor could do nothing to remove the voters.  This evidence was also brought to the County Sheriff in Pennington County, and Sheriffs in two others.  The Sheriffs requested the information be sent to DCI.  DCI sat on the evidence presented for months and months, and then sent it back dismissing it with no explanation.  This took place about a year and a half ago.  You are free to ask Cindy Mohler why she didn’t bring this to the attention of the County Commission and if she has copies that she can share with you.  You are one of the officials that certify the election in your county.  Certifying a fraudulent election may bear criminal penalties.

On slide 27, your presentation talks about E-poll books. Are you aware that Pennington county does not use them? We did at one time, it was bad, and we did away with them.

Yes, we are well aware of the disaster that happened in Pennington County in 2020 with the e-poll books and use it as an example of what not to do.  Several candidates still think that the results of their elections were inaccurate. Were you one of the commissioners to certify this election?  Pennington County should be lobbying to get rid of e-poll books in every county and return to precinct level voting state-wide.  After your experience of what not to do, would you bring a bill to eliminate vote centers, super-precincts, and the use of vulnerable, non-EAC certified, internet-connected e-poll pads?

On slide 34, the Drazabot graphic you utilize asks the question of why did the vote total go down. What is the source data for that graphic? SD does not release the CVR's at this time (I am working on that) so that means the source data had to come from another source, human input, or something else. Do you have the data for that? I would suspect it was human error if someone was typing in numbers to the totals for that race. Have you looked into the source data first?

Election night reporting and Cast Vote Records are two separate things. 

Cast Vote Records are the per-ballot audit trail for the ES&S tabulators.

The Election Night Reporting graphs are created from data being pulled off the Secretary of State’s website from Bpro’s TotalVote system on the media tab.  Every five minutes on election night, data is uploaded.  This data is collected by Edison and Scytl, which is where the media gets the results.  This is also where the numbers that run across the bottom of the tv stations such as NBC, FOX, CBS etc. come from.  In our state, this is where Keloland, KSFY, etc. get the numbers they report.

Every state in the country reports their election night results this way, either through BPro’s TotalVote, VR Systems, or Tenex.  The Edison Data is published on the internet however, the 2020 Edison data has since been removed. We did save this data before it was taken down after much scrutiny by experts all across the country. South Dakota had over a dozen vote drops for Trump and increases for Biden in that Edison Data. 

The 2022 election results were reported in the same manner.  Capturing the vote returns every five minutes creates a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet data can be graphed, which is what you were looking at.  The data for the 2022 primary was publicly available nationwide. If you want a chain of custody of the data, ask the SOS to compare their results with what the nationwide reporting system said.  But since they didn’t take a backup, there is no way to verify those results. 

We appreciate your work on Cast Vote Records.  Do you realize we have sued your county for the Cast Vote Records?  Are you aware that your Auditor has the ERM system that allows analysis and audit of the election, that your county pays over $8,500/year for it, and that your auditor has never been trained on how to use it?  This system would also produce the Cast Vote Record in CSV or XLS format in five minutes or less.  This data does not identify a voter, it is not proprietary, it is always 100% available, and the County owns it; which means the citizens of the county own it. 

If you have read the ES&S transcript that we made public, ES&S specifically states they don’t train on Cast Vote Records or Audit Logs.  Why are County Commissioners wasting public funds for a software program no one knows how to use?  Better yet, why aren’t we auditing our elections with the software available to Pennington County?

No County Auditor in the state is allowed to give out the Cast Vote Records by advice of their State’s Attorney, quoting the Hearing Examiners decision to block our public records requests.  But everyone should understand, the Auditor is an elected official.  The State’s Attorney and the Secretary of State have no authority over them.  The Hearing Examiner is another unelected bureaucrat that is an administrative judge, who’s decision is not equivalent to a circuit court judges decision.  The Auditor is the guardian of the records.  The state law is very clear that if a record is not specifically listed as not publicly available, it shall be liberally construed   as publicly available, regardless of the form.  Transparency produces public trust.

The CVR’s are already a public record.  The first denials were sent upon bad advice from ES&S which was quoted in the denial letters from the counties, and since then, the state officials have dug themselves into a hole they can’t get out of.  These records are public information, have been since 2005.  They are not secret or proprietary, and the machine production of them is a requirement for EAC certification.  Anything to the contrary is misinformation. 

Why has Pennington County hired outside legal counsel to fight the citizens for their right to public records that they paid for, rather than coming to the table to remedy the massive distrust in the election process?

On slides 35 and 36 do you have the raw data? Was it downloaded or was it manually inputted by individuals? I would like to understand that process a little more and I would like to understand the chain of custody to verify that SD Canvassing received accurate reporting.

It is unfortunate you were unable to attend one of our West River events, as we explain this data comes directly from the Secretary of States website through the BPro TotalVote System.  Our team downloaded this data all night on election night.  We had multiple individuals that collected this data and those data sets match.  You should set up an appointment with Cindy Mohler to ask her how these numbers get into the TotalVote System, and then do an extensive amount of reading and research to understand how this data is at risk of manipulation.  Your concerns with the chain of custody of our data can be directed back to the Secretary of State and their chain of custody of the data, which is clearly changing on a regular basis with no explanation for any of it.

On slide 44, while technically correct there has not been a post-election audit on the machines to verify their accuracy, there have been recounts that were hand counted as I understand that verified the machine data was exactly correct. Just a side note I was on the Post Election Audit summer study team and worked hard to ensure a hand count audit that involves the public in a very open and transparent way.

Recounts in South Dakota are done with machines, as mandated by administrative rule.  Audits are not recounts.  The presence of Jennifer Morrell in the summer study tainted the goodwill put forth by those representing South Dakota. 

On slide 45, there is a reference to the Antrim County lawsuit, what is that about? Do you have any specific data on that lawsuit? As I researched it, it was dismissed and found to be an invalid complaint as the hand count revealed the machines did not do what was claimed. Do you have a comment on that?

Where is your research? Please submit for response.  Was your research on results or the presence of illegal modems in place against state law?

Also on slide 45 you reference the verizon sim card in an ES&S machine, was that in SD anywhere? Do you have any physical evidence there are any of those cards in SD? We inspected the ones in Pennington County and there was no such card or any other type of card/wireless modem.

As you must be aware, the election machines are not available to public inspection.  The election machines are also not open to inspection by anyone in our state, per the specific instructions of the ES&S contracts.  If you have not reviewed this, please request Pennington County’s contracts from Cindy Mohler.  ES&S requires any inspection and maintenance of the tabulator machines be performed by ES&S technicians.  Any opening of a machine by anyone other than the ES&S technician voids the warranty and decertifies the machine for use in an election.  The contract requirements are standard.

Are you saying Pennington County opened one or more of the DS850 tabulator machines?  Do you realize per the terms of the contract that you signed, that the opening of the machines invalidates the warranty and makes them an uncertified piece of equipment immediately?  Have you decertified those machines that you inspected in Pennington County? Are those decertification and any applicable re-certification records publicly available?  Were any of those machines used for counting an election after you opened them?  If so, those election results may be out of compliance and would need to be decertified immediately.

If you were looking for a Telit Chip in your DS850’s you were looking for the wrong kind of modems.  Those are only placed in DS200’s.  DS850 modems can be as small as a grain of rice.  The DS850 motherboards are made in CHINA with Chinese parts.  Anything MADE in CHINA does not leave the country without the approval of the CCP.   This is something that you should do more research on.  Col. Shawn Smith, who was in charge of the U.S. Air Force Cyber Defense, states that these computer parts can and do execute code while the machine is turned off.  If it is connected to a power source, code can run without the knowledge of the election officials.  He also states that there is not a single piece of election equipment that meets DOD standards for cybersecurity, as the US has deemed the election apparatus as national critical infrastructure.  Col. Shawn Smith attended your special County Commission meeting via zoom, and he stated this on while on the call. 

When defending national critical infrastructure, the U.S. Military operates under the assumption they have already been hacked.  Then proceed to plan B, C, D, E.  It is quite the opposite with our election infrastructure. Those who ask questions are shamed, and those who must produce evidence of security and accurate results hide the proof.  Please request a copy of the lawsuit filed against your county and read all 600 pages of evidence.

You neglected to address the programmed and encrypted flash drives that your county purchases from ES&S for $105.00 each.  Those flash drives are programmed, but no one in the state has access to the source code, knows who is programming these drives, or has access to the data on the drives (CVRS) because ES&S has intentionally kept the election officials in the dark.  Have you reviewed the programming on the flash drives or the results on the flash drives?  Have you taken a forensic image of your machines and had them independently analyzed by forensic experts for machine manipulation?  Have you compared the forensic image to the flash drives, and the flash drives to the TotalVote results?  Where is the chain of custody of the election results in Pennington County?  The fact is, there is none, and your county and the rest of the state have violated the civil rights of the voters of Pennington County by contracting away all transparency and authenticity of the election to third-party for-profit vendors along with failing to produce and audit trail.   

Slide 47, you give statements about instant trust and instant doubt. Well we have errors documented with human hand counting. We have errors with digital counting, but usually that is because it was programmed wrong (which we get fixed) or some other variable such as dirty optic lense. You mention test decks, were you unaware that all SD counties must use them? Are you aware that we create our own and not the programming company? Are you aware that we don't run them just at the beginning of the count?

Rick Weible has proven multiple counties in SD were using test decks out of compliance with the EAC?  Are you aware that many counties in SD test less than 20 ballots before running an election, and that this minimal amount of ballots is also out of compliance?  Rick Weible was able to get the law changed to bring the counties into compliance with the test decks.  Were any of the tests run prior to this law change in compliance with the EAC?  Also, are you aware that the machines scan scribble marks in the ballot stamp area and regular office copy paper rather than weighted official ballot paper with no problem? Refer to Hand County Commission public testing of the machines on YouTube.

Hand Count error rate is less than 2%.  The machine count error rate for the Arizona general election was over 68%.  ES&S says hand count error rate is over 25%, but this is not true.  There are many groups across the country that have studied, demonstrated, and published various methods of hand counting ballots.  Each batch of 50 tallies or less must match before going forward. Dual party representation and local oversight help secure locally tallied results.  

Computerized machine counts can change thousands of votes in an instant.  There is plenty of evidence of overturned elections with hand count audits of the machines all over the country.  It’s much harder to change massive amounts of results with citizen oversight counting in the precinct with dual party representation. The hidden audit trail of the black box tabulators in South Dakota produces zero trust.  In case you missed it, a recent Rasmussen poll says 80% of Republicans and over 60% of the general population have lost trust in the machine run elections.  The state officials who insist on protecting machine companies and absentee fraud are in the 20% minority of Republicans.  We represent the majority of the United States population.  It’s time for South Dakota to right the ship before it sinks.

I am working with legislators to get the CVR's released as public information. I even have an email from ES&S they have no problem with the file being released, but they dont create a non encrypted file because of our State law.

You don’t need to change the state law.  CVR’s are already a public record. The law is being weaponized against the citizens, as demonstrated by Pennington, Lincoln, Minnehaha and Davison Counties, who contracted with outside law firms, using taxpayer dollars, to fight transparency of public records that the taxpayers have every right to obtain. 

South Dakota is in clear violation of HAVA and NIST requirements.  South Dakota tabulator machines must be EAC certified for use in our state.  CVR’s are part of EAC requirements for certification.  NIST standardized the production of CVR’s regardless of the machine vendor in 2005, and clearly list the general public as the intended audience. 

WHY IS THE GENERAL PUBLIC THE INTENDED AUDIENCE OF THE CAST VOTE RECORDS?  To produce trust in the results of running a computerized black box tabulator election where the paper ballots are not examined and locked in the basement of the courthouse for 22 months.  The fact that Pennington County and the rest of the state continue to deny access to the audit trail to the elections only exacerbates an already tenuous situation. 

Those that have nothing to hide, hide nothing.  Why will Pennington County and Cindy Mohler not release the CVR’s that your $8,500/yr contract for the ERM system would produce in less than five minutes?  What is the penalty for releasing them?  The County Auditor and the County Commission answer to the public.  The citizens of your county are your boss.  Not the AG office, not the SOS, not the State Bar Association.  The citizens of your county are your boss.  Releasing public records is not a crime.  Hiding them is.

Slide 60, are you aware the statement "I actually live at and have no present intention of leaving" puts military members at risk of being prosecuted for perjury just for registering to vote? Most members of the military who come to SD change their residency knowing they will change stations in the near future. I think the new statement is more accurate. Do I think it could use an update, of course, it can always get better, but the previous phrase puts military members at risk of being charged with perjury. Is that what we want, military members being charged with perjury?

UOCAVA voters have different registration requirements.  Military voters are allowed to register to vote in the state where they last resided.  If they lived in South Dakota, signed up for the military, and registered to vote here, there is no problem. If they lived in Virginia, signed up for the military, and registered to vote in South Dakota, they would be required to register in Virginia.

Military voters are clearly marked as UOCAVA.  They are not the problem.  The state law that requires a voter to actually live at a fixed permanent dwelling is still on the books.  Taking it off the voter registration form doesn’t negate the state law.  

Have you reviewed the thousands of incomplete and perjured voter registration forms that are clearly not UOCAVA in Pennington County? We have copies of original voter registration forms from multiple mail-forwarding services in South Dakota which clearly demonstrate incomplete and inaccurate records being illegally approved by the County.

You have your information wrong about the summer study and promoting machine audits. There was talk about it, but we did not entertain it, as it did not meet the intent of SB 140 and the requirements set before us.

Other attendees of the summer study were very concerned about the talk of using other machines for the audit.  Thankfully there was pushback to this idea. This may be why Jason Gant and the auditor association were adamant about changing the word “hand” to “manual” in the rules.  However, the 50 citizens that showed up to the Board of Elections meeting made sure the word “manual” was defined as “without the use of machines”, so anyone with the intention of using a machine, cannot do so.

I would like a response as I plan to schedule a follow up meeting with Citizens for Liberty in Rapid City in the next month or so giving you plenty of time to send responses to the questions and the data requested. I told the citizens there that I would do my diligent research and report back to them my findings.

We appreciate your questions, but it appears you are missing a lot of information on the processes, reporting, software programs, and machine vendors your county currently contracts with and promotes.  You may want to get better educated before you decide to present your partially informed opinions to Citizens for Liberty.  We believe your questions and our answers are good educational material for the general public, so will be publishing in our Substack.  That way, interpretation of our answers can’t be skewed. 

The problems we have with our elections go way beyond availability of the cast vote records. It is a very complex issue.  It’s generally too complicated for the average citizen to understand how their votes are being counted and reported.  Counting is not top-secret proprietary information that should be hidden from us, and our private identifying information and election results should not be hosted in the Microsoft Cloud or sold to third party vendors such as ERIC and AAMVA. 

Lastly, it is not up to the citizens to produce evidence of fraud.  It is the government that must produce evidence that our elections are honest, accurate, fair and secure.  This is sadly not the case in South Dakota.  All of our elected officials took an oath to protect and defend the South Dakota and United States Constitutions, and currently appear to be protecting and defending BPro and ES&S.  We must actively work to protect and defend from enemies foreign and domestic, in order to preserve a free, representative republic.  It starts with taking a long hard honest look at who actually has control over our elections, and then we must work to return that control back to We the People. 

Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you soon,

Travis Lasseter

Pennington County Commissioner, Dist. 4

Sincerely,

SD Canvassing

UNDER GOD THE PEOPLE RULE