This article originally appeared on JoeHoft.com and was republished with permission.
THE SHADY ORIGINS AND FOREIGN INFLUENCE OF THE UNCERTIFIED, ALL-INCLUSIVE SOFTWARE USED COUNTRYWIDE BY BPRO/KNOWINK
Guest post by Jessica Pollema and Erin Clements
We recently reported that uncertified, cloud-based, internet connected, and all-inclusive election software is being used to illegally process official election results. Investigators revealed impossible voter registration data spikes along with tens of thousands of voter histories being backdated to provide further corroboration of election systems being subverted.
There are four major election software vendors that appear to have the functional capability to touch virtually all aspects of our elections in a centralized fashion. The election software vendors are BPro, KNOWiNK, Tenex, and VR Systems. ES&S’s “Electionware” software appears to provide similar in-house software capabilities. There are others.
The main point is this: The software provides the capability to modify voter registrations, create ballots out of thin air that can be printed in areas not monitored by poll watchers, change tabulation results, and even affect what is reported on election night. Thus, each of the vendors carry the same vulnerabilities explained in the linked articles above.
The most prominent of the all-inclusive software is called “TotalVote,” created by election vendor BPro.
When you trace any of the election equipment vendors back far enough, whether its ES&S, Diebold, or Dominion, you will find that their origins converge with many of the same players and assets, switching from company to company. The effect provides a veneer of free market competition when the truth could not be further. Likewise, the vendors of all-inclusive election software appear to have taken a page out of the same book. When you look at the collective coverage of these vendors on a U.S. map, it appears that every election jurisdiction is accounted for.
TotalVote was originally created by BPro. BPro was recently purchased by KNOWiNK, and their products are now being used in dozens of states.
This article will detail the shady origins of TotalVote software, its proliferation throughout the United States, and its disturbing connections.
BPRO, BORN IN SOUTH DAKOTA
From the outside, South Dakota looks like a great place to live and raise a family. The people are welcoming and trusting to a fault. But something has been brewing under the surface in South Dakota that is undermining elections across the country.
BPro was founded in 1985 by a woman named Sandra Bowers, who sold the business to Brandon and Abbey Campea in 2009 who had relocated to South Dakota from Washington State. Before BPro merged with KNOWiNK in 2020, their software was being used in at least fifteen states.
BPro’s office in the tiny city of Pierre, population 15,000, is singularly unimpressive. It is in a non-descript strip mall, across the street from a series of silos, with a marquee mockingly sporting South Dakota’s motto: “Under God, the People Rule.”
BPRO STRIP MALL HEADQUARTERS IN PIERRE, SOUTH DAKOTA
Even stranger than its outward appearance, are its posted hours. BPro is open only three days a week between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. It is hard to imagine how BPro adequately supports elections in 15 states, especially during election season, with hours like that. It makes you wonder where the real work is being done and who is really doing it – more on that later.
The origin and proliferation of BPro’s flagship software, TotalVote, is another enigma – that stinks of corruption and backroom deals where the people ultimately lose.
ORIGIN AND PROLIFERATION OF TOTALVOTE
TotalVote was originally created in 2007 as an election night reporting system called the Central Election Reporting System (CERS). South Dakota Secretary of State, Chris Nelson, commissioned BPro to create CERS as part of a case study funded with a grant from the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
CERS replaced South Dakota’s existing manual election night reporting system with a centralized one controlled by the SOS. Nelson presented CERS to the National Association of Election Officials at their 2009 annual meeting. After this, CERS was renamed TotalVote and BPro assumed ownership of the software paid for with public funds – a gift that ended up being extremely lucrative for BPro.
In another questionable move, Nelson gave away the publicly funded TotalVote software in 2009 to North Dakota, but Bpro was given a $100,000 sole source contract to continue development and support of TotalVote. Then later in 2010, BPro entered another sole-source contract to administer TotalVote in Nebraska.
In 2011, Chris Nelson moved on to the Public Utilities Commission and was replaced by Jason Gant as Secretary of State. During his campaign, Jason Gant accepted a $7,500 donation from BPro and a $10,000 donation from South Dakota’s voting machine provider, ES&S of Omaha, Nebraska.
After his election, Gant hosted a pheasant hunt with other Secretaries of State from across the country, with Brandon Campea, now owner of Bpro, also in attendance. Acceptance of questionable campaign donations from state vendors and expensive social outings with their owners was the first of many corrupt dealings that included missing funds, missing electronic records, lawsuits, and conflicts of interest.
Gant continued exporting TotalVote to as many states as possible behind the scenes. For example, in 2014, Hawaii signed a sole-source contract with Bpro for the voter roll maintenance and election night reporting system. In May of 2015, New Mexico entered a $200,000 sole-source contract with BPro. The contract states that the TotalVote software was a “gift” from Secretary of State Jason Gant, but Gant had left office before this contract was made and there is no indication by what authority he was still giving away public property.
BPro also secured contracts with other states such as Montana, Iowa, Arizona, Washington ($10 million), Pennsylvania ($10 million), Oregon ($7 million) and more. Thanks to Nelson and Gant’s generosity in giving away state-funded software, BPro raked in the contracts which were not even put out for bid, as BPro claimed they were the only company who could service TotalVote.
TOTALVOTE GROWS INTO ITS NAME
As TotalVote was being given away all over the country while securing lucrative sole-source contracts for BPro, it grew into an election software behemoth. TotalVote started out as a centralized election night reporting program. But since that humble beginning, TotalVote has added multiple functions that include everything having to do with the election except scanning paper ballots.
TotalVote now handles voter registration, voter information, centralized election monitoring, ballot printing and design, electronic ballot delivery, electronic pollbooks, creation of the election canvass documents, voter signature capture, precinct management, redistricting tools, address verification, campaign finance, and even geolocation of voters.
BPro’s contracts with their various clients also claim that TotalVote is fully integrated with GIS (Geographic Information System), NCOA (National Change of Address), USPS (United States Postal Service), AAMVA (American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators), DMV (Department of Motor Vehciles, SSA (Social Security Administration), ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center, Inc.), and other state and federal agency interfaces.
A contract between Santa Clara County, California and KNOWiNK/BPro discovered by an election integrity researcher, revealed that when a county uses their products, they turn over extremely broad powers for KNOWiNK/BPro to access any networked or wireless device remotely associated with the County:
CONTRACT EXCERPT OF COUNTY DEVICES ACCESSIBLE BY KNOWINK/BPRO
BPRO’S CONNECTIONS TO COMMUNIST CHINA
In 2011, Jason Gant hired “Everyone Counts” of LaJolla, California to develop the first ever online military voting system, then called IOASIS. Gant used a federal grant and spent $668,831 on a system only twenty-seven people used in the first year – about $28,000 per vote. IOASIS morphed into a program that is now used for Uniformed and Overseas Citizen Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) voting.
In 2012, Everyone Counts was contracted to handle voting for the Academy Awards. The results were unusual and led some to question the voting system. Since then, Everyone Counts was bought by Votem Corp, where Konnech’s Eugune Yu was on the board. Konnech and Eugene Yu made headlines last year when it was discovered that they were stealing personal identifying information and storing it in communist China.
Another incident in New Jersey raises eyebrows about how connected BPro, KNOWiNK, Everyone Counts, and Votem really are. New Jersey signed a $17 million contract with Everyone Counts for voter registration system maintenance. In 2019, after Votem acquired Everyone Counts, the company restructured, and sold the New Jersey contract to KNOWiNK. However, at the time, KNOWiNK was only known to sell and service e-poll pads, as they had not yet purchased BPro which handles voter registration. The questionable timing of this “inherited” contract by KNOWiNK without officially owning or selling voter roll maintenance software is an example of the smoke and mirrors in the election equipment shell game.
BPRO RELIES ON FOREIGN SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS IN VIOLATION OF THEIR CONTRACTS
China isn’t BPro’s only foreign connection: The New Mexico SOS displays election results in both table and GIS map form. A candidate in New Mexico noticed that BPro’s mapping feature is provided by a company called “Leaflet” who included a hyperlink at the bottom of all the state maps displaying election results (the hyperlink has since been removed by BPro):
NEW MEXICO’S ELECTION RESULTS GIS MAPS PROVIDED BY UKRAINIAN COMPANY “LEAFLET”
Clicking on the hyperlink brought up fundraising advertisement for the Ukraine War and another link to information about Leaflet’s creator, a native Ukrainian named Volodomyr Agafonkin. Per the website description, “Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps….”
UKRAINIAN WAR ADVERTISEMENT FROM LEAFLET’S DEVELOPER EMBEDDED IN BPRO SOFTWARE
The biggest problem with using foreign-created GIS features in BPro software is that they have signed at least a dozen contracts that contain a clause that work on sensitive data will be performed in the United States, including subcontractors:
SECTION OF BPRO’S CONTRACT WITH ARIZONA FOR DEVELOPMENT OF ARIZONA VOTER INFORMATION DATABASE (AVID)
If Leaflet products are used in the redistricting features and geolocation offered by BPro, which would seem to be a self-evident violation of BPro’s contracts.
BPRO’S STRANGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PARTNER
Arizona’s elections are now famous around the country for massive irregularities, incompetence, and fraud. It will surprise no one that BPro is right in the middle of Arizona’s elections as one of the contractors that teamed up to create Arizona’s voter database called AVID (Access Voter Information Database).
In 2017, a company called “Sutherland Government Solutions” (a subsidiary of Sutherland Global Solutions) sought out BPro and another Arizona company called “Expert Technology Services Arizona (ETSAZ) to partner with them to create the AVID system.
Sutherland, a billion-dollar net annual revenue company, has a set of skills that you wouldn’t typically associate with a voter registration database.
Take this very curious statement from their website:
“We make digital human.”
At Sutherland, we create exceptionally engineered brand experiences that are a perfect match for the real people (and real moments) they’re made for. We do that by combining human-centered design with the scale & accuracy of real time analytics, AI, cognitive technology and automation.”
Why would a company that specialized in AI, real-time analytics, and automation be needed to create and maintain a database for Arizonans?
COMPANY WHO HELPED BUILD ARIZONA’S REGISTRATION DATABASE
A section from the BPro/Sutherland proposal to the State of Arizona states:
“Team Sutherland has experience with data analytics, the use of algorithms for problem solving…For example, if a particular polling location experience long lines during periods of the day, analytics could be used to understand why. Possible approaches to examine this situation could combine the time stamps that ballots are cast with the address locations of voters when they check in at the polling place to highlight driving distances used by voters. The results may point to a better or additional polling location to help minimize wait times…”
Using analytics to reduce wait times at the polls sounds great. You would think with tools like that the utter debacle that was the Maricopa County 2022 midterm elections could never have happened. But evidence presented in court and to the public strongly indicate that someone with access to the election management system purposely sabotaged ballot images used to print ballots at the polling sites so they would be rejected by tabulators on Election Day. Another shocking revelation revealed that Maricopa County election officials kept a heat map of expected Republican voters hanging on their wall and almost all the voting centers with machine problems were in deep red districts.
HEAT MAP SHOWING LOCATIONS OF LIKELY REPUBLICAN VOTERS HANGING IN MARICOPA COUNTY ELECTION CENTER
Could the advanced analytics Sutherland built into AVID be used to sabotage an election in Republican precincts using AVID? It’s clear someone in Maricopa County was thinking along those lines.
BPRO IS FULLY CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET AND HOSTED ON THE CLOUD
Considering the recent revelations that the Federal Government is pushing election officials to connect their election to the emergency use cellular network called FirstNet, which was built by AT&T and is widely viewed to be vulnerable to foreign attack, the statement on Sutherland’s proposal that AT&T is their longest tenured client is also troubling: (LINK)
SUTHERLAND GLOBAL’S STATEMENT ON AVID PROPOSAL
If full exposure to FirstNet wasn’t enough of a vulnerability, Bpro/KNOWiNK hosts their software and their client’s sensitive election data on the Microsoft Azure platform. Sutherland Global Services also lists Microsoft Azure as a partner.
In May and June of 2023, Chinese cyber hackers breached the US State Department, along with other US Federal Agencies, through the Microsoft Cloud. A recent Gateway Pundit article reported “According to the New York Times, “the hack, by a Chinese group that the company said was intent on conducting espionage, went undetected for a month…. [t]he investigation of the efforts by the Chinese hackers, who likely are affiliated with China’s military or spy services, is ongoing, American officials said. But U.S. officials have downplayed the idea that the hackers stole sensitive information, insisting that no classified email or cloud systems were penetrated. The State Department’s cybersecurity team first discovered the intrusion.
Within the article, Laura Ingraham adds her commentary:
“Now, despite the Fed spending, what, 15.6 billion on cybersecurity, more than the GDP of nearly, what, 75 countries, Chinese cyberspies were able to exploit a fundamental gap in Microsoft’s cloud, enabling them to hack email accounts at the State Department and other agencies. But this really should come as no surprise, because Microsoft has had a really symbiotic relationship for China for years now. As Forbes noted in a recent piece, in 2014, Microsoft became the first foreign company to offer public cloud computing services in the Chinese market. And in March of this year, they would begin offering OpenAI as part of its cloud services. And get this, Microsoft gave the Chinese government access to the source code for its Windows operating system. That happened back in March of 2003.”
BPRO/KNOWINK IS A NATIONAL SECURITY RISK
BPro has a shady history – from its creation to its proliferation across the country. It is being used to perform tasks in our elections that as noted previously appear to be in blatant violation of state and federal law, and even in violation of the contracts BPro has made with its clients.
BPro/KNOWiNK are now controlling electronic poll pads, voter registration databases, election night reporting, and even processing of official election results in a majority of US states.
We can prove the data this software produces indicates massive manipulation of the voter rolls, election night reporting, and election results reporting.
Revelations that our national infrastructure was spied on for months in the Solarwinds hack proves our national critical infrastructure can be and has been penetrated by foreign actors without the knowledge of CISA, the federal agency charged with securing our elections.
Evidence of all this manipulation have been brought to election officials across the country. None of it has been explained nor has any effort been made to correct these issues.
The weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the TotalVote software are a national security emergency. Election officials who have sworn an oath to protect the election franchise cannot continue to ignore this system.
All of this software must be discontinued immediately to protect 2024.
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