President Donald Trump and some of his top allies have claimed that Dominion Voting Systems software unfairly erased as many as millions of Trump’s votes throughout the recent presidential election cycle. There is no evidence supporting this claim that Trump votes were deleted, and the Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that the alleged mass vote deletion did not happen. Nevertheless, during a segment this week on Fox & Friends, the Trump-allied law professor Jonathan Turley incorrectly claimed that “thousands of votes… were given to Biden that belonged to Trump” because of “glitches” in Michigan. Co-host Steve Doocy cut in to correct Turley, noting that no incorrect changes to vote tallies have actually been tied to inherent issues in Dominion software.
Doocy said, in part, as follows:
‘I looked into it. With that Dominion software, five counties in Michigan and Georgia had problems, and the Dominion software was used in two of the counties and in every instance largely it was human error, a problem, but the software did not affect the vote counts.’
Doocy seems to have been referencing a recent report from The New York Times about the usage of Dominion software in election results processing around the country. As that report outlined, in five counties spread across Michigan and Georgia where issues occurred, Dominion software was only used in two of the counties. In one Michigan county, the issue was that workers hadn’t properly programmed the software’s reporting mechanism, an error which did not affect the vote tallies themselves. In a Georgia county, a software issue delayed the reporting of results, but again — the software did not affect the vote tallies themselves.
These tallies are routinely checked and re-checked in audits across the country. For example, a recent hand count audit in Maricopa County, Arizona, did not uncover a single discrepancy. In the hand count audit, local workers re-counted batches of ballots by hand to search for any potential issues with the tallies. The idea that Republicans are merely pushing some kind of valiant election protection initiative whose supposed aims aren’t already totally accounted for is just false. The protections are there. Republican claims otherwise are just make-believe.
