Reply from Ross McDonald – Director of Lake County Election Board:

“Lake County does not use Dominion for hardware or software. We use Election Systems and Software (a.k.a. ES&S).”

“Our machines are NEVER connected to the internet. On devices that could connect to the internet, we use network security measures such as “air gapping” to ensure there is no physical connection to the internet, plus we employ port disabling and white listing/deny by default configurations. Most of our devices (the voting machines) do not have the physical hardware to even establish an internet connection.

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Reply from Ross McDonald – Director of Lake County Election Board:

“Thank you for passing this along. I’m aware of this affidavit and will be monitoring any developments to determine if Lake County has cause for concern.” 

“I think it’s worth mentioning that we conduct post-election audits of the ballots, whereby we hand count over 5% of the votes cast in the election. This hand counted audit is done by bipartisan teams who are physically handling the absentee ballots, provisional ballots and the election day paper rolls produced by the voting machine (the paper roll is known in the industry as a Real Time Audit Log (RTAL)). As they review the ballots, two officials are reading the vote and two are recording the vote using a pen slash mark on the audit tally sheets. After all votes have been audited by human hands and eyes, their tally sheets are totaled and compared to the software’s reported result.”

“Let’s imagine that the software was compromised and the votes were allocated by a nefarious algorithm, as opposed to the voter’s intent. This kind of compromise would quickly be discovered during the audit process because the tally sheets and the software results would not align whatsoever. I have only used ES&S in my nearly 10 years of election administration, and I’ve never seen a post-election audit fail by even one vote.”

“We had our first BOE open house in 2019. At that event, we had several stations with presentations and Q&A time. One of those stations dealt with election security. Of course, we had planned to offer another open house prior to the presidential election, but you know, COVID. We will offer more open houses once the pandemic is over and I surely would appreciate your assistance in getting the word out at that time.”

Thank you for your confidence in our elections – that’s probably the highest compliment an election official can receive.

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