November 7, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – In an exclusive bombshell interview with LifeSiteNews, former Michigan state senator and aerospace engineer Patrick Colbeck brought to light a long list of scandalous violations of voting procedure in Detroit, including brazen lies, cheating, and violations of Michigan law.

“Anybody who’s claiming an election victory on the basis of what happened, particularly in the state of Michigan and in the Detroit Absent Voter [AV] counting board, should not be claiming any sort of victory at all,” Colbeck told LifeSite’s Lisa Stover. “Because I’m telling you, the fraud that we witnessed, the interference… are going to knock the socks off of people that may think that this is just a matter of the vote that’s been cast, move on, there’s nothing to see here.”

Colbeck explained that as poll challenger – a role distinct from that of poll watcher – he could “challenge the execution” of the voting process at each of his local precincts, if anything illegal was performed. He likened himself to a kind of “floor general” of poll challengers, responsible for highlighting issues that other poll challengers brought to his attention.

“If you don’t like what you’re seeing or if they say, ‘talk to the hand,’ and ignore you, then you can file a formal complaint, a poll challenge that’s supposed to be entered into the poll book, which is kind of like a journal of the proceedings of the day as to who voted, who didn’t vote, and what issues came up during the day. If you get into lawsuit territory or recounts, that’s part of the public record that will be discussed in the course of that lawsuit,” said Colbeck.

Colbeck noted, “The poll workers themselves are fairly cooperative; they just want to do the right thing. But some of the chief election officials seemed to be intent on interfering with actual oversight activities of our officials, which is blatantly against the law. And that interference did not start on election day, November 3 – it started well before that.”

“The stuff that was really egregious, and frankly a threat to election integrity, wasn’t that exciting. In addition to being a former Michigan state senator I was also an aerospace engineer. I worked doing cabling design for the space station, and I also am a certified Microsoft Small Business Specialist,” said Colbeck.

“So the first thing that I checked out when I got into the AV counting board was the network topology for the computerized tabulators, the electronic poll books, adjudicators, and the election official computers.”

‘Blatant lying’ about internet connection

Colbeck told Stover he found it very concerning that “every single one of these computers [used for the voting process], except for the electronic poll books, connected to the internet.”

“That’s kind of interesting, because that opens up the door to a lot of people tapping into this network,” he explained. “I don’t care if it’s secure, if the communications are encrypted, if they got a VPN network, it doesn’t matter. There are people a lot smarter than I am that know how to break this in a matter of minutes.”

“When I walked in, one of the first things that I did was I walked around to all the computers. With the exception of the electronic poll books, and they all had that icon saying they’re connected to the internet.”

“I asked the head of the election bureau – his name was Daniel Baxter – I go, are any of these computers connected to the internet? And he told me, ‘No they’re not.’”

“I walked through again, and I heard about what happened earlier in the day, I think it was 10 am, a message had popped up on a computer screen that startled one of the poll workers, that said, ‘Your computer is being hacked.’”

“So there’s another election official, the former state representative by the name of David Nathan, and I said, ‘David, are these computers connected to the internet?’” explained Colbeck.

“And he says, ‘No they are not.’ And I go, ‘Well can you verify that for me?”

“And all he had to do was move that little mouse cursor over the land connectivity icon in the bottom right hand corner, and it’ll pop up and say you’re connected to the internet or you’re not.”

“And he said, ‘No, you’re just gonna have to trust me.”

“And I said, ‘Dave, I’m sorry, but maybe somebody lied to you.’ I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. And I’m saying, ‘I’d like to have verification that the computer isn’t connected to the internet.”

“And he said, ‘You’re just gonna have to trust me. And that’s where it was left.”

Commenting on whether there are laws in place prohibiting use of the internet during vote counts, Colbeck said, “There [are] laws against manipulating election results. I don’t care if you do it by throwing in a whole bunch of extra ballots or whether or not you decide to be savvy with SQL databases. Either way it’s the same effect and you’re manipulating election results.”

Blank tally boards

Colbeck then described a conversation he had with another senior election official, Chris Thomas, in which he tried to figure out how Detroit was going to communicate its election results.

“I said, ‘Help me out here, I want to understand, it wasn’t shared with anyone beforehand, how are you going to communicate your tabulated results to the county and other third parties?’”

“In other words, with all the viewers at home, when CNN and Fox News are going off and [people are] watching updates as to what the status of the votes is in Michigan, how’s that being communicated?”

“Because normally the way it’s supposed to happen is that you close out a precinct, they have balanced all their books, they have a little printout of the vote tally for that particular precinct and then they will share that vote tally with the public, with the clerk’s office, with the county, and they’ve got like 5 different copies of it that they send across the board. And that is the official vote.”

“But in Detroit, they never had one of those printouts. They never had a tally.” Colbeck noted that vote tallies were supposed to be posted on red boards on the wall next to green boards containing initial zero tallies for each machine. The observers told him it never happened.

“All the red boards that were supposed to be printing out that stuff here were blank. And yet they kept reporting results. So I was very curious, I was like, how the heck are they doing this?”

“So I went back to Mr. Thomas repeatedly, kind of like the kid in the backseat on the way to Disneyworld, who says, ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’ And for the first couple times he said, ‘No I don’t know yet.’ And finally he said, ‘You know what, I’m not gonna tell you until after things are done tomorrow.’  And mind you, this is my primary duty: to monitor the execution of these processes.”

Colbeck reminded viewers, “There’s an old adage attributed to Josef Stalin: ‘It’s not he who votes that counts, it’s he who counts the votes that counts.’”

He went on to count the ways that the election process in Detroit abused four different key areas of vulnerability for vote tampering.

“I was vice chair of the Michigan Senate elections and government reform committee. And while there I diagrammed out the election processes so I could identify potential failure points, what are the areas we really need to safeguard,” said Colbeck.

“For each one of those control points, I’ve got a whole list of issues that were cited throughout the process that should raise concern about the fairness of this election.”

Dead ‘voters’

Colbeck explained that official records show dead people having voted in this election.

“What we indeed found in this election is that there’s a lot of people that have lived a very healthy life here in Michigan,” he quipped. “So one of our pure Michigan slogans should be that we’ve got one of the largest populations of people over 120 years old in the whole country. Suffice it to say, the secretary of state is culpable in the manipulation of data.”

“To make matters worse, the Secretary of State Benson actually developed a partnership with [left-wing Rock the Vote] to perform data entry of new voters into the qualified voter file. So now a third party, with dubious oversight is actually entering data into our first control point of the election, the qualified voter file.”

Two-for-one cheating

Colbeck went on to describe the second important point to safeguard – the poll book – which is used to verify the identity of anyone who casts a vote in an election. He explained that separate poll books were generated for Michigan voters which allowed them to vote with both an absentee ballot, and in person at the polls.

“That’s exactly what we saw happen in various areas around the state of Michigan. Some people are more important than others apparently because they get two votes, the rest of us only get one.”

Ballot issues

“The third control mechanism is that of the actual ballot. You’ve gotta make sure you’re controlling the origins of these ballots, there’s a lot of issues around ballot harvesting. We’ve got these things called dropboxes where they’re not monitored 24/7 or if they are, nobody’s actually looking at it,” said Colbeck.

“And that opened the door to a lot of people putting prefabricated ballots into the dropbox that are unmonitored and pushed through the system. They’re supposed to be reconciled against the pollbook. The way you validate the identity of the voter is you take information on the absentee ballot such as the ballot number and signature and you verify that against the pollbook.”

Colbeck said that a lot of ballot envelopes that came through even without a signature or a correct ballot number – which means they could have been swapped out for another ballot in the course of processing it – were still processed by the Detroit elections bureau.

“The fourth key control point is the tabulation of the vote itself. Frankly, that’s the most important one.” Colbeck alluded to the Stalin quote that “it’s he who counts the votes that counts,” and to his concern about Detroit’s lack of tabulated results.

Colbeck said coronavirus rules were ‘central’ to obstruction of the voting process.

When asked by LifeSiteNews about stories of people filling out extra ballots, Colback affirmed that “it definitely happened.”

Colbeck also pointed out, “You are by law required to have [a] Republican poll worker and a Democrat poll worker to examine [military] ballots because they’re going to be transferring the vote from the military ballot to a new duplicate ballot that’s compatible with the scanner format.”

“We have many people that were Republicans that submitted their name to be a poll worker in the city of Detroit. They were never contacted or they were rejected from being able to serve.  We only identified three actual Republican poll workers out of at least 136 that should have been serving in that capacity. There were at least 136 slots and all we could identify throughout the night were three.”

How coronavirus rules allowed obstruction of voting process

Colbeck said coronavirus rules were “central” to obstruction of the voting process.

As a matter of fact, prior to the election I had written an editorial in the Detroit News highlighting how COVID was being used as an excuse to subvert election integrity. So we knew this was coming beforehand. Part of it is that absentee ballot application scheme that was launched by the Secretary of State. But it went deeper than that. It got into the 6-foot rule…

By the way, when I came into the polls I made sure we printed out the actual court ruling that actually put an injunction on that rule. So they were not even supposed to be able to quote it. But apparently the memo didn’t get out to most of the poll workers. And some of them were quite combative about maintaining that 6 ft rule. And we do have a right to go off and inspect anything. But as poll challengers we couldn’t touch anything…

So what they were doing was, in many cases, whenever they were processing a ballot or ballot envelope or signature, rather than giving us an opportunity to verify the data on that, because they were 6 feet back, they would immediately flip it over on the side so that you couldn’t read what you needed in order to verify the integrity of the process. There were all kinds of games like that being played by some of the poll workers that were enabled, frankly, by the fact that they pushed us back at 6 feet.

Colbeck described the counting of the military ballots as one of the “more egregious examples” of how coronavirus policy affected the transparency of the vote counting process.

“I got a phone call saying, ‘They’re starting to count the military ballots.’ Keep in mind, the military ballots have been kept up on this stage all night long and there were times when the poll workers were completely idle, but they chose not to count the military ballots during that time frame.”

When they did choose to count the military ballots, it coincided with when the election officials decided they were going to katy bar the door and keep any poll challengers who were outside from coming back in to witness the [counting of] the military ballots. And the rationale that they used was that we were over our limit due to covid. And I can tell you, we’re not over any limit inside there at all. It was used as an excuse to keep poll challengers from witnessing that activity…

As a matter of fact, they even went to the extreme of putting up cardboard over the windows so nobody could look in to see what was going on.

Colbeck pointed out that it is especially important to have a witness in the case of counting military ballots, because there is a different procedure involved, where duplication of ballots is required. “You need a witness because they’re going off and copying from one ballot to another ballot, and if you’ve got a bunch of military people who say they like Trump, and then you got somebody in here that can’t stand Donald Trump filling in the circles, they’re going to be tempted to go off and fill in wrong circles. And COVID[-19] played a role in their ‘justification’ to keep us out of there.”

“As soon as I heard that they were putting the military ballots in, I tried to get down, and I was blocked. That was kind of the crystallizing moment for me. This is the type of stuff that happens in a banana republic, not a constitutional republic,” said Colbeck.

“We have it on good authority that when Democrat poll challengers came in they were specifically instructed to interfere with poll challengers from the Republican party and also my organization, the Election Integrity Fund, which is an organization I help fund to protect us from just such a case of craziness that we’re experiencing right now.”

Referring to the incident with military ballots, Colbeck noted, “That was a deliberate infraction against an Michigan Compiled Laws [MCL] statute to actually interfere with the poll challengers’ duties, and there are actual criminal fines for such action.”

Suspicious incidents

Colbeck shared that he witnessed one Detroit Elections Bureau van “opened up with the ballots,” which were “being unloaded and put into the staging area.”

From a timing perspective it looked very suspicious, for somebody who’s analyzed different ways for people to mess with and steal the election. There was a quiet period of almost four hours prior to the arrival of that truck. There was pretty much no activity, no counting going on on the floor, which also begs the question of where was this 100,000, or 200,000 vote switch between midnight and 5 a.m.? What counts were being relayed?

There’s a key principle in election security that’s called chain of custody. You always want to make sure that you can trace that breadcrumb through. Just like with UPS, where you can track your shipment from point of drop-off to point of delivery. We don’t have a lot of fidelity on that, particularly in the city of Detroit, as to what’s happening.

Colbeck described an incident that raised yet more major questions about pre-election voting procedures in Detroit.

“We’ve got people [who] have been monitoring the Detroit Elections Bureau before Nov. 3, seeing people dropping off boxes of what appeared to be ballots at a side door of the Detroit Elections Bureau.”

Colbeck noted that when they were confronted by someone with a recording device, “all of a sudden they found a very speedy retreat where they pushed the boxes back into their Mercedes car and sped off before anyone could ask any more questions about the origins of those boxes and their intent.”

Colbeck said, “I think it’s a pattern not just of election fraud that happened here in the wake of covid, I think it’s indicative of sedition. I take that word very seriously. I believe that people that have been deliberately messing with the integrity of this election should be tried on sedition charges, not simply election fraud charges.”

Colbeck pointed out that balancing vote tallies happens at the precinct level “everywhere except Wayne County and Detroit, it seems.”

What they’re doing in Detroit is they send out a transport, all those ballots, from point A to point B, who knows what happens in the middle of the transport. Once it gets to the Detroit Elections Bureau for these canvassing operations, that’s when they go off and sort and make sure there’s a number of ballots cast according to the poll book, equal to the number of ballots we have in our container. And when they don’t, even if it’s off only by one, that precinct is not subject to a recount. And if it’s not subject to a recount, if they were executing voter fraud they just got away with it.

Help stop voter fraud: The Trump Campaign has created “Defend Your Ballot” to report election issues. Report fraud here or call 888-630-1776. Project Veritas is also accepting voter fraud tips here. The FBI says to report suspected instances of voter suppression/fraud to your local FBI field office or at tips.fbi.gov. Learn more about observed instances of election fraud in Michigan at LetsFixStuff.org.