The Red Mirage - The same methods used to swindle vote totals in 2020 are in use again

[Anti Federalist]

This is how it's done.

And you'll shut up and like it.



Early election night results might not indicate final tallies (and why that's OK)

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ear...ies/story?id=92762835&cid=social_twitter_abcn

A "red mirage," or an artificial GOP vote lead, will likely reoccur Tuesday.

ByIsabella Murray

November 7, 2022

As early Election Day results come in on Tuesday, it will likely appear that a Republican candidates vying for any number of the federal or statewide races appear to be leading their Democratic opponents, even by large margins.

Their leads will dwindle, or crumble completely, after perceived "dumps" of votes are recorded by state election officials who count mail-in and absentee ballots in the days -- or even weeks -- following Election Day.

This phenomenon was popularized as the "red mirage" or the "blue shift" after the 2020 presidential election, when former President Donald Trump took a deceptive lead in several competitive states on Election Day due to delays in counting of Democrats' mail-in ballots -- their preferred method of voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic -- only to eventually dissipate when the entire reserve of votes was totaled.

The illusion was a principal component of Trump and his allies' false claims that the contest was fraudulent upon his ultimate loss to Joe Biden.

Why and where might we see a 'red mirage'

This is likely to occur again on Tuesday, according to election experts, because of the same cocktail of factors that led to a "red mirage" in 2020: Democrats have continued to use mail-in voting more than their Republican counterparts, while some of the same decisive states will take a longer time to tally their mail-in, absentee and provisional ballots due to state laws that prohibit their count until late stages in the electoral process.

And it's likely to occur in some of the same states where the phenomenon presented itself last cycle -- in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin -- battleground states that also happen to feature some of the most hotly-contested races of the election season.
MORE: Midterm elections early voting updates: Turnout surpasses prior years

"All signs point to the fact that it's going to be extreme in certain critical states again, and Pennsylvania top among them," Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Brennan Center's Elections & Government Program said, noting that certain candidates may claim false victories or legally attempt to stop or slow vote counts.

"I am very worried. I'm very worried that election denial forces are much more organized than they were in 2020."

Every state canvasses vote counts at a different pace, and one of the foremost causes of delayed completion of the unofficial count in 2020 is that some states didn't even allow the processing of mail-in ballots until polls are closed on Election Day.

That was the case in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and despite asks from bipartisan election officials for their legislatures to change state laws to make tallying votes easier and earlier, ballots still cannot be counted until after 8 or 9 p.m. on Nov. 8. In Pennsylvania, counties will participate in "marathon counting," meaning that they can start processing votes at 7 a.m. on Election Day, but counting still must begin at 8 p.m.

In Michigan, officials can process ballots just two days ahead of Election Day. And while canvassing laws have remained the same in some states, expanded mail-in voting access stands permanent, even after serious threats of the pandemic.

Counting of mail-in ballots

"A lot of states are expanding the rights to vote by mail, but they have not expanded as much the ability of states to do the canvassing and especially in pre-canvassing of mail-in votes," said David Alexander Bateman, an associate professor of government at Cornell University.

They're different from places like Florida, where election officials not only process mail-in ballots before Election Day, but release counts within 30 minutes of poll closings.

In places like Arizona, which also begins processing absentee votes before Election Day, the sheer number of people who use mail-in ballots make processing time lag. More than 3 million Arizonans have requested mail-in ballots this cycle, according to the U.S. Elections Project. According to the Arizona Secretary of State's office, there are over 4.1 million registered voters.

Experts expect election denialism, legal challenges

"In some states the numbers are so huge, like in Arizona, in terms of the number of people that are voting by mail. And though they have a head start, it's not enough of one, so the counting is going to take a little bit longer," Norden said.

Late mail-in ballots received in 2020 skewed more Republican than earlier ballots in Arizona, so a "blue mirage" might lead votes to toggle in 2022 -- initially skewing Democratic, before adding Election Day and late arriving mail voters which could swing the vote toward the GOP.

The shift in vote totals doesn't always favor Democrats. About 90 minutes after polls closed in Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio, FiveThirtyEight reports, Biden looked competitive in these three states -- he even led in North Carolina and Ohio. But that changed as officials reported more results, and Trump wound up carrying all three states.

"I think it's important to make clear like nobody's winning or losing on Election Day. The votes are all in, for the most part, it's just a question of what states chose to count and when," Norden said.

Bateman agreed: "Just as football games do not end at the first quarter, you play out the game and it ends when the game ends. And whoever's in the lead at the end of the game wins. It's the same with elections. An election does not end, and it has ever ended on Election Day."

Nearly 21 million voters have returned mail ballots so far this election, according to the University of Florida's Michael McDonald, an expert on American elections who is tracking early voting numbers, while over 57 million have requested mail-in ballots.

(There's the steal. 36 million uncounted ballots floating around. - AF)

For the second straight election cycle, Democrats have been casting their ballots through mail-in voting methods much more than Republicans -- a trend that presented itself in 2020 when COVID presented a clear danger to voting in-person at crowded polls.

According to the U.S. Elections Project's analysis of states that report party registration data, Democrats requested more than 6 million more mail-in ballots this election cycle than Republicans.

Before the last election, there was little partisan slant between who voted by mail, with Republicans -- who tend to be older voters -- usually preferring the method.

"A lot more people are using mail-in ballots, and those people are now, for the first time, those using them are disproportionately Democrats," Bateman said.

After the polls closed on Election Night in 2020 and then-President Trump began claiming that mail-in voting was "rife with fraud," as his early lead diminished, Republicans have even less incentivized to cast mail-in ballots, the election experts said.

In Pennsylvania, where Trump preemptively claimed victory in 2020 after declaring that the counting of ballots in Philadelphia and other places across the state be stopped, about 1.4 million voters have requested mail-in ballots this year, a number lower than the 2.8 million requested in the last election, but much higher than years prior.

Norden said he's "absolutely" expecting election denialism similar to claims circulated in 2020 to happen in states like Pennsylvania again, and perhaps more filing of legal action aimed at stopping the processing of mail-in and early votes. In 2020, Trump and his allies filed lawsuits to halt the counting of ballots in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In Nevada, home to another Senate race that could determine the balance of power in Congress, the current GOP nominee, Adam Laxalt, filed numerous lawsuits after the presidential election in 2020, attempting to stop the counting of ballots in Clark County.

Laxalt told radio host Wayne Allyn Root in the days after officially announcing his candidacy that he planned to construct a team to "come up with a full plan, do our best to try to secure this election, get as many observers as we can, and file lawsuits early, if there are lawsuits we can file to try to tighten up the election."

"Frankly, there's been signals from some of the election deniers already that they're going to claim that the count should stop on election night," Norden said.

Al Schmidt, the sole Republican on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections who had seen the canvassing of ballots in 2020 and later testified before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, wrote an op-ed on Friday in the Pennsylvania Capitol Star.

Schmidt warned Pennsylvania to again expect some shifting of the unofficial vote tallies, which isn't indicative of anything nefarious.

"Most of the in-person results from polling places should be posted before midnight, but because county officials can't begin processing mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, a significant portion of the vote cannot be published until later at night or the following days," he wrote.

"And because more Democrats than Republicans use mail-in ballots (another consequence of partisan misinformation), most of the votes published later will go toward candidates of one party. This "blue shift" or "red mirage" has occurred election after election and is not indicative of anything untoward or suspicious," he said.

 

[Occam's Banana]

 

[Occam's Banana]

They don't actually care about election "denialism", of course - they only care about which side is doing it.

Whenever they piss and moan about "denialism", notice how it's always and only Trump and/or the Republicans who are castigated for it, never the Democrats - despite the fact that the Democrats have been doing it for far longer (see Clinton 2016 and Gore 2000, for example).

Also notice how there were never any significant difficulties in getting votes counted in a timely fashion until after 2016 and the advent of widespread mail-in balloting.

They couldn't be doing a better job of maximizing skepticism of and doubt about election results if they were actively trying to do so.

They deserve every single bit of the "denialism" they are fostering.

And I'm totally okay with that.

AFAIC, the more mass democracy at scale is exposed for the farce that it is (and has always been), the better.

 

[Anti Federalist]

Ya sure but everyone knows most of the ballots come in starting at 2am the next morning and continue coming in for the next 3-10 days

///

 

[Anti Federalist]

They don't actually care about election "denialism", of course - they only care about which side is doing it.

Whenever they piss and moan about "denialism", notice how it's always and only Trump and/or the Republicans who are castigated for it, never the Democrats - despite the fact that the Democrats have been doing it for far longer (see Clinton 2016 and Gore 2000, for example).

Amazing how that works...I gotta find that monologue of Carlson's about Soviet "democracy" and western democracy.

 

[Snowball]

Mitchell Henderson with Jeff Rense:

Democrats will steal the election again.

https://www.beyond-the-fringe.com/showthread.php?tid=5982&pid=674681#pid674681

 

[Anti Federalist]

Now you know where those 20,000 Fetterman ballots came from, that will show up at 3 AM tomorrow morning.


Pennsylvania Voters Line Up to Cast New Ballots as GOP Loses Lawsuit to Block Voters From Fixing Mail-In Ballots with Incorrect Dates

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/20...k-voters-fixing-mail-ballots-incorrect-dates/

By Cristina Laila Published November 7, 2022 at 8:29pm

Pennsylvania voters are lining up to cast new ballots after GOP efforts to block voters from fixing errors on their mail-in ballots failed.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week invalidated thousands of ballots because of incorrect or missing dates.

Thousands of Pennsylvania voters were notified of the errors and given a chance to fix their ballots.

The line at City Hall in Philadelphia ‘snaked outside the building,’ according to the Washington Post.

The Washington Post reported:

Six days after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court invalidated thousands of mail-in ballots in response to a Republican lawsuit, citizens in Philadelphia and other parts of this battleground state scrambled to cast replacements so their votes will be counted on Election Day.

Kirby Smith said after he and his wife were told that their mail ballots would not count, because they were missing dates, they stood in line for two hours at Philadelphia City Hall to cast replacement ballots, missing much of the workday.

“Oh I’m going to vote. It’s not a question,” said Smith, a 59-year-old Democrat who said he viewed the court decision as part of an attempt to block people from voting. “I’m going to fight back.”

Multiple judges have ruled over the past two years that mail ballots returned on time by eligible Pennsylvania voters should be counted even if they lack a date on the outer envelope. Republicans sued in October to reverse that policy, arguing that it violated state law. Last Tuesday, they won a favorable ruling from the state Supreme Court, which directed counties not to count ballots with missing or inaccurate dates.

That decision triggered a sprawling volunteer-run effort to make sure voters who had already returned their ballots knew that their votes would not count if they didn’t take action.

Nowhere has that effort been more intense than in Philadelphia. On Saturday, city officials published the names of more than 2,000 voters who had returned defective ballots and urged them to come to City Hall to cast a new ballot in the few days remaining before Election Day. Community activists and volunteers for the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party began calling, texting and knocking on people’s doors to get the word out.

On Monday, the line to cast a replacement vote at City Hall snaked outside and into the building’s courtyard as volunteers supplied snacks and bottled water, according to voters and activists.

GOP efforts to stop voters from being able to fix their ballots have failed so far.

The Monroe County Republican Party sued to block elections officials from notifying voters whose mail-in ballots included errors to help them fix their ballots before Election Day.

A Pennsylvania judge on Monday blocked the GOP effort to stop elections officials from sorting through the mail-in ballots and helping voters fix their ballots.

“Given that our Supreme Court’s policy has been to enfranchise the voter when interpreting ambiguous statutes and considering the Commonwealth Court’s recent decision on this very subject, I find that MCRC has not shown a strong likelihood of success at this very early stage of litigation,” wrote Monroe County Court of Common Pleas Judge Arthur L. Zulick, according to Fox News.

The judge said issuing an injunction one day before Election Day would cause harm.

“I do not find that MCRC has a clear right to relief in view of the recent Commonwealth Court decision, and I find that at this point after 150 to 175 voters have been advised that their ballot has been canceled and that they have an opportunity to file a correct one, it would adversely affect the public interest to grant the injunction,” the judge continued.

Meanwhile the Fetterman campaign is suing the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office to allow misdated and undated ballots to count.

 

[sparebulb]

Pretty funny, there are no allegations of ballot-stuffing in Crimea, Lugansk or Donetsk.

Yet they are held as examples of fraudulent elections and are not recognized.

Meanwhile, our government will continue to provide the resources and knowhow to rain death upon those people because they threaten "democracy".

It is beyond time to recognize our elections for exactly what they are.

 

[AngryCanadian]

It appears it is likely they are trying to "fortified" the election in some areas.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

This is how it's done.

And you'll shut up and like it.
...
Their leads will dwindle, or crumble completely, after perceived "dumps" of votes are recorded by state election officials who count mail-in and absentee ballots in the days -- or even weeks -- following Election Day.
...

And miraculously, those late ballots will be 90-100% Democrat.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

Now you know where those 20,000 Fetterman ballots came from, that will show up at 3 AM tomorrow morning.


Pennsylvania Voters Line Up to Cast New Ballots as GOP Loses Lawsuit to Block Voters From Fixing Mail-In Ballots with Incorrect Dates

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/20...k-voters-fixing-mail-ballots-incorrect-dates/

By Cristina Laila Published November 7, 2022 at 8:29pm

Pennsylvania voters are lining up to cast new ballots after GOP efforts to block voters from fixing errors on their mail-in ballots failed.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week invalidated thousands of ballots because of incorrect or missing dates.

Thousands of Pennsylvania voters were notified of the errors and given a chance to fix their ballots.

The line at City Hall in Philadelphia ‘snaked outside the building,’ according to the Washington Post.

The Washington Post reported:

Six days after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court invalidated thousands of mail-in ballots in response to a Republican lawsuit, citizens in Philadelphia and other parts of this battleground state scrambled to cast replacements so their votes will be counted on Election Day.

Kirby Smith said after he and his wife were told that their mail ballots would not count, because they were missing dates, they stood in line for two hours at Philadelphia City Hall to cast replacement ballots, missing much of the workday.

“Oh I’m going to vote. It’s not a question,” said Smith, a 59-year-old Democrat who said he viewed the court decision as part of an attempt to block people from voting. “I’m going to fight back.”

Multiple judges have ruled over the past two years that mail ballots returned on time by eligible Pennsylvania voters should be counted even if they lack a date on the outer envelope. Republicans sued in October to reverse that policy, arguing that it violated state law. Last Tuesday, they won a favorable ruling from the state Supreme Court, which directed counties not to count ballots with missing or inaccurate dates.

That decision triggered a sprawling volunteer-run effort to make sure voters who had already returned their ballots knew that their votes would not count if they didn’t take action.

Nowhere has that effort been more intense than in Philadelphia. On Saturday, city officials published the names of more than 2,000 voters who had returned defective ballots and urged them to come to City Hall to cast a new ballot in the few days remaining before Election Day. Community activists and volunteers for the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party began calling, texting and knocking on people’s doors to get the word out.

On Monday, the line to cast a replacement vote at City Hall snaked outside and into the building’s courtyard as volunteers supplied snacks and bottled water, according to voters and activists.

GOP efforts to stop voters from being able to fix their ballots have failed so far.

The Monroe County Republican Party sued to block elections officials from notifying voters whose mail-in ballots included errors to help them fix their ballots before Election Day.

A Pennsylvania judge on Monday blocked the GOP effort to stop elections officials from sorting through the mail-in ballots and helping voters fix their ballots.

“Given that our Supreme Court’s policy has been to enfranchise the voter when interpreting ambiguous statutes and considering the Commonwealth Court’s recent decision on this very subject, I find that MCRC has not shown a strong likelihood of success at this very early stage of litigation,” wrote Monroe County Court of Common Pleas Judge Arthur L. Zulick, according to Fox News.

The judge said issuing an injunction one day before Election Day would cause harm.

“I do not find that MCRC has a clear right to relief in view of the recent Commonwealth Court decision, and I find that at this point after 150 to 175 voters have been advised that their ballot has been canceled and that they have an opportunity to file a correct one, it would adversely affect the public interest to grant the injunction,” the judge continued.

Meanwhile the Fetterman campaign is suing the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office to allow misdated and undated ballots to count.

Internationally, mail-in ballots are notorious for being prone to fraud and corruption. So many opportunities arise for manipulation.

In the US, according to Democrats, it is the only fair way to vote. Mail-in ballots is Democracy. Any contradiction of that (or analysis or facts) is the destruction of Democracy.

Anyone who takes Democrat and leftist voting propaganda seriously is either a partisan who think it gives them an advantage (and opportunity to cheat), or a damned fool.

 

[devil21]

Remember, the USPS has already developed and patented digital blockchain-based voting (presumably to be smartphone based, no more in-person and paper voting) and is just waiting for the right "crisis" to offer it. Same ol' problem-reaction-solution playbook as always.

https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/585723-usps-secretly-tested-mobile-voting-system-report/

 

[Brian4Liberty]

Saw some MSNBC today. Non-stop talking about how counting votes may take weeks, especially in swing states. Also how the vote may change dramatically after the first numbers come in. The amount of effort being put into this pre-vote propaganda should be a huge red flag.

 

[acptulsa]

 

[acptulsa]

There's a new twist, too. Republicans like to vote in person? Then have technical difficulties.

 

[Madison320]

Saw some MSNBC today. Non-stop talking about how counting votes may take weeks, especially in swing states. Also how the vote may change dramatically after the first numbers come in. The amount of effort being put into this pre-vote propaganda should be a huge red flag.

So everyone is worried about voter fraud. I get that. Mail in ballots are stupid for example. But I defend the right of states to do stupid things.

The worst response is to try to "remedy" the situation at the federal level. That's a disaster waiting to happen. Right now most of you would agree since biden is president but that wasn't the case back when trump was in charge. Most of y'all wanted the Feds to "fix it".

 

[Occam's Banana]

Saw some MSNBC today. Non-stop talking about how counting votes may take weeks, especially in swing states.

Gee,I wonder what it is about the votes in "swing" (or "battleground") states that makes them so much more difficult to count, compared to the votes in "safe" states.

Very strange.

 

[Anti Federalist]

Very strange.

Yuve Yuve Yuve Yu...
[MENTION=10850]phill4paul[/MENTION]

 

[Anti Federalist]

Pipe down all you commienazi, right wing, racist, sexist, ableist, haters.

There's nothing wrong with anything, all is well, your complaints are nothing but Donald Trump fever dreams.


Special Report-Voting-system firms battle right-wing rage against the machines

https://news.yahoo.com/special-repo...xgQtJq9gHEYJzYSDk409s55UTJ2RDqKhGFkH2iv_uYpvE

Sun, November 6, 2022 at 1:37 PM·13 min read

By Helen Coster

(Reuters) - Donald Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods have thrust America’s voting machine suppliers into a national struggle to protect their businesses.

Industry leaders Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software are waging a political and public relations ground war to beat back threats to their state and local government contracts, rooted in bogus conspiracy theories about vote manipulation. Dominion has also turned to the courts, filing eight defamation lawsuits against Trump allies and media outlets including Fox News.

The efforts to fight misinformation have so far blocked any significant loss of business, in part because many counties and states are locked into long-term contracts for voting systems. But the companies are nonetheless taking the election-denial movement seriously as the belief in voter-fraud fictions continues to gain mainstream acceptance on the right. About two-thirds of U.S. Republicans say they believe the election was stolen from Trump, Reuters polls show.

Whenever companies "face a tsunami of suspicion and distrust of their products, that poses an existential threat to their livelihood and survival,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a U.S. nonprofit that promotes the use of secure voting technology.

Dominion faces the most intense opposition because the company has featured prominently in right-wing theories alleging its equipment flipped votes from Trump to Biden in 2020. In all, Dominion has faced campaigns in at least a dozen jurisdictions across eight states by officials or activists seeking to replace Dominion voting systems based on unproven fraud allegations, according to a Reuters review of government records and interviews with local officials.

Among the risks: a statewide voting-systems contract Dominion holds in Louisiana, which Trump won handily. Officials there have indefinitely delayed awarding a new contract worth about $100 million amid pressure from pro-Trump, anti-machine activists.

In Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections, five counties facing voting-machine protests — in the states of Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Minnesota — plan to institute hand-counting of ballots as a check on their machine counts by Dominion or ES&S tabulating equipment. Among them is Nye County, Nevada, where commissioners voted unanimously to recommend dumping Dominion touch-screen voting machines after a pressure campaign by nationally prominent election deniers.

Voting vendors also face including well-funded national campaigns targeting their machines. Such protests could gain steam nationally depending on the election outcome. Election deniers who support ending the use of electronic voting systems are campaigning in battleground states such as Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania for governor or secretary of state — the top voting administrator.

Dominion declined to comment on its financial performance since the 2020 election and did not answer detailed questions about its campaign to battle misinformation. The company told Reuters that it has been “active” in “refuting the harmful lies spread about us.” Stolen-election activists, the company said, have “damaged our company, harmed elections officials, and diminished the credibility of U.S. elections.”

ES&S also declined to provide financial specifics but said it has not lost customers because of the voting-machine protests. “Jurisdictions continue to need to seek trustworthy support of their elections,” the company said in a statement.

Both companies managed to grow their revenue in 2021, after the contested 2020 election, according to data provided by PrivCo, which tracks private company financial information in a proprietary database.

The assault on voting machines is at the center of a broader offensive on the U.S. election system by a loose network of right-wing activists. Across the country, election officials have received hundreds of threats or menacing messages that cite debunked conspiracies involving the machines. And pro-Trump officials and activists, on the hunt for fraud evidence, have been accused of gaining or trying to gain unauthorized access to voting equipment in at least 18 security breaches since the 2020 election, Reuters has previously reported.

Debunking the torrent of misinformation is costly, forcing voting-machine companies to expand investments in litigation and public relations, according to more than two dozen interviews with election officials, voting-system vendors and their representatives.

Dominion has vocally rebutted voting-machine conspiracy theories in public statements and in its defamation lawsuits. But it has kept a lower profile in the local political fights over its contracts. The company said it prefers to provide information and expertise to local officials who are dealing directly with voting-machine protesters.

ES&S executives travel multiple times a month to states like Kentucky, Wyoming and Idaho, where they participate in equipment demonstrations for the public, according to the company. They confront questions such as whether the machines are connected to the Internet (they aren’t) and whether the company has foreign owners (it doesn’t). The executives include Chris Wlaschin, the company’s senior vice president and chief of security.

ES&S also says it helps public information officers field questions from voters and the media even in jurisdictions where it has no business — such as Antrim County, Michigan, where a quickly corrected error in the initial reporting of 2020 results from Dominion machines was seized on by conspiracy theorists to baselessly allege widespread fraud in the state.

“When we are able to sit at that table and respond to questions, it shows that we are not hiding,” Wlaschin said.

CHINA, VENEZUELA AND ANTIFA

Right-wing activists’ nonsensical claims about systemic vote-rigging have overshadowed a more useful and long-running debate about legitimate issues with U.S. voting systems, according to four election technology experts interviewed by Reuters. Experts have long scrutinized Dominion, ES&S and other voting technology firms over issues including security, usability and interoperability, accessibility for people with disabilities, and a lack of transparency around pricing and contracts.

The systems are “far from perfect,” said Lindeman, of Verified Voting, but the torrent of pro-Trump vote-manipulation claims “make no sense whatsoever.”

Attacks on voting machines exploded after the 2020 election, led by Trump himself. He tweeted on Nov. 12, days after the election, that Dominion “deleted” votes or “switched” them to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. As Trump’s misinformation went viral, Denver-based Dominion faced an onslaught of Republican voter rage.

Since then, false claims about Dominion and other voting-technology companies have caught fire, spread by local and national politicians, aspiring pro-Trump congressional candidates, Republican activists and right-wing media. Some have alleged without evidence that Dominion machines were rigged in plots involving Chinese communists, Venezuelan socialists or Antifa, the loosely organized U.S. anti-fascist movement.

Dominion is fighting back in court. Since the 2020 election, it has filed eight defamation lawsuits against Trump allies and conservative media outlets. None has yet been resolved. The company has sued Fox News for $1.6 billion in Delaware Superior Court, alleging that Fox defamed the firm by amplifying false claims about its technology in an effort to boost ratings. In a statement to Reuters, Fox called the damages claims "outrageous" and “nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs.” A trial is set for April 2023.

To fight local political battles, Dominion arms state and county election officials with data and other information to counter conspiracy theorists. Kay Stimson, Dominion’s vice president of government affairs, often calls in to local meetings when voting machine issues arise, to keep abreast of the accusations or to answer questions from officials. In Nevada, Dominion employs a high-profile consultant, former Republican Nevada governor Robert List, who appears at county meetings as the face of the company – someone who can sympathize with Trump supporters but deflect blame for his loss away from Dominion.

At an April board of commissioners meeting in Elko County, for example, List told residents that he shares their “rural values” and, as a Trump supporter himself, was disappointed in the outcome of the election. “But I know it wasn’t the fault of the machines,” he said, before debunking some common claims by election conspiracy theorists.

$100 MILLION ON THE LINE

Some of the highest-profile attacks on voting machines have originated with MyPillow chief executive and Trump ally Mike Lindell. In June, at a Louisiana Voting System Commission meeting, he told state officials that America will be lost “if we keep even one machine in this country going forward.”

The commission was created by law in 2021 amid widespread claims of voter-fraud and machine-rigging in the 2020 election. The law also banned a type of voting machine that does not create an auditable paper trail, according to a September report on the effort from the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana (PAR), a nonprofit public policy organization.

Lindell said in an interview that his goal in Louisiana and nationally is to force the removal of all voting and voting-counting machines and return to counting paper ballots by hand. Election officials and experts overwhelmingly reject that idea, saying the laborious process would make elections more vulnerable to fraud and error, not less. Many voting security experts recommend a middle-ground approach that already is used in the majority of U.S. jurisdictions: hand-marked ballots, completed in private by voters and counted by machines, which create a paper trail for audits or recounts.

Among those calling for Louisiana to ditch Dominion machines is the state’s Republican National Committeewoman, Lenar Whitney. At a Republican Party meeting last year, she described Dominion as committing “illegal and treasonous acts” in the 2020 election. Whitney did not respond to a request for comment.

In the spring of 2021, Dominion launched a public relations campaign in Louisiana, including ads on the radio and a conservative political website, to fend off opposition to its bid for a new state contract, worth about $100 million. Its executives – along with those from other vendors – appeared at the June Voting System Commission meeting where Lindell gave his presentation attacking the machines. The executives provided technical answers to address common fears of machine skeptics — reassuring them that Dominion was U.S.-owned, and that its machines could not be remotely accessed or rigged through components imported from China.

Authorities in the heavily Republican state acknowledge that their aging Dominion machines, most of them bought in 2005, are outdated. The machines Louisiana uses are no longer manufactured, requiring the state to scavenge for parts when they break and to lease some new Dominion machines as temporary replacements, according to the PAR report. The machines also do not create a paper trail for auditing, which most states now require.

Nonetheless, Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin last year abandoned a state effort to buy new machines amid protests from anti-machine activists and complaints about the fairness of the bidding process.

The Louisiana secretary of state’s office did not make Ardoin available for an interview or answer questions about the delayed contract and the pressure from stolen-election activists. The Republican state election chief, who chairs the Voting System Commission, invoked a “chairman’s privilege” to allow Lindell more time to speak at its June meeting, where the pillow magnate addressed the board for 17 minutes.

A couple of months later, on August 14, Ardoin appeared on an episode of “The Lindell Report,” a show on Lindell’s website. Ardoin said in the 40-minute conversation that he had sent a letter on Aug. 10 ordering local Louisiana election officials to preserve records from the 2020 election as potential fraud evidence. The secretary of state stopped short of alleging widespread voter fraud in 2020 but said a “travesty of manipulation” had “changed the outcome.” He referred to election law changes before the vote, which included expansions of mail voting and ballot drop boxes meant to protect voters amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Asked about voting machines, Ardoin said he had told the chief executives of at least two machine suppliers that they needed to be more “transparent” about the internal workings of the equipment. Otherwise, he recalled telling them, “You’re going to go out of business and our Republic is going to go to hell in a handbasket.”

HAND-COUNTING IN NEVADA

Dominion’s business is also precarious in Stark County, Ohio. The local Board of Elections voted in December 2020 to replace aging Dominion machines with more than 1,400 new ones at a cost of $6.5 million. After Trump supporters protested, citing false voter-fraud claims, the county’s all-Republican Board of Commissioners voted in March of 2021 to withhold funding for the machines, arguing the county could save money by using other voting-equipment vendors.

The county’s Board of Elections sued the commissioners in April last year to try to force them to buy the machines in time for primary elections. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled in May 2021 that the elections board has authority to select voting technology, and that the county must go ahead with the purchase of Dominion machines. The county complied with the ruling.

Members of the elections board and the county commission did not respond to requests for comment.

In Nevada, a critical election battleground, seven county commissions have considered changing their election systems, by switching voting-equipment vendors or getting rid of the machines altogether. Five of the counties have not moved forward on the proposals, but two have started making changes.

In December 2021, officials in Nevada’s rural Lander County voted to switch from Dominion to ES&S – a vendor used by just one other Nevada county. A Lander County elections technology official told an October board of commissioners meeting that replacing Dominion machines was a “positive change to help regain trust in the system.” County officials approved spending more than $223,000 on new ES&S equipment and an additional $69,000 for equipment installation, training and maintenance.

In Nye County, where Trump won 69% of votes in 2020, commissioners voted 5-0 in March to request that the county clerk ditch Dominion touch-screen voting machines and require voters to submit paper ballots.

The county plans to continue using Dominion vote-counting machines, but also to separately hand-count the ballots to confirm the result. Newly elected County Clerk Mark Kampf in September called the continued use of Dominion tabulators a “stopgap measure” as the county researches whether it can exclusively hand-count in the future.

Commissioners were persuaded after a presentation led by Jim Marchant, a Republican candidate for Nevada Secretary of State who falsely claimed voting machines were rigged against Trump in 2020. Marchant is running in a close race and could become the state’s top election official.

“Why is it even a possibility we would even use any of these electronic voting machines at all?” Marchant asked in a March 3 email to Nye’s commission chair, obtained by Reuters in a public records request.

Marchant did not respond to requests for comment.

The decision by Nye’s commissioners amounted to a recommendation. Only the county clerk could legally implement it. Nye’s longtime Republican clerk, Sandra Merlino, said she took early retirement in August out of frustration with the move to scrap the machines. Her replacement, Kampf, has claimed Trump won the 2020 election. He moved quickly to implement the hand-counting plan.

Kampf did not respond to a request for comment.

Nye’s move to paper ballots and its possible switch to exclusively hand-counting could cost Dominion. The company had been receiving more than $50,000 annually for maintenance and other services, according to Merlino, the former clerk. Dominion machines remain in use in 14 of Nevada’s 17 counties.

Merlino said she was stunned the commissioners voted for junking the machines and returning to old-fashioned hand counts.

“I thought: My commissioners are not going to go for this,” she said. “But they did.”

 

[Brian4Liberty]

There's a new twist, too. Republicans like to vote in person? Then have technical difficulties.

...

As I read this, Juan Williams was on Fox talking about how it is two different elections, where Democrats vote by mail, and Republicans vote in person. So his conclusion is don't trust early results because they are a “mirage”.

Considering he is nothing but a DNC mouthpiece, all of this is well known. Thus problems with in person voting on election day would be more of a “feature” than a bug, in the eyes of the DNC.