No, Dominion’s voting machines did not cause widespread voting problems.
President Trump on Thursday published new and unfounded allegations about Dominion’s voting systems, which manufacture software that local governments use across the country to help conduct their elections, fueling a conspiracy theory that Dominion has “software glitches.” It changed the vote counts in Michigan and Georgia last week.
Dominion’s program was used in only two of the five problematic counties in Michigan and Georgia, and in each case there was a detailed explanation of what had happened. In all cases, the program did not affect the number of votes.
In the two Michigan districts that had errors, the errors were due to human errors, not software problems, according to Michigan State Department, county officials and election security experts. Only one of two Michigan counties has used the Dominion Program.
Cases in three Georgia counties had other explanations. In one county, an apparent problem with Dominion’s program delayed reporting those in charge of the vote count, but did not affect the actual vote count. In two other provinces, a separate company program slowed the ability of polling officers to register voters.
“Many of the allegations being confirmed about Dominion and questionable voting technology are misleading information at best, and in many cases, outright misinformation,” said Edward Perez, an election technology expert at the center. OSET Institute, A non-profit organization that studies voting infrastructure. “I am not aware of any evidence of certain things or defects in the Dominion program that would lead one to believe that the votes were incorrectly recorded or counted.”
Right-wing online voices this week incorrectly claimed that Dominion was responsible for errors in the vote count, and Mr.Trump shared an article on the Breitbart website on Twitter that incorrectly linked the Michigan issues to the separation of problems in Georgia.
Several of these people said, against the evidence, that Dominion was used to switch voices. Some people even indicated that the company was bidding on the Clintons, a conspiracy theory Mr Trump shared on Twitter. On Wednesday, President Rudolf Giuliani’s attorney said he had been in contact with “whistleblowers” from Dominion, although he had not provided evidence. On Thursday, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter new and unfounded allegations that Dominion had “deleted” and “changed” hundreds of thousands of votes in his favor.
Dominion, a Canadian company originally headquartered now in Denver, manufactures machines for voters to cast their ballots and poll workers to count, as well as programs that help government officials organize and track election results.
Georgia spent $ 107 million on 30,000 of the company’s machines last year. In some cases, it proved to be a nuisance in the state primaries in June, although officials largely attributed the problems to a lack of training for election personnel.
Dominion did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In Antrim County, Michigan, unofficial results initially showed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat Mr. Trump by nearly 3,000 votes. But that doesn’t look true in the Republican stronghold, so election workers checked again.
It turns out that they configured Dominion poll scanners and reporting software with slightly different versions of the ballot, which means that the votes were counted correctly but were reported incorrectly, State officials said. Correct stats showed Mr. Trump beat Biden by nearly 2,500 votes in the county.
In Oakland County, Michigan, election officials also discovered a bug after they first reported the unofficial charges. They realized they missed the Rochester Hills, Michigan, vote twice, according to the Michigan State Department.
The revised numbers showed that the incumbent Republican county commissioner had kept his seat and not lost it. Oakland County used a program from a company called Hart InterCivic, not Dominion, although the program was not wrong.
Both errors, which appeared to conflict with the Republicans, spurred conspiracy theories in the conservative corners of the Internet. That elicited a response from Tina Barton, a Republican writer in Rochester Hills, a city that was briefly counted twice.
“As a Republican, I am disturbed that this was misrepresented intentionally to undermine the election process,” she said in a video posted on the Internet. “This was a single bug that was quickly corrected.”
Michigan officials added that the errors came in unofficial county numbers and that they were fixed before another layer of checks intended to spot such errors. In this review, two Republicans and two Democratic “observers” validate the count of votes in each county, checking ballot books, ballot summaries, and tabular tapes.
In Gwinnett County, Georgia, the vote count was delayed due to an apparent issue with Dominion’s program, according to Detailed explanation from county officials. The county said the program counted the votes correctly, but it would not send some numbers to the state’s central database. Gwinnett County spokesman Joe Sorenson said the county has since been able to inform the state of the exact totals, but it remains unclear what happened with the program.
Spalding and Morgan counties in Georgia had separate problems with systems that check voters at the polls. These so-called polling platforms were made by a company called KnowInk, not Dominion, said Harry Horsty, an election security expert on the ground in Georgia.
“People compare apples to oranges with a name Dominion,” said Mr. Horste.
Mr. Perez, an election technology researcher, said it was fair to demand more transparency and accountability from the companies that manufacture the technology that supports the elections, but there is no evidence of any fraud or widespread errors in the 2020 race.
He said, “It is reasonable for citizens and politicians to view the role of private sellers in the machinery of democracy and to pose questions.” “Now this does not mean that the elections are rigged.”
Nicole Burleroth contributed to the report.
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