A voting machine seen during early voting at a polling station in Black Mountain, North Carolina. A Georgia judge dismissed one Republican lawsuit this month, calling the security concerns about voting machines it raised “purely hypothetical.” Photo / Jim Watson, AFP
The former president and his closest allies are returning to debunked claims about hacked machines as they prepare to contest the vote next month.
It has been nearly four years since a parade of judges dismissed wild claims from Donald Trump and his associates about hacked election machines and a year and a half since a leading machine company obtained a US$787.5 million ($1.3 billion) settlement from Fox News over the debunked conspiracy theories.
But Trump’s presidential campaign and his closest allies are again trotting out the theories as part of a late-campaign strategy to assert that this year’s election is rigged – although this time Trump’s campaign appears to be largely acting behind the scenes.
The theories are rampant on social media and widely embraced by activists. They have frequently shown up in the blitz of lawsuits that Republicans have filed in the run-up to the election, including a Georgia lawsuit that a judge dismissed this month, calling the security concerns about voting machines raised in the suit “purely hypothetical”.
Trump’s name was not on the suit, nor was the Republican National Committee’s. But text messages reviewed by The New York Times suggest that the former President’s top aides were behind it.
The lawsuit was filed by a county Republican Party only after the state Republican Party in Georgia refused, despite requests from “Trump inner circle/high up in RNC,” Alex B. Kaufman, the state party’s general counsel, wrote in a text to another Republican official last month.
“We had immense pressure from above and below to bring this, and said absolutely not,” he added in another message.
Josh McKoon, chair of the Georgia Republican Party, denied that the Republican National Committee or the Trump team had asked the state party to file the lawsuit.
“I, at no time, was under any pressure from anyone,” he said.
The Trump campaign and Kaufman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Theories about voting machines were some of the most far-fetched and easily debunked of the claims that Trump tossed out in his attempt to hold on to power after his defeat in 2020. Kaufman, in his texts, said the state party’s priority was “protecting sensible” election rules. While the machines are not without potential vulnerabilities, there has been no evidence to support the conspiracy theories that have proliferated – the most prominent being that the machines are programmed to flip votes away from Trump.
Those claims have brought legal consequences. State prosecutors have charged nine Trump allies in three states with crimes related to tampering with the machines and to data breaches in futile efforts to prove they were faulty. Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, two machine companies, filed defamation lawsuits against news media companies and figures that repeated the claims.
“We remain fully prepared to defend our company and our customers against lies, and to seek accountability from those who spread them,” Dominion said in a statement to the Times.
Yet, those cases have not ended the misinformation. Trump has said machines slow down the vote count, when they actually speed it up.
“We expect to have the results like seven days after the election. If you had paper ballots, you get them at 10 o’clock,” he recently told supporters in Pennsylvania. Paper ballots are actually common, in some cases as a backup.
Several of his allies – including Elon Musk and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser – have called for voting machines, which have been used widely for decades, to be banned. Election officials deride the notion as impractical and based on a misunderstanding of how the devices work.
Grassroots activists have taken up the cause, pressuring local election officials to revamp their procedures. This month, several activists showed up at an election board meeting in Atlanta wearing black T-shirts emblazoned with what activists claimed was an old voting machine password (“dvscorp08!”) and implored officials to switch to emergency paper ballots.
“My whole thing is to get rid of machines in the election and go to paper ballots, hand counted,” Mike Lindell, the Trump ally and pillow company owner who has built a network of conspiracy-minded activists – and who has been sued for defamation by Dominion – said in an interview.
In remarks at a Trump rally this summer, Lindell told the crowd, “Here in the USA, we have the worst election platforms in the world”.
The resurgence is part of a continuing effort to lay the groundwork for another contested election, if Trump loses again. The theories are expected to surface in postelection legal challenges and online misinformation campaigns if Trump supporters again try to disrupt the process of certifying the results. Democrats are doubtful those claims will succeed.
“Will Trump, in the postelection, say that all the machines in every county that he lost in America were rigged? Absolutely,” Marc Elias, an election lawyer for Vice-President Kamala Harris’ campaign, said in an interview. “Will there be litigation? Yes. Will those claims have any chance at all of affecting the outcome of a postelection contest? Zero point zero, zero, zero percent.”
Brandon Wales, former acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said that “machines are probably the most secure part of the entire system” because, despite the claims that they have been hacked, “they are not connected to the internet”.
Yet, the distrust has spawned a movement to turn back the clock and return to hand-counting paper ballots, a tedious process that election officials say would be riddled with errors and result in long delays.
In Georgia, the State Election Board, which was recently taken over by a right-wing majority, passed a law requiring all clerks to hand-count ballots to verify that the total number of ballots matches the machine count. The move was assailed by local election officials as well as by Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, and it was blocked by a local judge.
But such efforts continue, even at this late stage. This month, in Waynesboro, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, two of the county’s three election board members filed a lawsuit against the state and county elections departments. They vowed not to certify results unless they were able to hand-count ballots, saying it would violate their oaths.
Sharon Van Name, the third board member and a Democrat who did not participate in the suit, said it seemed to come out of the blue for a community of around 20,000 people that has not seen a lot of turmoil over elections recently.
“I think the whole thing is part of the general GOP push to undermine confidence,” she said.
In rural Nevada, Elko County tried an eleventh-hour change to its tabulation procedures and explored hand-counting ballots for the 22,000 registered voters there, despite pleas from the county clerk and previous guidance from the secretary of state.
At a county meeting in early September, one attendee, wearing a pro-Trump sweatshirt, said machines were helping “them” cheat in elections, adding, “We know they’re cheating”.
The case in Georgia, in DeKalb County, alleges that machines operated by Dominion Voting Systems did not have the proper encryption. It was tossed out but is being appealed.
The lawyers involved in the lawsuit are familiar figures. Trump himself has recently been in contact with one of them, Kurt Olsen, who has been sanctioned in Arizona by both a federal judge and a state judge for making false election claims.
William Olson, a lawyer who filed an amicus brief in the DeKalb suit, also played a role in false machine claims after the last presidential election, when he tried to get the Justice Department to intervene on Trump’s behalf.
The lawsuit was filed against Raffensperger, who has been a thorn in Trump’s side since he refused to reverse Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia. The claims it advances draw in part on software obtained through the data breaches after that election, episodes that resulted in criminal charges against local officials and one of Trump’s former lawyers, Sidney Powell.
And it was the DeKalb lawsuit that surfaced the old password publicised by the activists at the recent Georgia State Election Board meeting.
“Don’t read this password,” one of the activists, Richard Schroeder, said during the meeting, as he placed a hand over the symbols written on his T-shirt. “This is the password that’s all over the United States for the Dominion machines.”
Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said the activists misunderstood the systems. Even if the password was real, new passwords are created regularly, he said, adding, “Their shirts might as well have said ‘admin’”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Danny Hakim, Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon
Photographs by: Michelle Gustafson
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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