Like a great many of the comings and goings we here at National Zero end up reporting on, this story begins in the dregs of the MAGA internet, where facts and beliefs are interchangeable:
The article reads like some unemployed incel’s third attempt at a “cyber thriller” movie script but he hasn’t get around to writing any actual dialogue yet. It’s rehashed shit from Telegram posts by “CodeMonkeyZ”, aka 8chan founder Ron Watkins, aka the man widely-rumored to be the “real” Q of QAnon fame, alleging that Dominion Voting Systems ballot tabulation devices can be connected to the internet, thus “proving” the 2020 presidential election was hacked and stolen from Trump, and so on and so forth. Various pieces of the alleged whistleblower’s “evidence” was included in the article, along with a video posted on right wing YouTube knockoff Rumble.
Now we’ve examined the video closely, almost frame-by-frame, and nothing on the screens shown stuck out to us as a password, but apparently someone at the Colorado Secretary of State’s office did recognize something as being a unique password, one that had been issued to the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s Office by the Secretary of State for the purposes of using and maintaining the county’s Dominion Voting Systems equipment. Meaning that the asshole who made this video just telegraphed to the entire world exactly where it is they work.
The Secretary of State’s office announced an immediate investigation in a Monday press release:
Today, the Colorado Secretary of State’s office issued an Order in response to a potential chain-of-custody and security protocol breach for Mesa County’s voting system components.
Several items were published online that constituted a breach in the security protocols for Mesa County voting system components. The posted images depict the BIOS passwords specific to the individual hardware stations of Mesa County’s voting system. The public disclosure of the BIOS passwords for one or more components of Mesa County’s voting system alone constitutes a serious breach of voting system security protocols, as well as a violation of Election Rule 20.6.1. This breach in security protocol has not created an imminent direct security risk to Colorado’s elections and did not occur during an election.
It is likely from the content of the social media postings that this sensitive information was collected during the limited access trusted build installation in Mesa County on May 25, 2021. The collection and dissemination of this information during the trusted build installation violated security protocols and Department of State rules governing the process. In response to this breach in protocols, the Secretary of State’s office has sent an Order requesting inspection of election equipment and other relevant materials to the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder. Depending on the outcome of the investigation, these violations may result in the decertification of the voting systems in Mesa County.
Now, while the Colorado Secretary of State doesn’t outright say Mesa County clerk Tina Peters did it, it’s pretty goddamned obvious she or someone close to her did, given Peters’s well-documented love for MAGA fan fiction stories about alleged 2020 election fraud and vaccines.
So in summary, it is very likely the Trump loving Mesa County, Colorado clerk, in her quest to “expose” voter fraud perpetrated by Dominion Voting Systems via tampering ended up herself tampering with their election equipment by exposing their authentication data publicly to legions of obsessed MAGA conspiracy freaks, resulting in their likely decertification by the Colorado Secretary of State, and costing Mesa County taxpayers millions of dollars to replace the equipment.
And before you ask, yes. Yes, Mesa County is part of famous high school dropout and QAnon fan Rep Lauren Boebert’s district. Your gut feeling was 100% correct on this one. Good job reader.