Nearly four years after judges rejected Donald J. Trump and his allies’ outlandish claims about hacked election machines, major machinery companies have debunked conspiracy theories. It’s been a year and a half since we won a $787.5 million settlement from Fox News. .
But Trump’s presidential campaign and its closest allies are touting the theory again, this time as part of a late-election strategy to claim this year’s election was rigged. Trump’s campaign appears to be operating primarily behind the scenes.
This theory is prevalent on social media and widely accepted by activists. They have frequently appeared in a series of lawsuits filed by Republicans in the lead-up to the election, including a judge this month who dismissed safety concerns about voting machines raised in the lawsuit as “purely hypothetical.” This includes a lawsuit from Georgia.
Trump was not named in the lawsuit, nor was the Republican National Committee. But text messages reviewed by the New York Times suggest that the former president’s inner circle was behind it.
The lawsuit was filed by the county Republican Party only after Georgia’s state Republican Party refused, despite requests from “Trump aides/RNC higher-ups,” said Alex B. Kaufman, the state party’s general counsel. he wrote in a letter addressed to another person. Republican officials said last month.
“There was immense pressure from above and below to make this happen, but I said no,” he added in another message.
Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McCoon denied that the Republican National Committee or the Trump campaign had asked the state party to file a lawsuit.
“I never felt pressured by anyone,” he said.
The Trump campaign and Kaufman did not respond to requests for comment.
The voting machine theory was easily debunked and one of the most outlandish claims Trump has discarded in an effort to stay in power after his 2020 loss. The priority was to uphold “sensible” election rules. While the machine is not without potential vulnerabilities, there is no evidence to support the widespread conspiracy theory. Most notably, the machines were programmed to steal votes from Trump.
These claims had legal consequences. State prosecutors have indicted nine Trump supporters in three states on charges related to machine tampering and data breaches in a futile effort to prove the machines were defective. Two machinery companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, have filed defamation lawsuits against the media and the person who repeated the claims.
Dominion said in a statement to the Times: “We are fully prepared to protect our company and our customers from lies and to hold accountable those who spread them.”
However, these incidents have not put an end to misinformation. Trump said the machines would actually speed up the counting of votes, but slow it down.
“We expect to have results about seven days after the election. If you have a paper ballot, you can get it at 10 o’clock,” he recently told supporters in Pennsylvania. In practice, paper ballots are common and are sometimes used as a backup.
Several of Trump’s allies, including Elon Musk and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, have called for a ban on voting machines that have been widely used for decades. Election officials have derided the concept as unrealistic and based on a misunderstanding of how the equipment works.
Grassroots activists have taken up the cause and are pressuring local election officials to review their procedures. This month, several activists showed up at an Atlanta Board of Elections meeting wearing black T-shirts emblazoned with what they claimed was an old voting machine password (“dvscorp08!”) and asked officials for a paper copy. He begged them to switch to emergency ballots.
“What I want is to get rid of machines in elections and have paper ballots counted by hand,” said Trump ally, who has built a network of conspiracy theory activists and sued. Mike Lindell, owner of a pillow company that also receives Defamation by Dominion — said in interview.
Speaking at a Trump rally this summer, Lindell told the audience, “Here in the United States, we have the worst election system in the world.”
The comeback is part of an ongoing effort to lay the groundwork for a recontested election if Trump loses again. This theory is expected to surface in post-election legal challenges and online misinformation campaigns if Trump supporters again try to disrupt the results certification process. Democrats question whether such arguments will succeed.
“Will Trump say after the election that every machine in every county he lost in America was rigged? That’s right,” Marc Elias, a campaign lawyer for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, said in an interview. “Will there be a lawsuit? Yes. Could these claims affect the outcome of the campaign after the election? Zero points, zero, zero percent.”
“Do not read this password”
Brandon Wales, former acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said that despite claims that the machine was hacked, because “the machine is not connected to the internet,” “the machine is probably a That’s the safest part.” ”
But that distrust has spawned a movement to turn back the clock and return to counting paper ballots by hand, a tedious process that election officials say will be error-prone and result in significant delays. claims.
In Georgia, the state election board, which recently gained a right-wing majority, required all clerks to manually count ballots to ensure that the total number of ballots matched the machine counts. passed a law requiring The move was condemned by local election officials and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and blocked by a local judge.
However, such efforts continue even at this later stage. This month, two of the three county election officials in Shenandoah Valley, Waynesboro, Virginia, filed a lawsuit against the state and the county elections office. They vowed not to certify the results unless the ballots could be counted by hand, which they argued would be a violation of their oath.
A third board member, Sharon Van Name, a Democrat who is not involved in the lawsuit, said this seems like a sudden turn of events for a community of about 20,000 people that hasn’t had much recent election turmoil. he said.
“I think it’s all part of an overall Republican push to undermine trust,” she said.
In rural Nevada, Elko County attempted to change its counting procedures at the 11th hour, denying the ballots of the county’s 22,000 registered voters, despite pleas from county clerks and prior guidance from the Secretary of State. I considered counting it.
At a county meeting in early September, one attendee wearing a pro-Trump sweatshirt said the machines were helping “them” steal the election, adding, “They are cheating. I understand,” he added.
The case in DeKalb County, Georgia, alleges that machines operated by Dominion Voting Systems did not have proper encryption. The case was dismissed, but an appeal is underway.
The lawyers involved in this case are well known. Mr. Trump himself has recently been in touch with one of them, Kurt Olsen, who was sanctioned by both a federal and state judge for falsely claiming the election in Arizona.
William Olson, the lawyer who filed the court brief in the DeKalb case, was also implicated in false machine claims when he tried to get the Justice Department to intervene on Trump’s behalf after the last presidential election.
The lawsuit was filed against Raffensperger, who has become a thorn in Trump’s side since refusing to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia. There is. The group’s claims are based in part on software obtained through a post-election data breach and an episode that led to criminal charges against local officials and Sidney Powell, one of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers.
And it was in the DeKalb lawsuit that old passwords released by activists at a recent Georgia Board of Elections meeting surfaced.
“Please don’t read this password,” one activist, Richard Schroeder, said during the meeting, placing his hand over the symbol on his T-shirt. “This is the password used on Dominion machines across the United States.”
Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, said activists misunderstood the system. Even if the password is real, new passwords are created regularly, he said, adding, “They might as well have ‘admin’ written on their shirts.”
