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April 22, 2024 - Info Warrior - Jason Bermas
17:39
Are The EXIT POLLS About To Be Rigged?
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Today's News Talk, TNT Radio.
And we are now joined by an individual I was lucky enough to come across very early on in my travels here in the Quad Cities in Iowa.
Someone who's been an on-the-ground journalist here for three-plus decades.
He is the founder of the River Cities Reader.
You can check it out over at rcreader.com.
And oftentimes here we talk about looking in the mirror and being your own hero.
And what? Free and fair elections.
And Todd has really been on the ground of trying to audit our election system and make them as free and fair as possible.
I know most people, they're not concerned about Iowa, but in the primary season that has long passed every several years.
But I would propose, again, we don't just preach it, we do it here.
And if we had more people like Todd that were trying to audit these things and keep up On our county commissioners, etc.
We have less problems in the system.
So right now, we've got this process formality.
I need you to lay it out in plain English.
First of all, thank you for joining us.
Tell us what's going on in Scott County, Iowa.
Thanks, Jason. Scott County, Iowa here on the banks of the Mississippi River in eastern Iowa.
Davenport and Bettendorf for the two major cities there in Scott County, Iowa.
And last November, the county auditor brought forward a proposal to purchase new poll book software and hardware.
And that is what manages the voter registration when people come to vote.
There's 66 precincts in Scott County, so there's 66 poll books, if you will, and then there's subsidiaries of those.
And Diane Holst, who's a former county supervisor, was monitoring the agendas and so forth, and up came this Consent agenda, where they had 20 items that the county supervisors, there's five of them, wanted to put into a consent agenda, meaning let's get all this stuff...
Backing up a second for people who probably know this, Committee of the Whole happens on a certain date in city council and county meetings, and then a day or two later comes the Board meeting.
So the committee of the whole is where all the sausage is being made.
Everybody kind of talks through with the staff.
What are we looking at? What are the pros and cons?
They look at what's called the green sheet or the memo about the particular matter.
And then they kind of figure it out, ask questions, let it be vetted.
And then they kind of move on to the, okay, two days later, we're going to vote up or down on this and move it to the regular board meeting.
Well, this was right before Thanksgiving in November.
And the county supervisors decided they were going to collapse in one hour.
A committee of the whole and a regular meeting and have a 20-item consent agenda, of which included a $450,000 acquisition of new poll book software.
So this was a flag. So let me just stop you right here.
So again, they're trying to smash it together to kind of circumvent any oversight by the public, correct?
There was like a 24-hour notice that this was even on the agenda, this being this item by the county auditor to change the poll book software.
And, you know, my wife, who's the editor of the newspaper we publish, and Diane's a good friend of ours who's a county supervisor, they've both been volunteers at the polls.
They've sat there and used the poll book software that people, when they come to vote, they say, okay, here's your ID. They scan it into this little scanner, and then they pull it up.
They say, okay, now here's your ballot because you're in certain precinct and so forth, and that's the management of the data in, right, the data in that's coming in, and the eligible voters.
And the incumbent software and hardware is a thing called Iowa Precinct Atlas Consortium, IPAC for short.
And it's a consortium of 80 plus counties in Iowa that started 10, 15 years ago where they did their own homegrown version of whole book software and hardware.
And they're using Microsoft tools, Microsoft products and scanners and so forth for all these years.
And we've been using them in Scott County for years.
There's never been any issues with them.
This new auditor comes in, and she was appointed, by the way, and then she decided she wanted to change the poll books to tablets.
So anyway, let's go to November.
Here's the consent agenda.
We get this at 24-hour notice.
So several of us start emailing questions to the supervisors and the auditor and saying, hey, before you approve this to go to the consent agenda, how about you ask these questions?
And it included the questions about what the one sheet that the auditor put out and asking backup questions about comments that she made like, hey, this provider is the only one that understands current Iowa election law.
Really? You're telling me that the consortium of 80 counties, you've been using for over a dozen years, doesn't understand election law?
She says this in writing.
We're like, hey, supervisors, supervise, ask the question.
How are you saying that this new person, you want to take the highest bid, by the way, this back up again.
Laws in Iowa state that for bidding processes, you take the lowest bid, unless there are extenuating circumstances or service issues.
So that wasn't articulated in any of the memos to the supervisors to approve this.
There was no service issues documented.
It was just, we want to go with this new thing.
We want to go with these tablets.
And so we challenged them.
We went to the supervisors meeting.
We went before them.
We asked the questions that we asked them during the day.
I called all five supervisors before the meeting.
Anyway, they rubber stamped it.
They put a consent agenda and they approved it.
Let me stop you, Todd. Let me stop you and really talk about why this is important.
Because when you look at what happened in the 2020 election, you weren't really allowed to have what would be regular polling because there were so many mail-in ballots, and there's a way to circumvent that.
I've often said this time around, if they don't go with those tools through, you will have polling.
So if the polling is so much off from the final vote, then you might actually be able to argue a real audit in court.
If you're able to take over the software now that takes care of the polls and the polls just magically match the vote, then, wow, you're a real conspiracy theorist if you think that the voting and the machines there are corrupt and then the polling software, which is separate, But probably proprietary and unable to be audited as well.
And like you just said, very strange that they would take the highest bid, aka there being extenuating circumstances that are not explained.
Well, this is the most important election ever.
We've got to make it the most secure ever.
We need secure polling software too.
This reeks of corruption.
This is a completely underrated story.
I'm going to let you go for the next like 40 seconds before we hit the break.
What else should we know about this case?
We should know that after it was approved in November, Diane continued with FOIA requests and uncovered the fact that the auditor broke the law and didn't publish the bid notices.
And they had to redo it in January and do it all over.
And through that FOIA request, we uncovered a lot more information.
And in the last month's issue, we published a full timeline of all that, which we can talk about in detail and explain how this was fast-tracked.
And when the auditor went back to the bidders, she said, we have a process formality.
Oh, due to a process formality, we have to actually do this properly.
So, yes, that should be a term that should be in concert, a process formality.
Well, it's always a mistake, and if anything goes wrong, it's an abnormality, it's a glitch, etc., it's an error.
There's never, ever, ever any malice out there.
We've got to take that break.
We're going to come back. We're going to continue to talk about this case and more.
We're going to talk whether or not America is the new empire and what are the similarities and differences.
With Rome, Todd McGreevy is our guest.
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Today's news talk, this is TNT Radio.
And quite frankly, I don't know that I will ever look as impressive as the old poot-poot topless on a horse or a bear or whatever AI creates in the future.
Separate topic.
Todd, again, one of the great things I love about your publication, and again, it's been around for years.
It's in print form.
It used to be bi-monthly.
It's monthly now. It's tough out there, I know.
But you have this timeline.
So break down some of the bullet points that you were able to find out through this FOIA. Well, let's back up a second here.
One of the things that was important to realize is that during that meeting in November, those of us who were asking questions asked enough questions where it was said, well, what's the problem with the incumbent again?
And it was never in writing.
It was verbalized. There were service issues.
What kind of service issue? Well, they only have one tech person available on election night was what was said.
And that was how the board decided to say, okay, oh, gosh, they just can't keep up.
We got a big election coming up.
They're understaffed.
Yes. In real time, during that meeting in November, I go to the IPAC website and there's six tech people right at their website with their profiles.
So you're telling me they blatantly lied to you when you asked that question?
Well, they blatantly lied to the board.
So we called the head of the IPAC shortly thereafter in November and had a nice dialogue.
And in our December edition, we published our review of all of this and all the questions we asked.
And didn't leave it alone. And then subsequently, Diana Delany's FOIA request moving forward.
And in the issue that's on stands now and at our website at rscruder.com, you can see that the timeline that we published about all the things that were disclosed, they include that there was no actual bid from the incumbent in November.
It was a made-up bid.
And there was no actual bid whatsoever from the incumbent.
We got results or input from IPAC, and they gave us the actual accounting of any of the service issues that there may have been.
And since 2013, there have only been four service calls that they've logged, and only one during an election period.
That's it. So there is no like smoking gun that the current system doesn't work.
It all has to do, in our view, with perceived ease of use.
It's easier. Jason, this is what my...
See, you're being nice.
Perceived ease of use.
I see backdoor corruption.
But you know what? I'm a conspiracy nut.
How dare I even question it?
Jason, your intuition is usually on point.
And what I'm going with here is what I think is happening.
We should all be aware of this. Because when you go to the article at the reader's website, you'll see we have a photograph.
It's Tenex. T-E-N-E-X is the software and the hardware that's being used, the provider that's being used for this.
And when you go to get your ballot, typically you have to hand-sign a piece of paper here in Iowa to get your ballot, to register, you know, like, here, I've just got my ballot, and there is a trail of a hand signature.
Our view is just that, because now we're using iPads, and the scanner's in the iPad, because the camera is the scanner, there's not a separate device, and trust me, I'm not a fan of micro sloth either, okay?
So it's not like I have a dog in this hunt.
But... They're trying to go with paperless.
See, that's the thing.
Now it's so much easier to cheat.
You don't even have to manufacture the actual fake signatures.
You can do so digitally.
And in an age of AI, you know how long that takes?
That takes a blink of an eye.
Yes. I want to shift gears to this other story because we've only got a few minutes left in this segment.
And one of the things I love about The Reader is that you do take on the big issues.
You've allowed me to do big op-eds on Elon Musk and others.
You've got this piece on the Roman Empire and the United States.
And, you know, why did you guys do this?
And what do you think the similarities and differences are?
Because I always hear about failing empires, but I see a lot of what's going on right now as a controlled demolition of our constitutional republic at the behest or the altar of modern-day globalism.
It is absolutely a controlled demolition, and we've published articles in a fascinating cartoon by Ed Newman about that.
But back to your statement about – that was an article we published by John Whitehead and his daughter Nisha of the Rutherford Institute, which is a phenomenal organization.
Everybody should check out rutherford.org.
They are more of the libertarian ACLU, if you will.
They file amicus briefs at the Supreme Court for property protection and for speech protection and Fourth Amendment protections all the time.
They're well worth supporting.
We publish their articles often.
He published an article that was on the cusp of Easter, and we came out right before Easter, and so this was a timely piece, and we put the headline, What Would Jesus Do?
You know, with regards to American Empire versus Roman Empire, and how would Jesus deal with what was going on in terms of how America is proceeding right now?
And John goes into a great detail of everything from how we're dealing with, you know, the foreign wars, the surveillance, the violations of the Fourth Amendment.
These are old saws, but it's repetition of message that counts, that we have to continue to remind people.
Julian Assange is mentioned many times in this, and he also goes into great detail about how Jesus was the original revolutionary.
He was the one who upended the system.
He lived and died in a police state is what John writes about.
And we thought it was a really inspiring article and that's why we published it.
And you know, you and I, we're not real big Bible thumpers out there.
But this is put into such a stark political context that I think that, yeah, sure, it could speak to Christians, but it speaks to everybody, right?
Because at the end of the day, it's speaking to a base morality, right?
Are we for freedom of speech?
Are we for peace?
Are we for the truth or...
Are we for this new NPR motto that we shouldn't start at the truth and the First Amendment is actually a huge obstacle?
Todd, you've been in this game for, again, 30 plus years on the ground level.
When you see something like that from an outlet like NPR, which even myself utilized a ton Back in the day, even when I was with Infowars, the early 2000s, even the late 90s when I started looking at news, and it was never my favorite thing, I never thought it would get to the level where the CEO literally says we're not starting at the truth and the First Amendment is an obstacle.
So what are your thoughts wrapping that up?
It's national propaganda radio, and here in Iowa, it's Iowa Public Radio.
And years ago, when Ron Paul was running for office, they did a hit piece on Ron Paul, and I lost my mind, and I called up the ombudsman of the state of Iowa, and I got to the director of Iowa Public Radio, and I challenged him about how he positioned what they said on the radio.
And he said out loud to me, he said, no, we have a democratic socialist country.
That's what we're in. That was told to me by an Iowa public radio executive years ago.
This ethos that's inside public radio is not new.
Frankly, it's monitoring the opposition.
I listen to them every morning to hear what they're saying.
It's flabbergasting when you listen to the things that come out of their mouths regarding climate change and fear porn with all that.
It's out of control.
Fortunately, in Iowa, The Regents voted to withdraw funding of Iowa Public Radio.
Well, again, these people shouldn't be funded on any level.
It's absolutely absurd and obscene, and I don't need somebody talking like this that isn't a programmed AI or robot I'm watching in a Kubrick film.
Todd, thank you so much for joining us.
We've got to take a break. We're going to come back.
More of the show after this.
You're not going to want to miss it.
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