Leaked voting machine BIOS passwords may implicate Q-friendly county clerk

Enlarge / Sensitive BIOS passwords leaked by QAnon figure Ron Watkins have been linked to a Colorado County office run by a clerk who promotes "Stop the Steal" messaging. (credit: JJ Gouin / Getty Images)

Last week, Ron Watkins-conspiracy theorist, QAnon enthusiast, and former 8chan site admin-released photocopies of an installation manual for Dominion voting machines. The copied pages gave basic instructions for configuring BIOS passwords (necessary to change some system settings) and iDRAC, a standard network remote control tool (which the manual explicitly requires the administrator to disable).

The next day, Watkins released a video purporting to be from a "whistleblower" exposing Dominion's "most egregious lie"-that Dominion can remotely administer the machines, he said. He also released several screenshots of Election Management Systems hardware his "whistleblower" had access to.

Although none of Watkins' screenshots-which will be immediately familiar to anyone who's ever administered enterprise-grade hardware-are as damning to the voting machines as Watkins would clearly like, they did end up causing problems for one of Watkins' fellow travelers: county clerk Tina Peters of Mesa County, Colorado, whose office manages the machines in question.

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