Attacks against Dominion Voting continue despite high-profile lawsuits

With a series of billion-dollar lawsuits, including a $1.6 billion case against Fox News set for trial this month, Dominion Voting Systems has sent a stark warning to anyone spreading falsehoods that the company’s technology has contributed to fraud in the 2020 election: Be careful with your words or you may pay the price.

Not everyone takes the warning to heart.

“Dominion, why don’t you show us what’s in your machines?” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive and prominent election denier, screamed during a live stream last month. He added that the company, which has filed a $1.3 billion defamation suit against him, was involved in “the biggest cover-up for the biggest crime in United States history — probably in world history.”

Claims that election software companies like Dominion helped orchestrate widespread fraud in the 2020 election have been widely debunked in the years since former President Donald J. Trump and his allies first penetrated the theories. But far-right Americans on social media and influencers in the news media have continued in recent weeks and months to make baseless claims about the company and its electronic voting machines, pressuring government officials to scrap contracts with Dominion, sometimes successfully.

The ongoing attacks illustrate how Mr Trump’s claims of voter fraud have taken root in the shared imagination of his supporters. And they reflect the formidable challenge that Dominion, and any other group that captures the attention of conspiracy theorists, faces in putting false claims to rest.

The attacks on Dominion have not reached the fever pitch of late 2020, when the company was cast as a central villain in an elaborate and fictional voter fraud story. In that story, the company traded votes between candidates, injected fake ballots, or left glaring security vulnerabilities on voting machines.

Dominion says all those claims were made with no evidence to back them up.

“Nearly two years after the 2020 election, credible evidence has never been presented to any court or authority that voting machines did anything other than count votes accurately and reliably in all states,” Dominion said in an emailed statement.

On Friday, the Delaware judge overseeing the Fox defamation case ruled that it was “CRYSTAL CLEAR” that Fox News and Fox Business had made false claims about the company — a major setback for the network.

Many prominent influencers have avoided the company since Dominion began suing prominent conspiracy theorists in 2021. Fox News fired Lou Dobbs that year — just days after being sued by Smartmatic, another election software company — saying the network was focusing on “new formats. Mr. Dobbs is also a defendant in Dominion’s case against Fox, due in court on April 17.

Yet there have been nearly nine million mentions of Dominion on social media websites, broadcast and traditional media since Dominion filed its first lawsuit in January 2021, including nearly a million citing “fraud” or related conspiracy theories, according to Zignal Labs, a media monitoring company. Some of the most shared posts came from Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tweeted last month that the lawsuits were politically motivated, and Kari Lake, the former Republican nominee for governor of Arizona who has advanced theories of voter fraud. since her defeat last year.

Mr. Lindell remains one of the loudest voices pushing unsubstantiated claims against Dominion and electronic voting machines, posting hundreds of videos on Frank Speech, his news site, and attacking the company with stories of voter fraud.

Last month, Mr. Lindell celebrated on his livestream after Shasta County, a conservative stronghold in Northern California, voted to use paper ballots after its contract with Dominion was terminated. A provincial supervisor had flown to Mr Lindell before the vote to discuss how to conduct elections without voting machines, Mr Lindell said. The regulator eventually voted to switch to paper ballots.

In an interview this week with The New York Times, Mr. Lindell to have spent millions on campaigns to end electoral fraud, with a focus on eliminating electronic voting systems and replacing them with paper ballots and manual counting.

“I will never back down, never, never, never,” he said in the interview. He added that Dominion’s lawsuit against him, which is continuing after the United States Supreme Court declined to consider his appeal, was “frivolous” and that the company was “guilty.”

“They can’t deny it, no one can deny it,” Mr Lindell said.

Joe Oltmann, the host of “Conservative Daily Podcast” and a promoter of voter fraud conspiracy theories, hosted an episode titled “Dominion Is FINISHED” in late March, claiming that there was a “device used in Dominion machines to actually transfer ballots”, which only provide speculative support.

“This changes everything,” Mr. Oltmann said.

Dominion sent Mr. Oltmann a letter in 2020 demanding that he retain documents related to his claims about the company, which is often the first step in a libel lawsuit.

In a livestream last month on Rumble, the streaming platform popular among right-wing influencers, Tina Peters, a former Colorado district attorney who was indicted on 10 counts related to allegations she tampered with Dominion’s election equipment, devoted more than an hour to to several claims for election fraud, many involving Dominion. The discussion included a suggestion that because Dominion’s boxes were stamped “Made in China”, the election system was vulnerable to manipulation by the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Oltmann and Ms. Peters did not respond to requests for comment.

The Fox lawsuit has also added fuel to the conspiracy theory fire.

Far-right news sites have largely ignored the finding that Fox News privately hosts derogatory claims of voter fraud, even as they gave them plenty of airtime. Instead, the Gateway Pundit, a far-right site known for spreading theories of voter fraud, focused on separate documents showing that Dominion executives “knew their voting systems had major security vulnerabilities,” the site wrote.

The documents showed the frenzied private messages between Dominion employees as they were troubleshooting issues, with one employee remarking, “our products are worthless.” In an email, a Dominion spokeswoman noted that the comment was about a splash screen that hid an error message.

In February, Mr. Trump shared the Gateway Pundit story on Truth Social, his right-wing social network, sparking a new wave of attacks against the company.

“We will not be silent,” said a far-right influencer whose posts are sometimes shared by Mr. Trump on Truth Social. “Dominion is the enemy!”