Ensuring the integrity of our elections is one of the most solemn responsibilities our elected officials have. The democrats literally walked out of the capital to kill election reform during the 87th Regular Session.

As we prepare for the start of the first special session, Cyber Security Expert, Phil Waldron gives us some background on why we must make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

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Today, we’re going to talk about election integrity, a very, very hot topic. I’m very pleased to have as my guest today, retired Colonel Phil Waldron. You may have seen him on Fox news or testifying with Mayor Giuliani. He’s a Texan, lives outside of Austin and very, very excited. Colonel Phil, thanks for coming on the show.

Phil Waldron:
Thanks, Jon. Thanks for having me.

Jonathan Schober:
A lot of things have happened since November and since January 6th. So very quickly, you’ve been all over the nation. You’ve covered some of the things that have happened in Arizona and in Texas and Pennsylvania. Why don’t you start with a high level explanation of what’s been going on around the nation, and then we’ll kind of transition to the particulars of what’s going on here in Texas. And especially as we talk about the 87th legislative session.

Phil Waldron:
That sounds good. Yeah, so I guess starting with Georgia and Michigan, those were the two key states where we started off. Our team ran the Antrim county, Michigan audit, that first audit, which was not a full audit. We had only access to certain pieces of equipment, not the ballots. We had tapes and it was kind of put together, rapidly put together audit.

Jonathan Schober:
Maybe that’s one of the first things that we need to talk about and bring to everyone’s attention, because I know in the news you hear the word audit and that means different things to different people. So what I’d like to get is your perspective and really your definition of an audit. Has there actually been a full forensic audit yet? Again, lot of news, Arizona’s talking about it, but what’s actually happened?

Phil Waldron:
Yeah. So the first audit of the machines, other than what they call a risk limiting audit, which is a statistical sampling of ballots, not really looking at the processing of the ballots, but the tapes, the computer log, or the computer outputs, and then a statistical sampling of some of the ballots, the hand count. So that was done a lot of places, and a lot of misinformation and disinformation was put out there. “Well, we’ve already had a recount in Georgia. We’ve already done a recount here.” No, they didn’t. They did risk limiting audits or a statistical sampling of audits. They’ve never done a full audit of certain counties.

A lot of your viewers and listeners probably heard last week, the judge finally unsealed the actual hard copy ballots in Fulton county, Georgia. So we’ve had the scan ballot images for a while, and now the judge, based on some affidavits that were presented to the Georgia Senate and House in the hearings before, and right after Thanksgiving, the judge reconsidered and opened the paper ballots because of the fact in Georgia, in Coffee County, Georgia, one of the elections administrators showed how you can scan a ballot, create a scan ballot image, and then manipulate the votes on that scan ballot image, even as far as voting a blank ballot that’s scanned in.

So the argument to the judge was, you have to look at the paper ballots, that’s the constitutional remedy. Then you compare what the machine put out and that’s really the full audit. And so you mentioned a full forensic audit is looking at the equipment, the software, the security logs, the processing logs, everything on the computers, the servers, the routers, which the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is reticent to provide because it would show that the information packets that we’re processing and leaving Maricopa county, I believe that’s why they’re not giving up the routers.

But anyway, that full forensic audit looks at from … I grew up in Southeast Texas. So you eat the alligator from the tail to the teeth. And so you got to look at the front where the votes were first touched and process in the machines all the way to the tail end of those hard-copy ballots. Now in Antrim County, Michigan, we had one township, a small number of machines that they were able to conduct a forensic analysis of the machines, and they had some tapes. Didn’t have the hard copy ballots. In a nutshell … Go ahead.

Jonathan Schober:
So just real quick, can you define tapes versus hard ballots? Just so we understand what you’re talking about.

Phil Waldron:
If you can look at Matt DePerno’s, Matt DePerno Law, his website, all this stuff is captured and displayed there for public inspection. But when the voting machines, the electronic voting systems process ballots, they get a scan ballot image, and it spits out a tape. It’s like a cash register receipt. And it’s just got the summary of those daily election logs. And it provides supposedly an audit trail from beginning to end, if you look at a concept called machine logic, and I try to explain this to a lot of legislators, because they really don’t understand this. If you look at a CNC machine, everybody understands the concept of a CNC machine. It spits out widgets, tools, parts, pieces, and machine logic dictates that with a piece of software applied to that hardware, that every tool, every widget that spits out is exactly the same.

And if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be a ballot machine. It wouldn’t be bought, purchased or used in conducting machinery. Well, on Antrim County, Michigan, the software applied to the hardware three different times produced three different results. So they were able to correct those images to correct the votes by doing a hand recount, but the machines never processed the information accurately, down to the security logs being missing, down to the scan ballot images being missed, which we found out later through discovery, an email from Dominion’s elections, went out, a lady I believe named Sheryl Holmes copied two other Dominion employees that said to increase the speed of modem transmission time, we decided to delete the scanned ballot images, the saving of the process, and this was done in the primary. So that’s why there was no scan ballot images on the general election.

So it wasn’t the County Election Supervisor. It wasn’t the Secretary of State. It wasn’t the legislature. Wasn’t the people of Michigan that decided to turn that off. It was Dominion voting officials, and they were able to do that across the state remotely. So the fallacy of that these machines are air gapped, that they’re not connected to the internet, is truly a fallacy. And that Antrim County, Michigan forensic audit, at least those 22 machines was really the thread that started pulling apart a lot of the lies that legislators and officials had been told, and the lies that are propagated by even the director of CISA in DHS, Chris Krebs, he said this was the most secure election. And he said the two reasons that he made that hypothesis were that the machines are not connected to the internet, which is a lie, either by his ignorance or his deception. And then that the states had processes to prevent voter fraud. And we’d know, by looking at Philadelphia, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, that that was not the case.

Jonathan Schober:
People need to be able to trust their elections. I’m just a common Joe. I have a little bit of a technical background, but maybe you can explain again, just from a common Joe perspective, why does it have to be this complicated? I mean, I remember when I was in school, we had Scantrons and all you needed was a number two pencil and a piece of paper with bubbles on it. Why does it have to be so complicated? Why do we have to have these optical character recognition and connected to the internet and all of these things, really just putting aside the politics and conspiracy theories, why is it this complicated?

Phil Waldron:
Now, since you mentioned putting side politics, I’ve been accused of not really liking politicians as a whole. I always use the dime analogy. When you hold a dime up and you look at the head, the head is distinctly different from the tail, but when you turn it on its side, there’s only that much room between them. So there’s not a lot of difference in my mind. Politicians, once they become corrupt politicians, I don’t care what flavor they are. They need to be gone. They need to be out of leading and representing the American people. And that’s really what I’m about. So I don’t care if it was a Republican individual who was fraudulently elected or a Democrat. If the American people wanted Bernie Sanders or anybody, they may want Willie Nelson to be President. And if the American people vote, that is what our Republic was founded on, government of the people, by the people and for the people. And that’s what needs to happen. And that’s not what happening. That’s not what’s happening in our bureaucracy that’s in the DC area. It’s just, it’s corrupt [inaudible 00:10:42] swamp.

Jonathan Schober:
So maybe some of the complexity allows a few shenanigans to be played around the edges?

Phil Waldron:
I do believe, and it would probably be accurate to say that if you made the assumption that both Republicans and Democrats who were sitting in office benefited from the complexities of the electronic voting machines, I would probably say I’d be willing to put odds on that in Vegas.

Jonathan Schober:
So we just asked who benefits, the incumbents or the people from all these complexities? The answer to that question may give a lot of insight into why these complexities occur. So I want to turn our eyes to Texas specifically and talk about election integrity, certainly from the politicians, there seems to be some talk about it, but if you would tell us in very practical terms, if you could wave a magic wand and establish proper election integrity changes, what would you suggest needs to be done? We’re going into a special session, didn’t get it done in this session, but what needs to get done here in Texas?

Phil Waldron:
Well, a lot of the legislators in Texas had the right idea. We’ve actually had meetings with the Lieutenant Governor’s staff, the Governor’s staff, the Governor himself, with several of the members of the election committee, looking at Senate bill seven, I believe Senate bill seven got gutted and strung on with a lot of amendments that basically took any of the teeth and any of the reasonable approaches to election integrity out of Senate bill seven. So I don’t see that we made a whole lot of progress this session.

What I believe needs to happen is that we go back to the fundamentals. It doesn’t have to be complex. You go back to the precinct voting, we go back to printed and numbered ballots. So for example, if I’m a precinct judge in Blanco County, I have 900 registered voters at the end of voter registration. I know that I’m going to have a certain amount of spoil ballots. I’m going to have a certain amount of absentee ballots that I have to transfer over to those ballots. So I print up, I get printed 1200 ballots and they’re numbered from 1 to 1200. And then at the end of the day, if I had 900 registered voters, 700 of those voters actually showed up to vote either in the early voting, the standard early voting time that’s authorized by the legislature and on voting day.

And I know those, and again, they’re not numbered per the person, they’re just numbered per the ballot. So that set of randomized ballots is handed out to the voters in that precinct. So 700 people voted, I printed out 1200, so I got 500 left. Okay. In that voting process, I had 150 ballots that were spoiled. It had to be recorded or entered on another ballot. So I got 150 spoiled ballots, and I had 100 absentee ballots either from folks with verified medical issues that they couldn’t come, or they were military, or they were certified out of the country.

So out of that, I got 950 ballots. I printed 1200 ballots. So at the end of the day, the precinct judge goes, “Here’s 700 ballots that were voted in early voting election day. Here’s 150 spoiled ballots, and here are 100 transferred absentee ballots. And here are my blank ballots.” So it’s just like balancing a checkbook that we learned in … or our projects from 4H or FFA or home-ec, or wherever you learned that, it’s a balancing process that is a zero sum game. What the access to voting anywhere, what that does is makes a need to be able to print up ballots at wherever you show up, and that’s just an opening for fraudulent activity.

That’s really the conversation that I had with Governor Abbott week before last. In a perfect world, numbered ballots, precinct voting, and hard copy ballots, you can use hand counting would be optimal, but you can’t. There are “dumb scanners”. A scanner that you can register grids, scan them in and actually count the ballots. But the constitutional remedy for a recount is a hard copy ballot recount. Subsequent to that, we had a longer conversation with Governor Abbott that I said, “Sir, I’m a small business owner. And so for my small business, I have to have a health inspection, a fire inspection, a water inspection, a sewage inspection. I have to have the backflow preventer inspection for the ice machine, and a food safety inspection to make sure that all the refrigerators are staying at the right temperature.”

I said, “Now, sir, does it make you kind of cringe when there’s no oversight? There’s no inspections at the state level for our elections? So, what we need, what Texas needs to do as the Lone Star State, and that could be an example to the rest of the country, is stand up an election integrity center of excellence, a laboratory that, okay, you may have a certification from this electronic voting machine company, but until Texas inspects it and validates it and verifies it, it doesn’t matter. You got to pass Texas check.”

We found that one of the most common machines here in Texas is the ES&S machines, the DS200s. In another state, we found embedded into the motherboard of those same machines, a 4G wireless modem chip. So this myth of being air gaped, this myth of the not being connected to the internet is truly a myth. So just like your cell phone, just like your iPad, [NEM 00:16:51] can connect wirelessly over a phone signal, through any kind of open port wireless communication device.

Jonathan Schober:
That’s so true. I don’t think that people realize that it was just six months ago that there was a major video encoder that was used by Department of Defense. And the Chinese had put a spy chip, or at least somebody put a spy chip on this encoder. And it was being used in major infrastructure. So this is not a conspiracy. I mean, we have significant enemies in and outside of our country that certainly have the capabilities to be able to put these types of technologies into election systems. So I guess the bottom line is, keep it simple stupid really does solve a lot of these problems.

Phil Waldron:
Jon, it’s not just the capability. It falls within the Chinese doctrine of unrestricted warfare. My background in the military, I started off flying helicopters and I went to the unconventional warfare, information operations, psychological operations. The Chinese doctrine of unrestricted warfare opens up biological warfare. I happen to have a little bit of a background there. It actually talks about lawfare, using law to propagate their national objectives, economic warfare, they are using all of those right now. Our country is under attack and nobody’s fighting back. And nobody really even realizes that we’re under attack. The majority of the populous don’t realize that.

But that DS200 machine, ES&S machine, the tele chip was a company in Taiwan with a senior communist Chinese party official as a board member. So again, the linkages between the private equity companies, UBS securities and UBS, LLC, they both shared three of the board members were senior communist Chinese party members. UBS Securities was previously called Beijing Capital. They changed it to an innocuous name. So that is a company who owns, who bought Staple Street Capital, who holds the intellectual property of Dominion. So we’ve got to, one of the suggestions that I made to the legislature was that in the RFP that’s submitted by the state of Texas, full financial disclosure, including holding companies, parent companies, and any shareholder, that’s what needs to come with Texas. We need to know who is running our elections and where the information is going, where it’s stored and have 100% certainty that it’s secure. And it’s not.

Jonathan Schober:
We’ve been having a conversation today about election integrity, across the country, as well as right here, specifically in Texas. Our guest today is Colonel Phil Waldron. In conclusion, the question that I have for you is, what is it that keeps you up at night?

Phil Waldron:
That would expand from election integrity. So election integrity is one part of what we recognized early last summer as a Colour Revolution, that was being propagated on our country. So my main concern is that our country’s rapid decline or taking the road down to Marxism, and the election’s one part. I do believe it’s a critical node. So if we don’t correct the elections, election integrity by the midterms, I personally don’t believe we’ll ever have another free and fair election if we don’t correct it by then. So that decline to Marxism is happening and it’s being pushed throughout our government, has been for at least a dozen or so years. I met this active duty Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Matt Lomeyer talked to him and he published this book about the impending dangers of Marxist extremism within our military. He made that information about a week later public and was relieved of command. So his book was an academic-

Jonathan Schober:
Wow, we could have a whole episode on what’s going on with our military. We could have a whole episode on the wokeness of our military. We just saw this recruiting ad, and as a veteran, it’s just embarrassing what we see happening in our military and what it looks like some people are trying to turn our military into.

Phil Waldron:
Yeah, it goes counter to everything I learned in the military, that the military’s purpose is to fight and win America’s wars. The military is a form of, one of the elements of national power and it projects American power, might and will to enforce foreign policy or to support foreign policy, either in a friendly way or a non-friendly way. And to be used as, I guess an experimental sociological ground is something, I think that’s a detriment to the country and it goes to our enemy, China, Iran, and North Korea among others, their goal … and Russia. Their goal is to destroy America to such an extent that America can never be a competitor again. And so economically they’re doing that.

Part of this decline, I see inflation, I see shortages. Not only gas shortages. There’s going be food shortages. There’s going to be other things that are coming down the road that are directly connected with a Marxist communist shift. So that’s really what keeps me up at night, is the decline of our country, moving away from the founders principles. That was a very brilliant document, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, it’s still every bit as applicable today as it was then. And I’m not willing personally to shirk the oath that I took and watch the destruction of our Republic, Texas or the United States.

Jonathan Schober:
Thank you so much. Thank you for what you’re doing. You’re taking a lot of arrows for what you’re doing, and we appreciate it. Thank you for your service and thank you for what you’re doing even now. Well, if you’ve enjoyed this episode and you have some suggestions for other guests or other topics, you can text me directly at (512) 729-5712.

 

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