The U.S. Government & The Third-Party Vendor Are One

A lawsuit in Colorado alleges that a private company currently trying to chill free speech in America is actually the government itself.

Earlier this month, a rather extraordinary lawsuit was filed in Colorado on behalf of eight Michigan poll watchers against the most infamous third-party vendor in the world. (For the duration of this article, let’s call that overly litigious entity: Opinion Voting Systems or OVS.) The details contained in that lawsuit are striking for a number of reasons, and not the least of them is the “Lawfare” strategy that OVS employed to silence any criticism of the company. (The entire lawsuit can be found here.) This “lawsuit warfare” campaign was so extensive that it (allegedly) chilled the free speech of regular Americans who volunteered as poll watchers and didn’t make any public statements about the company at all:

As part of this campaign, OVS publicly boasted, with the assistance of
Hamilton Place Strategies, LLC (“HPS”)—OVS’s Public Relations Firm—on its website and in interviews that its lawyers, Clare Locke, LLP (“Clare Locke”) sent letters to over 150 individuals demanding they cease and desist from “taking part in defaming OVS and to preserve all documents and communications that may be relevant to OVS’s [unspecified] pending claims” and threatened ruinous “imminent” litigation—even if the recipients of the letters did not make any public statements about OVS.

These were odd and intimidating letters. They informed people that the letter was “your formal notice to cease and desist taking part in defaming OVS and to preserve all documents and communications” without listing exactly where or how the person had “defamed” OVS in any way.

That’s not all. In these letters, OVS (and its lawyers) demanded that recipients “confirm receipt of this letter and that you intend to adhere to our request to retain documents” without providing any address or contact information to do so. The letters demanded the retraction of statements that were never identified. They demanded the retention of documents that didn’t exist:

Said another way, the Letters were boilerplate directives meant to instill fear
and intimidation. Despite failing to identify the alleged defamation, OVS then illegally demanded these private citizens preserve all communications, emails, texts—private or otherwise—and a host of other materials.

According to the lawyers who filed the suit against OVS, the letters were designed to stop ordinary Americans from talking about election security regardless of the validity of those claims:

For example, Plaintiffs are restricted—according to the Letters—from
speaking about a topic of major public concern: the largest cyber breach in U.S. history. In December 2020, the U.S. government announced it suffered the largest cyber breach in history through the Solar Winds hack. This breach demonstrates how vulnerable electronic voting systems are to hackers because those systems are, directlyor indirectly, connected to the internet. Despite the OVS CEO’s claims that OVS had never used SolarWinds, an archival screenshot of OVS’s website shows a now–erased SolarWinds logo. Based on this evidence, it appears that OVS did use SolarWinds software.

In other words, OVS was (allegedly) trying to suppress the American public from discussing election integrity in general. The “lawfare” letters sent out to these 150 people were merely one part of a much larger campaign to stop anyone from criticizing the results of the 2020 election:

Public debates, audits, and/or investigations of the 2020 General Election are currently being conducted or contemplated by state legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and other states to ascertain the scale of vulnerabilities and whether they were exploited. By widely publicizing its intimidation campaign, OVS and its co-conspirators seek to intimidate and silence not just Plaintiffs and the Class, but also the public at large from exercising their right to speak and to share their own testimonial evidence relevant to proceedings investigating election fraud in the November 2020 election.

Does this sound like the behavior of a third-party vendor to you? Have you ever heard of a private company waging war against the free speech of its customers? Of course not. These things do not happen for obvious reasons. Lest you think that OVS is just a company with suicidal business practices, the lawsuit drops the most important and explosive allegation contained in any lawsuit filed in America:

OVS has not waged its Lawfare campaign as only a corporate citizen,
but also as a state–actor, i.e., the government. OVS is a state–actor because States across the United States have outsourced their constitutional obligation to run elections by deferring to OVS’s professional experience and contracting out the administration, collection, counting, recording, and auditing of ballot results through voting technology, software, and thousands of hours of technical and election services. For example, Georgia paid OVS roughly $90,000,000 for a complete, end–to–end election solution in their Master Solution contract. In the Master Solution, Georgia specifically stated “[t]he unique abilities, knowledge, and skills of [OVS] constitute a material inducement for State entering into this Agreement.” Such reliance and partnership between OVS and States, according to which OVS itself takes the place of the government, makes OVS’s conduct of elections and all its related activities a state-action. The administration, collection, counting, recording, and auditing of ballot results in elections are inherently a traditional, exclusive public function. So not only have these Americans received Letters from a corporate citizen with tens of millions in annual revenue and private equity support, but they have also been threatened by, in effect, the government itself.

Just read those key sentences again:

The supposedly third-party vendor which presents itself as a private company “is a state actor, i.e., the government.”

“These people have been threatened by, in effect, the government itself.”

That’s why a cyber security expert on stage at Mike Lindell's Cyber Symposium said: "The question is: who's running our elections? I think the third-party vendor is running our elections. I think this has been happening for a long time."

That’s because the U.S. Government and the third-party vendor are one and the same. These people have been threatened by, in effect, the government itself.