In the face of clear evidence that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump and his surrogates have promoted wild and demonstrably false conspiracy theories that voting machines changed the votes needed to deliver Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
Last week, Trump shared a One America News report claiming that Dominion voting systems “DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.”
Twitter immediately disputed the claim.
On Thursday, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell said at a press conference that Dominion voting machines “can say that a Biden vote counts as 1.25, and a Trump vote counts as 0.75 and those may be the numbers that were actually used here. It’s not just the swing states that were affected. The algorithm was likely run across the country to affect the entire election.”
It’s simply lunacy.
One reason why we know with certainty that these claims are false is that the state of Georgia just conducted a hand recount of all the paper ballots in the entire state.
That is, with bipartisan observers, human beings looked at each paper ballot and tallied them all up.
If there were problems with vote-counting machines, Georgia’s hand recount would have found them.
There was no evidence of Powell’s claim that the machines counted a Biden vote as anything more than one vote and a Trump vote as anything less than one vote.
Trump did gain about 1,400 votes during the hand recount because officials in a Republican county missed some votes in their tally on Election Night.
But there was no evidence whatsoever of any systemic problem with the vote-counting machines.
The conspiracy theory about Dominion Voting Systems seems to have sprung up because Michigan’s Antrim County, a reliably Republican county in the northern part of the state, initially showed Biden winning the county on Election Night due to the misallocation of some 6,000 votes.
“It was a human error,” Antim County clerk Sheryl Guy told National Review.
Guy, a Republican, says the problem stemmed from changing ballots in October to add two candidates running in local races (school board and village trustee).
“We re-ordered ballots,” Guy says, but “we didn’t reprogram” the system to appropriately adjust for the changed ballots.
The error was quickly caught and corrected because the numbers were so out-of-whack with typical results.
The Michigan secretary of state’s office noted in a memo that the error “would have been identified during the county canvass,” when bipartisan observers “review the printed totals tape from each tabulator.”
Hand recounts aren’t necessary to prove that the vote counts were accurate: Every state has its own laws in place to double-check vote counts during its canvassing or auditing process designed to catch errors made on Election Night.
But hand recounts do provide an additional level of transparency and trust that the vote-counting machines got the count right.
In Wisconsin, some counties use Dominion voting machines while some don’t.
If the Trump campaign thought the Dominion voting-machine conspiracies were remotely plausible, wouldn’t they want this level of scrutiny in the counties that used the Dominion machines?
One would think so, but in Wisconsin, the Trump campaign only requested hand recounts in the state’s two largest (and two overwhelmingly Democratic) counties — Milwaukee and Dane, neither of which uses Dominion voting machines.
The Trump campaign’s recount strategy in Wisconsin tells you how serious the campaign is about the Dominion voting conspiracy theory.
Of course, Georgia’s statewide hand recount already told us everything we needed to know about the Dominion conspiracy, and it should remove any sliver of doubt that there were significant problems with vote-counting machines in the 2020 election.
“What Trump is doing is spreading the seeds of conspiracy so that in coming years he and his supporters can claim there was massive fraud,” said political analyst Jim Heath. “They will glue it in their heads, despite it being wildly false, so they can mentally justify how Joe Biden defeated Trump and made him a one term loser president.”
A spokesperson of Dominion Voting Systems also addressed the conspiracy theories about the company on Fox News Sunday, saying it was “not physically possible” for its machines to change voter selections.
“This is a nonpartisan American company. It is not physically possible for our machines to switch votes from one candidate to the other,” Michael Steel said on Fox News’ “America’s News HQ.”
“Let’s be very clear, our election system is run by local elected officials and nonpartisan poll watchers. We simply provide a tool to count the ballots and to print and count ballots,” he added. “There is no way such a massive fraud could have taken place and there are no connections between our company and Venezuela, Germany, Barcelona, Kathmandu, whatever the latest conspiracy theory is.”
Attorneys working for the Trump campaign laid baseless claims of voter fraud during a press conference last week that included allegations that Dominion had ties to Venezuela.
Pressed by Fox News’ Eric Shawn as to how he could be sure the voting machines were secure, Steel responded “When a voter votes on a Dominion machine, they fill out their ballot on the touchscreen, they are given a printed copy which they then give to a local election official for safekeeping.”
“If any electronic interference had taken place, the tally reported electronically would not match the printed ballots,” he added. “And in every case where we’ve looked at in Georgia, all across the country, the printed ballots, the gold standard in election security, has matched the electronic tally.”
Christopher Krebs, who Trump fired as top U.S. cybersecurity official last week, has pushed back against the claims, tweeting last week, “On allegations that election systems were manipulated, 59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.’”
Biden defeated Trump 306 electoral votes to 232 in the electoral college, and currently leads in the popular vote by over 5 million votes.