Dominion Voting Systems, a company that makes voting machines, has faced belligerent attacks from Donald Trump and his allies, who have alleged that the company worked on some kind of nefarious scheme to essentially rig the election for Biden. There is no meaningful evidence for any of these claims, let alone the more outrageous ones, like the idea that Dominion is a front for Communist interests and the claim, which the president himself shared, that the company “deleted” millions of Trump votes across the country. In a new op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Dominion CEO John Poulos systematically takes apart some of the nonsense that his company has faced.
Poulos explains, in part, as follows:
‘The allegations against Dominion are bizarre, but I’ll set the record straight. Dominion is an American company, now headquartered in Denver. Dominion is not and has never been a front for communists. It has no ties to Hugo Chávez, the late dictator of Venezuela. It has never been involved in Venezuelan elections. None of Dominion’s systems use the Smartmatic software that has come under attack, as any state certification lab could verify. There is no secret “vote flipping” algorithm.’
“REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN.” @ChanelRion @OANN
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2020
There’s been no real sign of a slowdown in the Trump team’s unhinged, vitriolic attacks against Dominion, which seem based in some kind of desperate, frantic eagerness for a scapegoat for Trump’s recent resounding and definitive loss. As Poulos notes, “Baseless and ludicrous smears” have been “presented without evidence and amplified across social media.” These “attacks,” Poulos adds, “undermine the tens of thousands of state and local officials who run our elections.” U.S. elections simply are not run by some backroom schemers — they’re run under rigorous supervision from individuals of both major parties, and systems like the ones that Dominion distribute are certified on both the federal and state level.
The outright lies from Trump and his allies about Dominion and the electoral process can have serious consequences. As Poulos notes, “wild allegations of recent weeks have fueled the harassment of election officials and Dominion employees across the country—including stalking and death threats.” Going forward, the distrust of the electoral process that Trump is frantically sowing among his followers could also pose serious problems.
