#330 Free, Fair & Trustworthy Elections Are Foundational to The Republic w/ Col. Shawn Smith

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(01:04):
Welcome to the state of freedom everybody.
It is Thursday, September 4th, 10 a.m.
Central and I'm joined by my good friend and co-host Chris Alexander.
We're coming to you live on Voice of the People USA TV and Radio Network on RumbleX,YouTube and Facebook.
Wherever you're watching, please give us a thumbs up, give us a like, share it, retweetit, whatever it is.

(01:29):
It helps gain visibility.
It helps us uh get our numbers up.
Comment in the chat.
We love to hear your thoughts and we want you to participate here with us this morning.
Well, we are so honored and I'm going to bring our guest in now to have, we're so honoredtoday to have Colonel Sean Smith joining us.
He is an authority when it comes to cyber threats, national defense and complextechnology.

(01:53):
So I want to give a little bit more background than usual.
um
Colonel Sean Smith retired as an Air Force Colonel with over 25 years of active duty inspace and missile operations.
He was director and test manager for operational testing of weapons systems, a US AirForce fellow to the RAND Corporation, installation and squadron commander.

(02:16):
He spent four years as a senior military evaluator for space, intelligence, surveillance,and reconnaissance systems under Director
um operational test and evaluation, Office of the Secretary of Defense.
He was exercising oversight of test design, execution, reporting, and advising Congressand senior Department of Defense leaders on operational effectiveness and suitability of

(02:43):
critical complex DOD space programs costing over $45 billion.
He's also been a consultant on adversarial assessment special
projects for the Department of Defense, all that to say a lot of that was over my head.
I don't, you know, don't ask me about any of that, but he is more than qualified to speakinto the security of our election systems, which is our topic for today.

(03:09):
Colonel Smith, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yeah, it is.
Hold on, Chris.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Let me get to the scripture of the day before you get off to the races.
Today's scripture is Ephesians chapter six, verses 10 through 13, and it says this.

(03:33):
Now, my beloved ones, I have saved these most important truths for last.
Be supernaturally infused with strength through your life union with the Lord Jesus.
Stand victorious with the force of his explosive power flowing in and through you.
Put on God's complete set of armor provided for us so you will be protected as you fightagainst the evil strategies of the accuser.

(03:58):
Your hand-to-hand combat is not with human beings, but with the highest principalities andauthorities operating in rebellion.
under the heavenly realms for they are a powerful class of demon gods and evil spiritsthat hold this dark world in bondage.
Because of this you must wear the armor that God provides so you're protected as youconfront the slander for you are destined for all things and will rise victorious." And

(04:26):
one of our friends who's been listening to the State of Freedom from the very beginning,Tim Babin, had a health scare this past week.
And when I touched base with him, he was so thankful for the prayers and support thateverybody sent his way in the visits.
And we just talked about how prayer and communion were weapons that successfully broughthim through to the other side of that.

(04:47):
And I think it's appropriate that the Lord's reminding us today that we're in a spiritualbattle against demonic forces.
We're not in a spiritual battle against our kids, our coworkers, siblings, our spouse.
We're fighting against demons.
who stir up trouble, division, and speak lies and bring discord.
So we have to be alert.
We need to really recognize the source of uh any trouble that's going on in our lives.

(05:12):
This is not a business as usual time to be alive.
We need to have spiritual eyes to perceive what's going on.
We need to ask the Lord for his battle strategies for the situations we face.
And let's put on the full armor of God every single day so we can remain protected andkeep in mind.
that our Savior has already won.
So we are fighting from a place of eternal victory.

(05:34):
We used to say that a lot and I think it's a good reminder.
We're fighting from victory.
You know what, Danielle, that was one of the first things you ever told me was that asChristians, we are fighting from a position of victory because Christ has already won the
battle.
ah And as we know, Satan is the father of lies and the father of deceit.

(05:55):
you know, our election system, one could argue, ah is the child of deceit and lies.
Our electronic voting system, which is what our great guest whose qualifications ah
really read like a who's who when it comes to cybersecurity, missile defense, both in andout of the military.

(06:16):
Colonel Smith, what a pleasure to have you on the State of Freedom today to talk aboutelections for a little bit.
Thanks for having me.
I looked back through some of your prior guests and saw you've talked to people that Iwork with and kind of got started with here like Dave Clements and Mark Cook, John Mills,
all of us have had so many discussions.

(06:38):
You talk about the armor of God, I was thinking about that.
I work with Mike Lindell and he and I kind of had instant rapport because of our
mindset and mentality towards things.
There's a sort of uh unshakable faith and uh there's a little bit of humility, maybe notenough humility.

(07:03):
Maybe there's never enough humility.
Some people have too much, I'm suffering from that.
uh
Not excessive modesty, not a problem just yet.
yeah, no, I'm the most, you know, I'm just, you know, there's always humility, but, know,he and I have the same similar background where we both been dead, we both should still be
dead.

(07:23):
We have this kind of background where you just think, why is this guy here?
And both of us have the same feeling that, you know, our lives prepared us.
Yeah, there's no question.
And clearly it seems like your life has prepared you to be where you are right now anddoing what you're doing.
I want to read quickly from a declaration that you made.

(07:45):
I think it was in connection with your expert testimony, perhaps in another court.
But it kind of sums up your position, and I think the position of an increasing number ofAmericans.
So I want to read this.
It's obviously your words.
Given my background, experience, education, and training,
And now my exposure to and understanding of the technology employed in U.S.

(08:06):
election systems.
My conclusion is that U.S.
elections are critically vulnerable to exploitation by foreign adversaries through supplychain compromise of our computerized election systems.
Colonel Smith, it doesn't sound like we're very safe.
Our secretary of state down here is about to invest $150 million into new votingequipment.

(08:30):
doesn't sound like that is very wise.
No, no, that's insane.
It's a part of the problem for the public officials, especially like secretaries of state.
Most of them, you know, are attorneys like a lot of politicians are.
And I've got some attorneys, you know, that I work with that I really like some justreally good sound people.

(08:50):
Most of them were something else before they became an attorney.
And that life experience, you know, and that sort of instinct among them, like I think oflike Kurt Olson, who was a Navy SEAL or John Case, who was a naval flight officer.
These guys are, they've got a steel backbone.
They're moral, they love their country.

(09:11):
They would not pervert, distort or circumvent the law.
But a lot of attorneys, uh my experiences are not like that.
And so then you end up with politicians that are drawn very largely from the attorneyclass and they don't know a lot outside of the law frequently.

(09:32):
Mm-hmm.
Sometimes they don't even know the law and that's been my experience with election law andother laws or they don't care about it, which is worse.
But you get somebody like Landry in office and I spoke to her predecessor.
I've never spoken to Secretary Landry.
I've spoken to her predecessor and they just don't know.
They're told something by people they consider experts, but they get this propaganda frominstitutions that we've allowed.

(09:58):
to in essence take over from the American people in controlling our government, includingour election.
you'd like National Association of Secretaries of State, National Association of StateElection Directors, the Election Assistance Commission, CISA to some extent, uh a lot of
the private sort of NGOs like CIS, Center for Internet Security, or CEIR, David Becker'sgroup, know, there's elections group with Noah Pritz and those guys.

(10:25):
There's, you know, so there's this
cast of usual suspects that have inculcated their way into the institutions.
The institutions have a common narrative and they're training.
So you're a secretary of state, maybe you were maybe you were straight and ethical whenyou got into office, probably not given this election system, but it's possible in some
places, you know, accidents get through, right?

(10:46):
I think President Trump was they didn't see him coming and he had so much popular supportthat their normal techniques in 2016, you know, were insufficient to keep him out of
office.
But in a lot of places, people aren't paying attention.
So you get somebody like Miss Landry in office.
She doesn't know up from down when it comes to the technology.
And so they tell her, this is so secure.

(11:06):
The federal government tests and certifies it.
We've got standards, man, the standards and the security and the defensive layers.
There's so many layers.
And then you get somebody like Clay Parikh, who actually tested the voting systems in thevoting system testing lab for security as a contractor.
because the labs themselves didn't have anybody who was capable of doing the securitytesting.

(11:30):
And then he had this background with Department of Defense security testing for cyber, andthey wouldn't let him do what he knew how to do for critical infrastructure.
And then he tested the systems, he was into every single one of them, five, 10 minutestops, some of them as little as two minutes.
He was bypassing every single safeguard that they say they've got, he verified theyweren't configured.

(11:51):
Oh, he tested for nine years.
I want to say from 2009 to 2018, Clay Parikh was doing that.
He was doing it as a side gig.
His real job was Army Threat System Management Office, which is like the red teams withinthe US Army.
Those are some of the best in the country, TISMO, Threat System Management Office, andNSA, from my experience, I would say those are probably the best red teams.

(12:17):
Yeah.
across national security.
You've got Air Force and Navy has teams and there's really good people, but as far asteams go in their approach, Tismo and NSA, my experience and what I observed were kind of
the highest level closest to advanced persistent threat.
So he did that for nine years, three different labs.
just maybe break that down for non-tech people, the red team that's a cyber threat team?

(12:44):
Yeah, so we have, you know, within the Department of Defense, National SecurityArchitecture, you have all of these systems that you rely upon.
They're all mission critical.
You know, you might maybe you have something that is, I know you're using it formechanical engineering drawings or something like that, and that's not mission critical.
But for everything that's mission critical, you know, the threat against U.S.

(13:06):
national security systems and organizations is just sky high.
It's higher than anybody can imagine.
When I was
at US Space Command as a space, I was doing space control.
So my job was offensive space control at US Space Command for about four years.
It was my job to know technically all of the capabilities in the US inventory, all thecapabilities in foreign adversary hands, how to employ them against one another, how to

(13:31):
protect systems.
That's what I did.
I was a technical expert for that.
I was pretty much the technical expert for that in the Department of Defense.
And then uh computer network defense came in
um That's what we called cyber operations at the time, computer network attack anddefense.
And that hadn't really had a home in the military.
There were some of it that was done, but it wasn't treated like a war fighting domain.

(13:53):
When they brought that in, they gave it to US space command because the other joint forcecommands, US uh strategic command and all those, they didn't want it.
It was like a redheaded stepchild.
And because I worked in the vault, what was called special tactical operations for spaceoperations at the time.
um I was the technical expert and so the colonels came to me and said, hey, you you writethe computer network uh attack and defense operational procedures because you wrote the

(14:21):
ones for offensive and defensive space control.
And I said, I don't know anything about computer network defense attack.
And they said, we don't really care.
You better go do it because that's how that works in the military.
They just tell you to do stuff.
So I went and found these guys who did know about it, guys who were consultants orcontractors, and they helped me.
And the procedures we wrote were terrible.

(14:42):
My fault.
I just didn't know.
You don't know what you knew.
But this was over 25 years ago.
And then I can remember just so clearly, we had called in all the intelligence communityliaisons because we were going to tell them as now the combatant command for cyber
effectively.
We were going to tell them this is what our operational requirement is for intelligencesupport.

(15:03):
And I can remember standing up in front of I was giving them this briefing, and this isrepresentatives from NSA, CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency,
et cetera, et cetera.
And I remember standing up in front of them and saying, Department of Defense computernetworks and computers are being attacked a million times per year.
And they were shocked.

(15:24):
They were shocked into silence.
And in the room, this was a room, I'm standing up in front, imagine a...
an Air Force captain in uniform, probably in a flight suit, and they were just, you couldhave heard a pin drop in this room.
And these are senior intelligence, experienced intelligence people.
The idea that we would be attacked a million times a year shocked them.

(15:48):
Department of Defense networks and national security systems are attacked millions oftimes a day now.
Chinese advanced persistent threat teams are literally pinging.
every single IP address in the world, every single day looking for configurationvulnerabilities, every single day.
New ones pop up, they look at the registers for all the autonomous systems and new IPaddresses and they check it all.

(16:12):
They will scan through an index, whatever's behind, you know, whatever the IP address isin the front.
So.
Colonel Smith, did you say that we're losing close to three quarters, if not a trilliondollars uh annually in cybersecurity breaches in our intelligence agencies and the data
breaches, technology breaches?
ah That was stunning when I read that.

(16:35):
I was, so what happened was I retired in 2018 from active duty and my boss, this seniorexecutive service kind of three star equivalent in my organization at DOT &E asked me to
stay on and help them with some what's called adversarial assessment where you look atdata sets and then figure out what the adversary knows and is doing, what they were trying

(16:59):
to do, what they know now.
And so they asked me to stay, I told them I'd give them a year uh and that's what I did.
And when I saw the data set, this was with a combined joint task force led by the FBI.
We had uh our guys, there was a GS-15 uh lead out of DOT &E who was running the project.

(17:20):
And then we had brought in a bunch of different technical experts.
I was the one for a couple different things.
So I knew quite a bit about cyber threats, although not as much as I did when we weredone.
And then I was also a space system.
if they were going after a specific technology, like for example,
There was a space system where ah there was a technology involved in the sensors.

(17:41):
And if that technology itself was compromised, if it was revealed what their sort oftechnical approach was, then it would compromise the whole system and make it vulnerable
and non-combat effective.
And so we went looking for evidence that the adversary had gone and looked for specificinformation.
And then we looked at how that affected their weapons and technology development efforts.

(18:04):
so that we could then turn around and say, look, here's what's wrong with our procurementand development systems in terms of their protection approach.
Here's what has been compromised and should just be canceled because it's no longer combateffective.
And these are the forces and plans that are in jeopardy because they hinge upon or relyupon combat advantages or capabilities that have now been compromised.

(18:26):
So that's what we did for about a year.
And in the course of doing that, I saw that we had been uh
suffering from the exfiltration, compromise and access of just crown jewels of nationalsecurity capability and technology for years.
And that overlap went back into the Obama administration.

(18:48):
And I was pretty furious.
I mean, I was pretty angry.
I ended up being one of the three principal authors on two reports from that effort.
The other one was a PhD that worked with uh
Office of Naval Research and was also involved in test community and the other was theGS-15 SES.
At the end of that, the PhD was retiring anyway, but both, so we wrote two reports.

(19:10):
One of them went directly to SECDEP and the precedent.
The second report should have gone the same path, but the uh new director of operationaltest evaluation stated he was afraid that the report was too embarrassing to the military
services because we basically explained how they had failed.
to protect their programs and technology and the impact of it.

(19:34):
And so he wouldn't sign it out.
It ended up getting distributed anyway for a comment because it was a draft.
And so it kind of got out.
And eventually after about two and a half years, it resulted in some changes to defenseprocurement that should have happened a decade before or five years before or when we
issued the report.
But it's a very slow moving machine and Department of Defense with a lot of inertia andkind of vested interests.

(19:59):
But anyway, the PhD was retiring anyway, but the other two of us basically quit.
The SES, I mean the GS-15 said, I'm done.
He walked away from his government civilian retirement and everything.
And he was maxed out as a GS-15.
So he's as highly as you could be paid without being senior executive service.

(20:20):
He just quit and walked away.
And I told them, I will not be doing any more of this work until you find that gentleman'sspine.
I think I said testicles, but if he's not willing to sign the reports, I'm not going towaste my time with them.
But yeah, in that we saw trillions of dollars over the course of the time period ofexfiltrated, compromised intellectual property that was undermining the national security

(20:47):
of the United States and just wasting national treasure.
I was more worried that treasure bothered me because we always have other purposes andthat came from the sweat from somebody's brow.
em
Americans, know, citizens labor, but what really bothered me because I know the guys, youknow, I know that the people I've trained, people I mentored, people I was responsible for

(21:08):
are going to be in jeopardy because our capabilities have been undermined by the failureto protect the intellectual property and the technology.
Colonel Smith, sounds, I mean, of course we've believed that we were in some kind ofirregular warfare for some time now.
It seems very obvious from what you're saying that we are actively at war, that ouradversaries are actively pursuing our demise.

(21:37):
In your opinion, would you say that it was appropriate to classify our election systems ascritical infrastructure?
um That's a tough question.
So it's sort of like asking whether it's appropriate to put an unaccompanied minor thatcrosses the border into the custody and care of an adult.

(22:00):
It really depends on the adult.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Should they be here and then who should they be with?
Let's see.
This person's unrelated to them and has a history of sexual trafficking and abuse ofminors.
Should we put them into custody with them?
The answer is no.
So the problem with Jed Johnson's declaration in January of 2021 that placed electioninfrastructure underneath the critical infrastructure umbrella is that it provided no

(22:28):
advantages of protection whatsoever.
There are standards for critical infrastructure protection, including everything fromencryption to the way that they're tested to verification of supply chain.
None of those things happened.
Not one of
The testing labs didn't change what they were doing.
The voting system standards at an EAC didn't change.
They didn't introduce any more experts.

(22:48):
All they did was, remember the old Get Smart show where the Agent 99 or whoever, 86 orwhatever, and his boss would lower the dome of silence over them?
That's all that happened with our election infrastructure.
So we had decades really of independent investigations and even occasionally media orCongress

(23:10):
acknowledging or pursuing answers about the technology.
And it's not just the voting systems.
It's also because of 2002 Help America Vote Act, the centralized statewide voterregistration systems, which then become just the foundation for all the corruption and
fraud because they are so, you know, the data is so corrupt and porous.
But anyway, so you put everything underneath this umbrella and then CISA and itsnon-governmental partners start

(23:40):
providing strategic narrative messaging and propaganda support and reinforcement to allthe officials.
So now the people are being, you know, gaslit about what's actually true.
They're not hearing that, you know, back in 2002, Bev Harris was explaining the problemswith black box voting with voting systems, that the Collier brothers explained the

(24:03):
problems, you know, back in the early nineties, that Sheila Parks in 2012 explained theproblems.
I mean, I could go through a list about 10 people who really in the majority explain theissues with the black box voting and those issues have only gotten worse.
But what happened is a shroud of secrecy, suppressing that information descended and itdescended from the US government through media and through their non-governmental

(24:32):
partners.
And that I think began in earnest in uh
January 2017 when the systems were put underneath that umbrella of criticalinfrastructure.
And if you, you know, there's a saying that if you want to know the purpose of something,look at what it does, not how it's described.
And so, you know, look at what happened when...

(24:55):
Sure.
just to bring this down to the election level for a minute.
When asked, the Louisiana Secretary State says, well, this is a paper ballot system herethat we're investing in because there's a paper receipt.
And we always, you know, make the counter argument on that.
So could you clarify for our listeners, Colonel, what is the difference between a secureserialized paper ballot system?

(25:20):
and a machine that spits out a quote, ballot.
um Well, it's night and day.
So um in the first place, the moment you involve computers for scanning in particular, ortabulating, all bets are off because even though, so even if you start off, let's say
you're a voter in Louisiana and you go into the polling place on election day, which isthe only uh reasonable way to conduct an election.

(25:47):
If you're sent that ballot through the mail, it's not secure and nobody knows who got thatballot.
They can't really track it.
The whole idea that they're tracking where the ballots go, that's conducted through theintelligent mail barcode system and the US Postal Services, IBM TR service, which tracks
the movement of the IMBs.
That's just data.

(26:07):
You could manipulate that data anyway.
I could give you data that showed you that I shipped my entire house from here toLouisiana and then had it delivered in Hawaii the same day.
You just know what they tell you.
You don't know if any of it's true.
It's just data.
computers.
That's the first thing.
Second thing is, if you come in to an election office or voting center and they hand you aballot, you fill it out and hand it back to them.

(26:33):
So far, so good.
So far you have a paper ballot that is the auditable record.
It can be verified by anyone if citizens had access, which in a lot of places they've beendeprived access to do that verification.
That's the basis of a ballot election is citizens looking at that paper ballot.
Ideally that paper ballot, I don't really care about most of the security measures.

(26:56):
I do care about serializing.
So serialized numbers like a ballot control number, and this was people in Florida andLouisiana citizens came up with sort of the idealized way to do the ballot control
numbers.
In other words, not just a number on there, but a number that reflects the location, theyear, the election type, and I mean location down to the county level.

(27:19):
And that way, if you're the county election official and you look at those ballots,
you know right away, is that one of my ballots or not?
And have I already received that ballot or not?
There's no way to double count and there's no way to mistake it for anything else.
And it makes duplication of the ballots much more difficult because now you've got tofigure out the range and then you've got to duplicate something that's not being used.

(27:39):
So it's a method of controlling the ballots that's helpful.
But then once you submit that ballot, once you cast it and give it to a sworn official, umnow the, if it's not hand counted, if it's stuck into a machine,
All bets are off.
And the reason all bets are off is because, you know, J.
Alex Halderman and his graduate students proved that, I think it was called, their studywhen they published a report was called Unclear Ballot.

(28:02):
They proved that you could run very lightweight software inside a scanner tabulatingmachine that could immediately, as the ballot was being scanned and the images were being
saved, change the vote marks on the image of the ballot so that
you know, unless you go back to the paper ballot, you have no idea what was true.

(28:22):
It's also possible that you can have, uh and this is where, you know, people think this isesoteric.
This is not esoteric.
I've seen this done.
OK, so most most scanner tabulators in most vendors voting systems that are being used andsold in United States have barcode and QR code scanners.
So they are looking at paper that's going into the scanner tabulator for barcodes all thetime.

(28:47):
that's just a small application that's running and the voting system testing labs are nottesting that.
They don't even have the capability to test that and look at what's being called up orwhat's being run as an application.
They might tell you that it's just reading the results or the ballot type, but you have noidea because you can embed on that paper small marks, including in dropout colors, which

(29:12):
all of the major vendors use dropout colors.
So the image that you see, if you look at the image that was captured,
doesn't reflect everything that was on the paper ballot.
You can have colors that are not even being saved in that image that form in effect a QRcode.
And all you need is a single bit, uh or an eight bit word, which could be just a few.

(29:34):
They could look like flecks in yellow or red to the naked eye, but to that scannertabulator, they can be an instruction that tells it to change its configuration.
This is why...
uh
where it was Jeffrey Lindbergh found down in Coffee County, Georgia, that when theychanged the color dropout settings on the Dominion, I think it was an ImageCast Precinct

(29:57):
tabulator, that it changed the way the tabulator handled the balance.
And it should never do that.
It should just change whether or not it drops the colors out.
But what it was doing is it provided an indicator that there was some code that was beingrun on the basis of what was printed on the ballot.
that was changing the configuration of system.

(30:19):
So in other words, to make a very long story short, um if you have good chain of custodyon paper ballots that are cast by voters, you can audit or hand count them and have
confidence in the results.
And I would do it transparently.
But once it touches a computer, all bets are off.
You have no idea what's happening.
Yeah.
would you um be against or what's your take on the uploading the ballots after the factfor um visibility by the public?

(30:50):
Because we've heard of that a lot.
yeah, I'm not against it.
um I don't think it's sufficient.
And the reason it's not sufficient is because it depends on scanning again.
What I would recommend and what we, you we've had several people demonstrate this.
We host on COA's site.
We host, we're tracking all the hand count methods that citizens are developing.
There's one down in Louisiana that they developed.

(31:11):
um There's one in Texas.
There's another one in uh South Dakota that they're sharing.
There's Missouri method, Linda Rantz.
We had our own that we developed a while.
It was not quite as well developed as any of the others, but in all cases, we recommend uhthat the entire process of receiving and counting and certifying ballots at the precinct

(31:35):
be kept on camera.
So in other words, from the time that ballot is cast by a voter, put into a ballot box forprivacy or secrecy until the time that the election in that precinct is certified.
That whole process should be on camera.
And then the tallying itself should be on camera in such a manner that any citizen can golook at the precinct count and see the exact ballots being tallied, see the vote marks on

(32:01):
the ballots and see the tally as it is compiled by talliers that are looking at thoseballots.
That is 100 % transparency verifiable by citizens.
Once you get away from that, I think, um you know, again,
you have various degrees of insecurity and uncertainty, and citizens shouldn't be asked totolerate any of it.

(32:24):
Because all of that is a trust me card that is not warranted by our government.
You you studied history at all, and the founders knew, right, that power corrupts, youknow, that men are not angels, that they designed government for a couple things.
They designed it to jealously guard its...

(32:44):
authorities against other branches and levels of government as a means of offsetting thataccrual of power that always leads to tyranny and that is Lord Acton's rule about absolute
power corrupting absolutely.
And then they designed our government for a moral, informed, involved citizenry.

(33:07):
And that's where we, that's where we slay that.
declining.
What about ah the software codes of these systems?
I'm sure it's the same in every state in the country, but ah state officials here, privatecitizens, do not have any access to these source codes.

(33:27):
Colonel Smith, I'm sure you're probably already aware of.
In what world ah does a government that is implementing and securing the most important
important right that we have, have any right to prohibit us from viewing the source codethat makes these entire systems work.
Yeah, I think no world, right?

(33:48):
And constitutionally, it's not permissible, but we've gotten away in courts from makingconstitutional arguments.
Instead, we rely upon the administrative statutes.
And it's just like, you know, if you read the constitutions of most states, there'd bevery clear that the government uh is established and dependent upon the will and consent
of the people.

(34:09):
And the elections are the means of conveying that will and consent.
But we allow government administrators to
know, abstract the people away from control of the elections.
Part of that was our own doing.
And I say mea culpa because I am, you I wasn't involved the way I needed to be involved.
I had a child's mindset that I would be able to walk away from government and not beinvolved again.

(34:31):
And I also wasn't just wasn't aware, you know, I was focused on foreign enemies and thatexternal national defense.
And I made some assumptions which were not valid, which I should have known better.
But once I realized, you know, that we can't depend on government to police itself.
which can be perfectly obvious if you have any historical knowledge, right?
Like at what point should we trust the government?

(34:52):
At no point.
No point.
Yeah.
certainly not something that our founding fathers didn't warn us about, you know, callinggovernment on its best day a necessary evil.
ah They were profoundly skeptical of government.
You speak about our foreign adversaries.
Can you talk a little bit more about the foreign adversarial connection to our electionsystems themselves?

(35:14):
I think, you know, they have very distasteful births, ah as I understand, but they'veprobably also really negatively impacted elections way beyond our borders as well.
absolutely.
Absolutely.
So I would say the state of the election systems worldwide, the corrupted, vulnerable,compromised state is definitely our fault in the United States.

(35:38):
I mean, we, you know, in 2000, when I was talking about, uh you know, we were beingattacked a million times a day, the United States was so far ahead of any potential
adversary from a cyber standpoint.
It wasn't even close.
It was like giants and, you know, Lilliputians.
I mean, actual, you know, bigger than human giant.
We were, we just dominate.

(36:00):
There was nothing that we were not on top of in cyber, but they watched how we fought.
And then, you know, for craven, greedy reasons, we offshored and exported manufacturing.
We allowed, you know, millions of foreign citizens into our universities where they wereinvolved in research and then into even our defense and technology companies.

(36:22):
So they have exported.
We basically trained the world to do cyber and we trained the world to do cyber fornational security, including penetration and compromise.
We did that.
Yeah, are still, know, so Russia always had some exquisite capabilities.
Iran and North Korea have developed some exquisite capabilities.

(36:45):
India has developed some exquisite capabilities.
But in terms of capability and scale, People's Republic of China,
far outstrips the United States in terms of the scale of resources they've committed tothe effort.
I mean, they have organizations with thousands of people that do nothing but focus oncompromise, exploitation, oh and access to Western technology.

(37:08):
And they don't just do it here.
It's not like war games where it's all remote hacking in a dial-up modem.
They're making our computers.
So every single voting system vendor in the United States is using computers that weremanufactured either entirely or in part overseas, mostly in People's Republic of China.
You look at the largest election system vendors in the United States are ES &S and thenDominion voting systems in that order, and then probably uh Hard InterCivic or Unison back

(37:39):
and forth, and then Clear Ballot Group.
And then the first thing you have to understand is they're all the same technology.
So they had, they're like converging into a single animal.
So they started off with kind of two camps.
There was the Yurovich brothers and gems, American election systems, information systemsthat then kind of became, uh they got, went into Debold, which then they had so many

(38:02):
problems with uh corruption that they renamed themselves Premier.
The same time Sequoia voting systems stood up.
And then you had ES &S established by Yurovich brothers.
ES &S bought Premier and then in 2010 through 12, the Department of Justice underPresident Obama forced both Sequoia, which had real issues because it was essentially

(38:27):
Smartmatic technology.
Smartmatic bought Sequoia.
They had so many issues with the elections in Venezuela and otherwise of that corruptionthat the Department of Justice forced Smartmatic to divest Sequoia and forced ES &S to
divest the intellectual property from
both to the same Canadian company that suddenly established a US foothold and had zeroelection system certified in the United States, Dominion Voting Systems.

(38:57):
So then you had, in a sense, uh an arms race between a establishment GOP controlled votingsystem company, which was ES &S, to some extent hard inner civic, but that's more of a
Texas homegrown.
uh And then you had Dominion.
So you had
ah You know, one group controlling ESNs, one group controlling Dominion, but Dominion hadthe technology from Premier and from Smartmatic.

(39:24):
They had the GEMS architecture and they had the architecture that was put in place by theVenezuelans in Smartmatic.
uh
that you named, by the way, Colonel, number of the companies that you named are ah havingtheir, you know, we're undergoing certification process right now in Louisiana for these
election machines.
Most of the companies that you named are on there, but it's important to clarify for thelisteners, and I think that you are, that there really isn't any computer-based voting

(39:53):
system that is not uh vulnerable to hacking, no matter who the vendor is.
That's correct.
Yeah, you can't, it could be done in theory.
You know, we in the Department of Defense National Security Architectures, we used to usesomething called uh reduced instruction set computers, RISC computers.
So these were processors that we had in weapons systems.

(40:15):
And the reason you do that is so that they can't be compromised.
They can't be corrupted.
You very tightly control the design and then you control the fabrication, then you controlthe integration and you control the access.
and you do that for the entire design through operational use and retirement lifecycle, oryou conclude that you don't have control and know what they're doing.
And I got to see this firsthand with modernized GPS receivers and how they had to beproduced and developed for the new GPS architecture global positioning system.

(40:44):
They lost control of the design on the computers at the fabrication facility that wasdoing the prototypes for about two weeks.
They didn't have security on it.
They had to go back and validate literally every single mask for, and I'm talking aboutfeature sizes that are, you know, one three thousandth, one four thousandth the size of a
human hair.
Those cannot be verified.
There's nothing you can do with the naked eye.

(41:06):
There's nothing to do with a microscope.
You need, uh you know, electron scanning microscopes in order to determine what's trueabout a fabricated chip.
You're better off just starting over.
And that's what we do.
You could...
use a processor that was designed securely like that.
And then if it only ran firmware, you couldn't alter, there was no way to alter software.

(41:29):
You could design a system that would be secure in that manner.
And I used to say we should do that for a scanner, for a ballot scanner.
But then I realized the fatal Achilles heel in that is that you would still be askingcitizens to trust somebody.
And I don't want citizens to trust somebody because citizens cannot trust people.
I mean, I think there are people that are trustworthy, obviously.

(41:51):
We are advised not to.
Yeah, I think the best way to avoid trust issues and compromises is sunlight.
And you can't have sunlight.
If you say, this is why the problem with a lot of more establishment election integrityorganizations where they said, we'll put more watchers in place.

(42:12):
What are you going to look at from the outside of the computer?
It's like Zoolander pounding on the computer on the desk.
You don't know what's inside it.
I never could understand that.
The watchers, know, there are certain things beyond the detection of the watchers forsure.
No question.
uh
It'd be like having a gastroenterologist try to diagnose you by looking at the outside,you know.

(42:35):
Exactly, exactly.
So do we have a, if you were advising the legislature, you know, our legislature hasoversight over the Secretary of State here in Louisiana, and they're supposed to be
fiscally, uh you know, regulating the SOS and also administratively.
And oh what do you say if someone were to ask you,

(43:01):
why we shouldn't be investing $150 million of taxpayer money in machines in very simpleterms, in terms of both cost and security.
Well, the primary argument is the primary argument, which is that they can't be trusted.
There is no integrity in an electronic or computerized system.
can't be verified by a citizen.

(43:22):
It can't be verified by the legislature.
And so it'd be like, you know, what is the most precious thing to you if you're a parent?
It's your child.
Imagine handing your child to somebody who you had not, you know, background checked andcouldn't background check.
Imagine handing your child
to the care of an individual whose credentials and character you could not verify and didnot know.

(43:49):
Only a fool would do it.
You know, there's a chance you would be okay, but really the greater chance is that, andthere are predators among us, the greater chance is that a predator puts themselves in a
position to have control over and be able to, you know, affect your child.
That's the case with elections.
If you're a legislator,
Unless you really have the cybersecurity credentials and background and knowledge, you arenot going to be able to verify what is going on in those machines.

(44:16):
And you shouldn't trust any of the people who've told you it's OK, right?
mean, SZA, at the same time that literally the same time SZA under Krebs uh was tellingthe American people this is the most secure election in US history, their own servers were
compromised by the SolarWinds supply chain compromise.
Two different attacks, really.

(44:38):
Sunspot and Supernova.
Sunspot was access, Supernova was exploitation, much more dangerous.
They had no idea that was happening for at least 10 months.
The only reason SZA found out their own servers were compromised was because Mandiant'sFireEye team had seen these indicators on their systems and they advised SZA.
And then the very first thing SZA did was advise all government agencies who had thecapability

(45:04):
to look for the indicators, take their systems offline and image them.
And this is critical because this is what we advise Clerk Peters to do on her votingsystems in Mesa County was we told her you can't count on retaining all the artifacts for
the audit trail based on the election project and the settings of the manufacturer.

(45:25):
The only way to get whatever evidence is still left on there are artifacts that would bean audit trail to verify the election results and process.
is to image the systems.
She wasn't allowed to do it herself.
She had to get somebody else to do it.
The county wouldn't help her.
The secretary of state wouldn't help her.
So she got someone else to do it.
They did it under her supervision.
And that was the crime that the secretary of state, the whole establishment, the corruptestablishment had to go after Kirk Peters because that image is the goods.

(45:55):
That image shows.
Colonel, you testified in Tina Peters' case as an expert, correct?
No, was not called on.
The judge essentially, Judge Barrett was not allowing defense testimony that would havebeen exculpatory to Clerk Peters.
So we would have explained the standards in the system, the configuration of the system,how the system did not meet configuration standards, how it violated Colorado statute that

(46:19):
it should never have been certified or used, that the Secretary of State illegallydirected modification, did not satisfy the statutory requirements.
that it was configured to allow access from any computer in the world, that a system thatwasn't allowed to connect to any system outside the boundary of the voting system had 36
wireless networking devices built into it as ordered by the vendor and approved by theSecretary of State.

(46:42):
We would have testified to a lot of things that I think would have undermined theprosecution's case.
so Judge Baird did not allow it in Clerk Peter's case.
Wow.
Colonel Smith, on the topic of Tina Peters, do you think that the move earlier this week,the announcement by President Trump that space command is moving from Colorado to Alabama,

(47:06):
do you think, is that a chess piece move to pressure the Colorado government to free Tina?
Is that a first crack at it?
Um, I, I don't know.
mean, you know, I don't, what is it?
The old radio show only the shadow knows what evil lurks in the minds of men.
don't, I don't, you know, pretend to know president Trump's mindset.

(47:28):
Um, and I think anybody who does that with another person, you know, is probably not afull grasp of their own faculties.
If know, you really, there's somebody who needs humility because going on somebody else'sbrain.
um What I do say, and I know a lot about BASING, a lot about Space Forces, I personallynever wanted to be stationed in Alabama.

(47:51):
I was at US Spacecom headquarters when it was established before at Peterson Air ForceBase, now Peterson Space Force Base.
I was there when it was stood down and absorbed into a STRATCOM.
um I was glad that it was stood back up.
I personally wouldn't have wanted to be assigned to Alabama.
And there are reasons not to put it away from Colorado, but there are good reasons to moveit out of Colorado.

(48:16):
Like you don't want all of your eggs in one basket that could be targeted all at once.
It's not just targeting the people or like kinetic weapons.
It's also, if you bring down the communications architecture in one location and you cancripple headquarters and contingency responses, you know, that's very attractive for an
adversary.
So you want to diversify geographically.

(48:37):
Now, whether in addition to that,
The president said, you know, let's do this because Colorado is, uh you know, doingsomething completely unethical and immoral in imprisoning clerk Peters.
I think, you know, the main issue there, and we've talked about this, I've talked aboutthis with her counsel for a long time.
I've talked about this, you know, publicly.

(49:00):
She is a whistleblower.
So when she first did the images, she wasn't a whistleblower.
She was just doing her job.
Her job.
was to retain those election records under both federal and state statutes.
She had an obligation, you can't do it through the processes that the Secretary of Stateprovides, they're insufficient.
Those systems are systematically constantly overriding, which is destroying their ownaudit trail in the form of the log files.

(49:22):
They're configured to do that, which is part of what makes the certification of votingsystems illegal.
It's a very clear violation of the voting system standards that are a minimum standardunder Colorado statute.
And it's a violation of both federal and state statute to destroy those election recordsin the form of the audit trail.
So preserving that audit trail was just her duty under state and federal law.

(49:43):
But the moment it was clear from the image that the image, the voting system itselfviolated state and federal law, now she became a whistleblower.
And that's what I've advised for probably three years now is, look, she's a federalwhistleblower.
she needs to be brought into federal protection and used as part of the investigation intothese voting systems.

(50:08):
Not just in Colorado, but there's nothing different about that in Colorado than it iseverywhere the Dominion voting systems are used.
And frankly, it's not very different from, know, Hart InterCivic, which had awhistleblower in 2007.
was Singer versus Hart InterCivic filed in Colorado in federal court.
It was a key tam.
fraudulent claims act claim where he said that the hard inner civic was making fraudulentclaims about the integrity integrity and accuracy of their systems the ES and S system

(50:38):
sued by the California Secretary of State Yes, the systems included remote access softwareand hardware on their systems without disclosing testing or certifying You know the clear
ballot group.
Yeah, yeah, there's no vendor.
That's clear.
I mean you unison is you know owned outright by uh international toddler uh

(50:58):
lottery and totalizator, which is owned by Berjaya, which is a Malaysia registered companywhose owner is very tight with Communist Party of China leadership.
There's no voting system company in the United States, no vendor that I think istrustworthy, and certainly none of the technology is.
Let me ask you one uh other question that I know interests our listeners.

(51:21):
Because we're always talking about, Colonel, how vulnerable electronic voting machinesare.
know, that votes can be manipulated, switched back and forth, malware can be inserted andthat sort of thing.
if someone were to ask you, how do we know, how does it happen?
How does this happen inside of these machines?

(51:42):
If you're saying that there can be someone sitting in Serbia who has the remote power tomanipulate electronic voting results inside of a machine, how does that happen as simply
as you can?
Well, so what does the Einstein said?
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

(52:06):
are, it's the number of ways with, because these machines are so complex, the number ofcomponents, the manufacturing is unsecured because they have wireless and wired networking
devices in them because the voting system officials, the election officials are asked andcompelled to move media back and forth.

(52:27):
between those supposedly closed, controlled, certified boundary systems and then externalsystems like their county networks, which are also, you know, poorly and inadequately
secured by people who are not the first rate cyber defenders in our country, right?
I mean, honestly, the county and state people are typically just not good enough to defendagainst an advanced cyber capability, let alone one that had access to the hardware before

(52:54):
it was ever even delivered in the United States.
So
there are almost infinite mechanisms by which uh unauthorized or malicious softwarefunctions could be introduced, including on the chipsets itself.
So on most of these computers, they use an Intel chipset.
In the Intel chipset, those are the CPUs for most US sold computers that are using Intel.

(53:20):
Those are manufactured in the United States, done at the Chandler facility for a lot ofthem, like the Xeon processors.
but all of that Intel processor technology has back doors.
It has a separate, entirely separate chip set.
It's almost like a separate computer running under the hood.
If you look at that Intel chip, it just looks like a square.
And then that's like a heat shield and uh dissipation and protection, but you pull thatoff and it's really a bunch of separate computer components inside there.

(53:50):
And then you look inside those chips and they're extraordinarily small, multi-layered.
uh processing units.
Well, there's a processor inside there in the Intel chipsets called it's Active ManagementTechnology.
It has different versions.
It might be Management Engine or it might be vPro.

(54:11):
And that separate computer is designed for enterprise managers to be able to control,manipulate and configure that computer without local access.
or without logging in or without administrator privileges.
It's completely separate from the Windows operating system.
So things it does, it has direct access to hardware and communications devices.

(54:35):
Things it does are not being logged by the operating system.
The operating system is blind to it.
It's like that, it's the V Pro and ME capability, the active management technology is likethe hand of the back of the puppet.
Mm.
Right?
You're seeing the puppets face, but that's not what really has control over that system.

(54:56):
And then the servers in the voting systems usually are using like Dell servers and thosehave a capability built into them integrated in the motherboard called iDRAC or integrated
Dell remote access.
ah Card, card.
I love to think of integrated Dell remote access.

(55:16):
I think it's card, might be capability.
And iDRAC has just one purpose and it's remote management and configuration of networks ofcomputers that are connected to that server.
So you have to ask yourself, you have to ask yourself, why would you build wirelessnetworking, uh remotely manageable chipsets and Dell remote access uh capabilities into

(55:43):
voting system components that are not supposed to have any remote access or management atall?
Great question.
suspicious, right?
So then the question of how exactly this is happening, there are so many different ways itcould be happening, what you have to do because you're not able to observe the systems in
operation, ah nor can you really, you can't after the fact, if you don't have supply chainsecurity, you can't really after the fact go back and figure out what has been built in or

(56:11):
cooked into computers.
And the reason for that is because the feature size is so small.
So if you don't know the exact triggers that will activate and allow unauthorized activityand functionality like turning on a wireless networking device or loading or integrating
and assembling and then running some code, if you don't know exactly how it's done, it'svery difficult to find the artifacts or evidence after the fact, especially because all of

(56:39):
our voting systems are not logging everything they're supposed to be.
And because citizens and
and real cyber forensic experts, independents, are not being given access for the mostpart.
So you might find an indicator here or there.
It's kind of like, to make it simple, imagine if you're trying to figure out if somebodyhas broken into a bank and stolen something from the bank.

(57:02):
If you see the back door to the vault, if you see that the vault has a back door, if yousee that the back door alarm has been disabled,
If you see that the back door to the vault has been left open, you can then go throughevery single one of thousands of lock boxes if you knew what was in them and inventory
them and see if anything was stolen.

(57:24):
But once you see that there's a back door built in and you see that there's a systemthat's supposed to protect it, that's been turned off and you see the doors open, you can
pretty much assume that something's been stolen.
You may not know exactly what or how, but you know the system's not secure.
And that should be enough.
And that's where we're at with our voting systems.

(57:45):
I could describe probably off the top of my head 10 different ways that you could corruptvoting systems and use them illicitly.
we've seen on some of the removable media used in US voting systems that they have ahidden encrypted partition.
So a lot of times the vendors are providing the removable media, USB cards or compactflashcards or something.

(58:05):
And we've seen on those that they have a partition.
that isn't even acknowledged or visible.
And that partition could have complete programs on it that are executed when it's pluggedin.
So unbeknownst to the operator, you put a USB stick into your computer, you think you'retransferring audio files for ballot machines or something.
And then in the background, the voting system that you plug it into, the electionmanagement system server, is automatically reaching into that hidden partition, executing

(58:35):
some code there or integrating it with existing code.
and it's running and it's changing results or changing data or eliminating artifacts thatwould indicate some other compromise.
And then when you pull that thumb drive or USB stick out, all evidence that had evenhappened is gone.
You'd have to have had a snapshot of the database before and after the execution of thecode to see what happened.

(59:00):
This is why the third report in Mesa County was so important.
because Jeff O'Donnell and Dr.
Dardy verified that there was a duplication made, which had never happened, of theelection database in an active election, and that records were copied partially, in one
case sequentially, in one case non-sequentially, and that that copying completely brokethe chain of evidence that linked the images and ballot records in that database to the

(59:31):
paper ballots themselves.
Could not be,
reproduced, which should result in an uncertifiable election result from the machine.
It should immediately drive you back to look at the paper ballots prior to certification.
But the voting system itself gave no indication to the election officials, certainly noindication to citizens.

(59:52):
There was no warning.
There was no artifact.
It was only because of his prior expertise of both those gentlemen, Dr.
Daugherty, who's a, you know, Professor Emeritus of, I think,
computer science, mathematics at Texas A &M, and then Jeff O'Donnell, I don't know, 30years as a full-stack cyber engineer.
was only because of their expertise that they could reconstruct and verify what hadhappened.

(01:00:14):
And that's why that Mesa image was so critical.
And of course, nobody has ever refuted or addressed that report.
The media has helped suppress it.
Dan Rubenstein, the district attorney out there in Mesa County, did not address it.
You know, he did a little dog and pony show in front of the county commissioners with thefirst report.
where he and his investigator, neither of whom have any cyber credentials, basicallyexplained that they talked to Dominion and took their word for it.

(01:00:40):
And then they gave them nonsense explanation not under oath.
Colorado Bureau of Investigations never did it.
FBI never did it.
Yeah.
Do you expect President Trump to come out sooner rather than later with uh additionalexecutive orders on these electronic voting systems?

(01:01:00):
Expect is a strong word.
I would love it.
I've been told that some of those are cooking.
I've talked to a lot of the election integrity people around the country and everybodywho's had contact there.
Sometimes we get asked to review or provide comment or provide support like method andtechnique and the kind of questions that we've been getting.
I'm very hopeful.
President Trump said that he wants to eliminate the voting systems and the mail-in voting.

(01:01:25):
And I hope he does because
You know, everything else that the administration is doing right now, whether it's savingkids or, you know, pursuing and prosecuting the criminal acts of corrupt public officials,
you know, all of that is necessary and none of it is sufficient.
If we don't restore integrity to our elections, then this is just a pause.

(01:01:48):
This is an Indian summer before the next round of corruption begins.
Because I think President Trump is, you know, maybe a once in a lifetime, maybe once in acouple lifetimes candidate.
And because he is so independent, which I think is what they really fear about him, theydon't control him.
And because of that, uh I think he has the opportunity to do something that would restorecitizen control of elections in a way that most candidates and officials never even have

(01:02:16):
the chance to do.
It's sort of like the Berlin Wall falling after decades of uh communist party control.
It's like your Winston Smith in 1984.
You know, the party has been in control of everything.
The Uniparty has been in control of everything and citizens have this window.
And there's a lot that they're doing that's important, but I don't think anything they'redoing is as important as restoring election integrity because that's the, that's really,

(01:02:44):
other than the second amendment, that's our mechanism for accountability with ourgovernment.
Yeah, you're 100 % right.
As you look at it, based on the fact that the Uniparty's been in control, pretty muchunfettered for at least my lifetime, probably long, probably far longer than that.
How many of our sitting quote unquote, elected officials do you think are therelegitimately, meaning they're uncontrolled, not legitimately as in we can verify the

(01:03:14):
election because I don't think that's necessarily possible.
That's a good question.
So I couldn't wait to leave DC and come back.
I described it as coming back to the United States.
I didn't even live in DC and I mostly worked outside of DC uh in Alexandria, but I hadlots of contact with DC people and it attracts some of the best people in the country and

(01:03:40):
many of the worst.
And I would say, you might find a tenth of a percent
among the normal population in the rest of the country who are some kind of sociopath.
In DC, it's like 10, 15 % of the people.
I there's just a lot of corrupt people and people who are just genuinely malicious andwholly self-interested.
And I think it's true in Congress as well.

(01:04:03):
You've got so many incumbents and the system is so corrupt.
I think it's very difficult to tell.
I like to look at people like Ken Butt came out of Colorado and he and Thomas Massey.
They started doing this series called The Swamp where they talked about all thefundraising and just how corrupt all that was.
And then it just got real quiet.
They just stopped talking about it.

(01:04:24):
And so I think you have a combination of a large proportion of people there who areselected.
They have been allowed, they've been encouraged, they've been nurtured, they've beenallowed through the process, through the filters, because they would play ball.
And then for anybody who doesn't play ball, I think they try to compromise them there.

(01:04:46):
Like I remember they did that with the, can't remember the kid from, I it was North orSouth Carolina at the wheelchair who talked about the parties they tried to get him to.
That's right, Madison Cothorn.
then, and then why, you know, why has there been, you know, I'm confident that in theEpstein files, if that implicated or incriminated president Trump, it would have been
released a thousand times already.

(01:05:08):
Would the Biden administration really have withheld?
I don't think so.
But they were silent back then and now they're very vocal, but just about President Trump,I suspect that it compromises or reveals a compromise of many other public officials.
And that's partly why there's been so little appetite for the release.
And at this point, you know, they've had control of the documentation artifacts for a longtime.

(01:05:31):
CIA can manufacture evidence, right?
That community can manufacture evidence on anybody.
They did it against, uh what was the guy, Paul Manafort, right?
The black box.
or the black book was manufactured, right?
That's been now demonstrated.
And so, you know, I understand a little bit, I'm very frustrated, but I understand alittle bit the reluctance to release all the Epstein information because you don't know

(01:05:52):
what's true among it, what isn't.
But I think what we can rest assured of is that that was an operation to compromisepeople.
And they don't go around trying to compromise people who don't have power or an ability todo what they want.
They compromise people who have power.
So how much of Congress, the short answer, how much of Congress?
I don't know, I think it'd be a good idea to start over.

(01:06:13):
I think it'd be a good idea to have, you know, clean slate elections, to impose termlimits, and to have elections with election integrity and see what we get.
Because I suspect, I believe it will be much different than what we've been seeing for thelast 30 to 50 years.
Yeah, I think so.
Is the paper ballot movement gaining traction?

(01:06:35):
Are you seeing spots of light?
It is.
And if you want to know if you want to know how how it's uh sort of gaining foothold andtraction, look at the voices coming against it.
So as the as the people afraid of it get more and more afraid, they you know, they'll be alot more gnashing of teeth and wailing.

(01:06:56):
Right.
There's my God, you never do it.
It's forever.
It costs so much money.
How can you trust people?
Right.
Every everything except let's just demo it for you.
You know.
And so we get we're.
not interested exactly.
been accused of taking us back to the Stone Age by one of our Congress members.
have.
We absolutely, no question we have been.

(01:07:19):
Well, Colonel Sean Smith, thank you for taking the time to join us today.
I know our listeners are going to benefit from what you're talking about here.
And it's a really acute level of expertise that you have on this issue and being able toarticulate the vulnerabilities of these machines is invaluable to us.
So thank you for joining us.

(01:07:42):
Thank you, it was my privilege.
You take care.
Thank you so much, Colonel Smith.
We look forward to having you back soon too.
Awesome.
Thank you.
And we'll just take a quick break here.

(01:08:35):
How great was that, Chris?
Unbelievable, unbelievable.
And I'm so glad that we got someone to be able to explain how a machine generated piece ofpaper is not a secure serialized paper ballot system, as Nancy Landry continues to say,
which is just a gross misnomer.

(01:08:55):
I'm glad we had someone to explain that ah and to go into the kind of depth that he wentinto regarding.
vulnerabilities of these computers.
I mean, this is a guy who worked in the highest branches uh of the government, Danielle.
I mean, he basically was, you know, one of the main administrators on our missile defensesystem.

(01:09:17):
You know, this is is high tech stuff.
So when he says something like your voting systems are vulnerable and your electroniccomputers are vulnerable, we have to we have to listen to him.
Yeah.
And you know, Chris, as he was talking and describing kind of that shroud that has comeover our election since, since the declaration of them being critical infrastructure at

(01:09:41):
the federal level, I was just struck by this kind of analogy that it's so similar to theway that COVID was handled.
You know, you have to trust the experts.
You don't have the right to question.
You need to just trust what's in the shot.
You need to trust the masks.
You need to trust the test.

(01:10:01):
Well, no, no, don't have to actually as a sovereign individual ah in charge of my ownbody.
Actually, I can ask those questions.
And I think that the time and the activity from people, the momentum of heart from peoplenow is I will assert my right to ask questions.

(01:10:24):
I will assert my right to reject the premise.
And that's exactly where we need to be because for our elections and for our personalhealth, we can't trust the experts.
We absolutely cannot trust the expert.
And it's such an interesting parallel you drew between the COVID response and now theresponse with regard to the election systems.

(01:10:47):
It's like the experts are all in the same group and they're all telling us what to do andwhat to believe and what to accept while never showing us the evidence.
That is.
were groomed and taught by Communist China.
Well, exactly.
Very, very well trained and well groomed.

(01:11:07):
ah So this is one of those things, Danielle, where there's no question that these machinesare vulnerable.
There's no questions that they have swung votes back and forth.
ah And, you know, we just have to do something to prevent this mass investiture of ourmoney.
Yeah, well, uh on that note, Chris, we can just mention that uh and encourage um anyonewatching or listening later to participate under protest at the Horse and Pony show, as I

(01:11:40):
call it, next week, Tuesday and Thursday at the Old Governor's Mansion starting at 9 a.m.
Both of these names were mentioned by Colonel Smith just now.
Tuesday, they will be demoing the clear ballot, clear voting system.
And Thursday is ES &S.
So uh would really strongly encourage public participation in that.

(01:12:04):
I think it's very important that uh the apparatus of our state understands that we are instrong opposition to this and in no way are assenting or condoning the moving forward of
this.
ah I don't know if you have additional thoughts on that, Chris.
in increasing numbers, Danielle, because of program podcasts like the State of Freedom andothers, think increasing numbers of people are understanding what really is glaringly

(01:12:34):
obvious to anybody, even if you're not a computer expert.
There's not a computer in the world that can't be hacked through sophisticated uhcybersecurity hackers.
It's ridiculous.
think Jenin would know that.
as a 12 year old.
we have to, but yeah, I agree with you about protesting in every way possible.

(01:12:57):
We still have our call to action up Danielle on lacag.org regarding a secure hand markedpaper ballot system.
So I'd encourage you to go to lacag.org action center and do that call to action.
Yeah.
And like I said, at the outset, Colonel Smith is far, far ah overqualified to explainthis.

(01:13:19):
So even if we don't have Colonel Smith's level of expertise, can certainly convey that.
uh This is my favorite analogy.
If you go to Taco Bell, which I would not recommend, but if you go to Taco Bell and youget your order and they give you a receipt, do you have to wonder, is this a receipt or a

(01:13:39):
ballot?
No, you do not have to wonder if it's a receipt or a ballot.
It's obviously a receipt.
So whenever you go into a voting machine and it spits something out at the end, do youhave to wonder, is this a receipt or a ballot?
No, you do not.
So I don't know why that's so difficult for people who are involved in this process tounderstand, Chris, but perhaps you understand.

(01:14:02):
Do you have any thoughts?
I'm starting to believe, Danielle, ah that this might be uh getting into willfulobtuseness, willful blindness, unfortunately, because they are apparently too deeply
invested administratively, financially.
ah But I don't hang your...

(01:14:26):
not where it starts and stops.
You have to do the full measure.
You got to do the full measure.
Exactly.
Well, we're going to continue to follow Danielle and where and I want to encourage peopleto go to support the state of freedom.
Subscribe, donate and share because we are truly building uh quite a network acrossLouisiana to reach Louisiana citizens about issues that are so important to them.

(01:14:53):
Danielle, you know that and we were the only source.
for many of those things that people know that are so important.
So we're so thankful for the many listeners we have.
that's in no small part thanks to LCAG.
So please also support the work of LCAG at lacag.org and do the calls to action therebecause we have not stopped just because the legislature is out of session.

(01:15:15):
There's plenty of work that we can be doing, plenty of advocacy that we are doing rightnow.
ah And please also join us right back here Tuesday, same time, same place.
We will be joined by Draza Smith.
She is another expert voice on election systems.
She's a computer engineer who's done comprehensive statistical analysis on vote counts,including those in Louisiana.

(01:15:39):
And she is going to come and explain the manipulation and the lack of trustworthiness ofwhat those machines are spitting out.
So please, you won't want to miss that.
Yep, as one of the dad of one of my old country friends growing up said, we want to knowwhat we're stepping in here, boys.
And right now, Danielle, we we really do not.

(01:16:02):
ah But I love you and we shout reconvene and veying we shout.
Perfect, see you on Tuesday, Chris.
Thank you so much.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

The Breakfast Club

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#330 Free, Fair & Trustworthy Elections Are Foundational to The Republic w/ Col. Shawn Smith

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

The Breakfast Club

All Episodes

#330 Free, Fair & Trustworthy Elections Are Foundational to The Republic w/ Col. Shawn Smith

Stuff You Should Know