President Trump on Thursday unveiled new unfounded claims about Dominion voting systems, creating software that local governments across the country use to help run their elections, promoting the conspiracy theory that Dominion ” Software bugs have changed the turnout in Michigan and Georgia over the past week.
The Dominion software was used in only two of the five counties in Michigan and Georgia, and each incident provided a detailed explanation of what happened. In all cases, the software did not affect the number of votes cast.
According to the Michigan State Department, county officials and election security experts, the mistakes made in the two counties in Michigan were due to human error, not software problems. Only one of Michigan counties used Dominion software.
The issues of Georgia’s three counties were further explained. In one county, an obvious problem with the Dominion software delayed officials from reporting the vote count, but did not affect the actual vote count. In two other counties, software from a different company slowed the ability of poll workers to check-in voters.
“Many of the claims about Dominion and questionable voting technology are misinformed and, in many cases, completely flawed,” said Edward Perez, an election technology expert. OSET INSTITUTE, A nonprofit that studies voting fundamentals. “I am not aware of any evidence of certain features or flaws in the Dominion software that would lead to the belief that votes were recorded or miscalculated.”
This week, right-wing voices on the Internet falsely claimed that Dominion was responsible for errors in the vote count, and Mr. Trump shared a Breitbart article on Twitter that linked Michigan issues to various problems in Georgia. Gone.
Many of them have said, contrary to the evidence, that Dominion software was used to convert votes. Some have even suggested that the company is bidding on Clinton, a conspiracy theory shared by Mr. Trump on Twitter. On Wednesday, presidential lawyer Rudolf W. Giuliani said he was in contact with Dominion’s “whistleblowers”, although he did not provide evidence. And on Thursday, Mr. Trump shared new baseless allegations on Twitter that Dominion “erased” and “changed” hundreds of thousands of votes for him.
Dominion, in fact a Canadian company now headquartered in Denver, builds machines for voters to cast their ballots and counting staff for voting staff, as well as software that allows government officials to organize election results. And helps keep.
Georgia spent 10 107 million on the company’s 30,000 machines last year. In some cases, they proved to be a headache in the state’s primary elections in June, although officials attributed the difficulties to a lack of training for election workers.
Dominion did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Antrim County, Miss. According to unofficial results, Biden Jr. defeated Trump by nearly 3,000 votes. But that doesn’t seem right in the Republican stronghold, so election officials re-examined it.
It turned out that they had configured the Dominion ballot scanners and reporting software with some different versions of the ballot, which meant that the votes were counted as correct but misrepresented. State officials said. The exact heights show that Mr. Trump defeated Mr. Biden by nearly 2,500 votes in the county.
Auckland County, Miss. In, election officials also noticed an error after reporting an unofficial count. According to the Michigan State Department, they realized they had mistakenly counted votes from Rochester Hills, Michigan.
The revised tally showed that a current Republican county commissioner retained his seat, not lost it. Oakland County used the software from a company called Hart Interactive, not Dominion’s, although there was nothing wrong with the software.
Both errors, which seemed anti-Republican, fueled conspiracy theories in the Conservative corner of the Internet. He responded to Rochester Hills, Republican clerk, Tina Barton, the city whose votes were counted twice briefly.
“As a Republican, I am concerned that this is being deliberately misused to undermine the electoral process,” he said in a video posted online. “It was a lonely mistake that was quickly corrected.”
Michigan officials added that the errors occurred in the county’s unofficial lengths and that they were assigned another layer of investigation to catch such errors. In this review, two Republicans and two Democrats “canvassers” verify the number of votes in each county, examining poll books, ballot contents and tablet tapes.
In Gwyneth County, Georgia, an obvious problem with Dominion Software delayed the count, according to one. Detailed explanation from county authorities. The software said the software counted the votes correctly, but did not send some lengths to the state’s central database. Gwyneth Paltrow spokesman Joe Sorensen said the county has since been able to report the exact number to the state, but it’s not clear what happened to the software.
In Georgia, Spalding and Morgan counties have had different problems with systems that check voters during voting. The so-called poll pads were not made by Dominion but by a company called Noink, said Harry Hursty, an election security expert at a field in Georgia.
“People are comparing apples to oranges in the name of Dobbins,” said Harsati.
Mr Perez, a researcher in electoral technology, said it was true that he wanted more transparency and accountability from companies that shape technology, but there was no evidence of fraud or widespread mistakes in the 2020 race.
“It is important for citizens and politicians to look at the role of private vendors in the machinery of democracy and ask questions.” “Now that doesn’t mean the election has been rigged.”
Nicole Pearlroth contributed to the reporting.
