Downriver Today

A bipartisan group of software engineers has come out with initial findings from the 2020 elections in Michigan showing anomalies suggesting a computer algorithm was functioning inappropriately in voting machines.

The group was led by Shiva Ayyadurai, an inventor and software engineer who recently lost the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts, Bennie Smith, a Democratic Party elections official in Shelby County, Tenn., and Phil Evans, who is a software engineer and entrepreneur.

The group's findings were clear, the election integrity in many jurisdictions across the country is vulnerable. 

“This is not a Republican, Democrat, independent issue – this is an American issue,” Ayyadurai said. “It's an engineering issue.” 

In Michigan, the group said 2020 election results from four counties they studied appear to show evidence of an algorithm improperly influencing the outcome of the voting machines' tally.

In particular, the group pointed to a feature on voting machines that allows for votes to be weighted. In other words, the vote loses its value as a single vote once entered into a voting machine. 

“The documented feature of a weighted election is such, such a bad idea,” Smith said. “The only thing that can verify to us in a black box is the input and if we don't know, we don't know. We can't know if a weighted election was conducted. It's a feature, it's not a bug. So the only way we could get back to that is for the citizens to be able to remove the computers from the situation.”  

The group said they believe Trump votes were transferred to Biden and that their analysis backs up such a claim, but that there simply is no way to properly verify the election. 

However, they realized that in Wayne County, the algorithm wasn’t applied. It showed that Trump was doing better in Democratic precincts.

Ayyadurai said it looked like Trump was doing 10 percent better in Wayne County.

“Trump is actually doing better,” Ayyadurai said. “He was actually doing better and there were some evidence that a lot of the people in the black community were moving away to Trump, maybe not to Republican voters, but to Trump.”

Ayyadurai said the algorithm was not applied in Wayne County, but that maybe something else was, but not anything they detected

“But it's clear that Trump was doing better among Democrat precincts,” Ayyadurai said.

Smith said they were able to establish some clear upper and lower control limits in Wayne County, unlike the other counties they analyzed.

Ayyadurai said when looking at Republican precincts versus Democratic precincts, Trump did worse in the Republican ones.

“He lost a higher percentage of votes the more Republican precincts there were,” Ayyadurai said. “Another way to think about this is the more the precinct was Republican, the more percent of Trump votes are transferred to Biden in that precinct.”

Right now there is a lawsuit going on in Wayne County where a Detroit employee alleged that she was instructed to pre-date absentee ballots for the election.

The employee, Jessy Jacob, claims ballots that were received later were being backdated in the system and she observed other election workers and employees coaching people to vote for Biden.