Mon Dec 14 20:08:22 +0000 2020

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I'm still digging into the ASOG Antrim report, but wanted to point out something pretty important: their claim that someone attempted to tamper with evidence is...unsupported by evidence. A quick thread because I don't think I can fit it into a single tweet.

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That excerpt is from their report, and their interpretation is that it means someone tried to "zero out" election results. This is wrong.

Let's break down what

"Id:3168 EmsLogger - There is no permission to {0} - Project: User: Thread: 189"

really means

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First thing I did was to check to see if the Dominion manual had an error message that matched the "{0}" one. If you search through https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/VotingSystems/DVS-DemocracySuite511/documentation/2-03-EMS-FunctionalityDescription-5-11-CO.pdf you'll find several messages that all begin with "There is no permission" followed by additional details about the error.

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You won't, however, find any error message that resembles "There is no permission to {0}". That's because it's not an actual error that means anything, let alone "direct proof of an attempt to tamper with evidence.". I'll explain, but it's going to get nerdy..

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Quick comp sci recap: programming languages provide you with the ability to substitute values into strings. This allows you to essential write a template, like "There is no permission to {0}", where {0} will get dynamically replaced with the actual error message.

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That's why there are multiple errors in the manual that start with "There is no permission". Instead of asking a programmer to write out every message individually, they can write the template, and the rest of the message is swapped in depending on the specifics of the error

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Given that Dominion runs on Windows, I'm guessing it's written in C#. If you look at C# Format strings, you'll notice something that may look familiar.. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.string.format?view=net-5.0

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So, {0} is essentially a placeholder for whatever the actual error is. Given that error made it into the Windows event log, I do suspect there was an actual error, but it's impossible to tell what error specifically it was - likely due to a bug in the Dominion software itself

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In order for ASOG's claim to be true, Dominion would have to support a 'zero out results' feature, and the error that would be logged if someone tried to perform that action without having the correct permissions would have to be logged exactly as "There is no permission to {0}"

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But, as far as I can tell, 1) Dominion doesn't offer that as a feature, and 2) that's an insanely unhelpful error. Let's look at the manual again. You'll notice those errors are descriptive. If you could zero results, the error would read "There is no permission to clear results"

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So, to sum it all up: ASOG claimed they have evidence of election tampering, but their 'evidence' was actually just bad exception handling in the Dominion software, which to be fair - is not great!! - but is not itself proof that any tampering occurred.

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For a group of "cyber terrorism experts", this is a really embarrassing mistake to make. I'm not sure if they were being intentionally misleading, or just interpreted the error wrong, but either way, it should call into question their credibility.

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Here's an unroll because I can never write a short thread - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1338576587780812800.html