Matthew DePerno is the Republican nominee for attorney general in Michigan. He won that position for one reason and one reason only: He was a fervent promoter of election conspiracy theories in the state, one who filed a doomed lawsuit claiming, without evidence, that Joe Biden's victory in the state wasn't valid because something something fraudulent vote counting.
It looks like he's also a soon-to-be-indicted criminal, because Reuters now reports conclusive evidence that DePerno's "Antrim County Election Lawsuit and Investigation Team" obtained unauthorized physical access to a Richfield county vote tabulation machine during their "investigation." That's a crime. It's a very significant crime, and Reuters reports that they were able to match a serial number shown in a photograph of a tabulation "summary tape" submitted by DePerno for his lawsuit to a Richfield county machine that had previously been reported as part of an election security breach in that county.
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"There's no doubt in my mind" that the photograph shows DePerno's team "had physical hands-on access" to the breached machine, an election security specialist told Reuters. We don't know how that happened, but we do now know that the Richfield county breach, conclusively, is tied to DePerno's failed "investigation."
As we have had to explain repeatedly of late despite it seldom coming up in conversation at any point prior to Republicanism's descent into widespread criminality, gaining unauthorized access to tightly restricted election machines is a big deal with big consequences. In order to prevent tampering, every machine used during the voting process is secured with strict chain-of-custody protocols to ensure nobody other than the machine's authorized users can so much as touch it. Any machine that falls out of that chain of custody must be taken out of service, because election officials can't prove it wasn't tampered with.
That may mean rebuilding the machine from scratch, or it may mean destroying it and buying a new one. Vote tabulation equipment isn't cheap, and a breach in the security chain can therefore be a budget-breaking screw-up on the part of whatever election official allowed it to happen. That's why gaining unauthorized access to those machines is a felony: Merely touching them effectively destroys them, even if no tampering was done.
For the rest of us, explanations of election security protocols have long been useful mostly as tools for irritating those around you at parties. That was until the recent election cycle, when Republican officials who believed and promoted the Republican Party's thoroughly seditious election conspiracies started willingly breaching that security themselves in nationwide attempts to prove that people who were not them had, uh, been doing it first.
So now we've got a whole slew of Republican candidates and elected officials being investigated or indicted for giving unauthorized Republican partisans physical access to election machines so that data can be copied or the machines can be disassembled to look for God knows what. Chips with bamboo in them, probably.
It was all based on a hoax promoted by a malignant narcissist who is simply mentally incapable of acknowledging that every individual bad thing that might happen to him is not a worldwide conspiracy to make him look bad, but it quickly descended into a Republican Party crime spree. Well, when your party immunizes a sitting president twice for gobsmacking corruption that would normally have resulted in removing the crook from office, it does tend to send a message to the party's ground troops. Crime is good now, so long as you do it for Republicanism.
The obvious question now is what level of legal trouble Michigan Republican attorney general nominee Matthew DePerno now finds himself in, and the answer is: a lot. Reuters reports that the current Michigan attorney general's office, headed by Democrat Dana Nessel, has been investigating the Richfield data breach at the request of the Michigan secretary of state. Now that Reuters has conclusive evidence tying DePerno's "investigation" of voting machines in Antrim County to a previously unexplained security breach in Richfield County, the attorney general's investigation now lands squarely on the Republican nominee to take over that investigation.
It seems likely that a special prosecutor will be appointed, rather than having the incumbent Michigan attorney general head an investigation into her own possibly felonious challenger. It also seems likely that this is going to happen very quickly, because we can be certain that if Matthew DePerno actually wins in November, he'll announce that the investigation into the Richfield County security breach is over and everybody around him is innocent.
What, you think a man willing to commit or assist in felony election systems tampering is going to not commit the further crime of quashing the criminal probe into his own acts if he's in a position to do so? There's a guy sitting in the attorney general's office in Texas who will prove you wrong any day of the week.
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