According to interviews and emails, two Lake County officials requested sensitive information on voting and tabulation devices both before and after an attempted data breach that occurred inside the county commissioner’s office on the day of a special election.
The county board of elections rejected the attempts by Recorder Becky Lynch and Clerk of Courts Faith Andrews because state and federal regulations strictly control who can obtain information about the machines, which, if distributed, might pose a security risk for secure elections.
Lynch, however, maintains that she found the manuals online and gave them to members of the county’s automatic data processing board in an email to cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. She claimed that Andrews requested the information at a time when the board of elections started the process of acquiring new voting equipment.
According to Lynch’s email, “it spurred the requests for more information and the manuals for the machine, among the many headlines of voter fraud at the time.” In what has come to be known as the “Stop the Steal” movement, Republicans at local levels around the country started pressing for information on voting machines to unearth evidence that fraud contributed to former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election.
Numerous judicial challenges and investigations brought up no proof of massive electoral fraud. There have been criminal investigations into data breaches and attempted data breaches in various regions of the nation, and these investigations resemble the ones in Lake County.
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In a follow-up email to a reporter, Lynch forwarded the manuals and claimed that she later located them online by utilizing the model numbers of the voting machines. Ross McDonald, the Lake County Board of Elections director, claimed that he and the board’s counsel had decided that Andrews and Lynch weren’t entitled to the manuals and had turned down their requests.
“What mattered to us is that this is a compassionate document, and it’s a security record, which is excluded from public records rules in Ohio,” McDonald said. “There is a lot of opportunity to provide people with access to administrator-level information that only election officials should know.”
According to McDonald, there are numerous tiers of election protection that would probably resist any hypothetical hacking attempts. However, he added, “It’s a danger that shouldn’t be there.” Multiple messages asking Andrews for comments went unanswered.
Officials earlier stated that on May 4, 2021, the day of a special election, someone swiped in using Lake County Commissioner John Hamercheck’s security card, logged onto the government’s server with a non-county laptop in Hamercheck’s office, and recorded county computer data. According to prior reports, the attempted hack only resulted in wireless printers connecting and never reaching the systems of the board of elections.
At a cyber symposium that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump supporter, had promised would show election fraud, screenshots of what was viewed were ultimately revealed. In a video message shared on social media on Wednesday, Lindell said that the FBI had taken his phone and questioned him about a Colorado election data breach plan in which local elections clerk Tina Peters and a deputy clerk had been accused of hacking the county’s voting system technology.
Along with the unimportant data seized from the Lake County commissioner’s office, the data from Mesa County—a hard drive copy of exclusive software created by Dominion Voting Systems and utilized nationwide—was presented in Lindell’s symposium.
Before the symposium, The Washington Post reports that Peters and Hamercheck had spoken with Doug Frank, a Lindell associate and former teacher from the Cincinnati region who worked with municipal politicians all around the country. On Wednesday, Frank posted on Telegram that the FBI had also taken his phone.
Hamercheck has previously denied being involved in the event. A spokeswoman for the Lake County commissioners directed a reporter to the county prosecutors. David Hackman, an assistant lake county prosecutor, declined to comment.
Ohio Secretary of State spokesperson Rob Nichols and Ohio Attorney General spokesman Steve Irwin confirmed that the investigation is still ongoing. The Washington Post received confirmation of the investigation’s existence from Vicki Anderson, an FBI spokesman, in August 2021. This week, when questioned about the case’s status, the organization’s new spokesperson, Susan Locate, said she couldn’t confirm or deny the probe’s existence.
Election officials have stated that attempts to obtain voting machine data might diminish public faith in secure elections and, in cases throughout the nation where information has been disclosed, could make voting machines and tabulators vulnerable to hackers.
According to McDonald, director of the Lake County board of elections, no requests for voting instructions have been made in the past seven years. He asserted that while he doesn’t think Lynch or Andrews committed any wrongdoing, they might have been influenced by the widespread, unfounded claims of fraud going through the nation since the 2020 presidential election.
McDonald stated, “I think they wanted the manuals because there was a lot of chatter in circles around the 2020 election that they believe a lot of fraud occurred. Lynch has shared remarks made by Trump on how the 2020 election was rigged on social media.
Lynch requested the manuals for the county’s voting machines and tabulators in April 2021, just before the breach, for both the equipment they were using and the new ones the county was thinking about purchasing. It eventually purchased the equipment. McDonald claimed that Lynch never responded after he rejected the proposal.
Later, Lynch, a county data board member, attempted to have the computers purchased through the data board. Lynch’s request was turned down after McDonald deemed that unacceptable. The day after the attempted hack, Andrews sent McDonald an email stating that she had already requested the manuals for the machines used at the time and during the 2020 presidential election, in addition to the manuals for the new devices.
Still don’t have those, Andrews wrote. “I must have copies as soon as possible, please.” The same day, McDonald provided her with the instructions for poll workers and asked Lake County’s attorneys for their advice on the instructions for the machines. Andrews replied immediately, adding, “I don’t see any evidence on this manual anywhere that the equipment manufacturer prepared it… ES&S. I require the ES&S machine’s operations
handbook and those that include the specs for both the voting machine and the tabulator. After learning that McDonald had contacted the prosecutor’s office for legal counsel, she followed up five days later. You had to find out if a different County of Lake elected official, a court officer, could see the instructions for the current voting machines. Wowser…intense,” that’s what she wrote.
Two weeks after Andrews’ initial request, Assistant Lake County Prosecutor Michael DeLeone answered and declined it, citing Ohio legislation forbidding manual distribution. In retrospect, McDonald stated, “I’m not sure we thought about it too much.” “Perhaps we would have seen it differently if we had known about the attempted data hack in real-time.”
