Trump Tweets Conspiracy Theory About Deleted Votes

Two voting experts told us they knew of no evidence for the claims about vote stealing.

“I am aware of no credible evidence of any kind that voting technology from Dominion Voting Systems is responsible for tabulation errors or mischief on the scale the president alleged,” Edward Perez, global director of technology development & open standards for the OSET Institute, told us in a telephone interview. OSET is a nonprofit that focuses on voting technology research and development.

Is such grand theft possible? “It’s highly unlikely for malfeasance on such a grand scale to go undetected,” Perez said. “In the United States voting technology does not exist in a vacuum. There are documentation and transparency procedures that include a wide array of cross checks and safeguards. It borders on the absurd to believe that almost like wildfire that many votes could be deleted or flipped.”

Gregory Miller, the institute’s co-founder and COO, said even if such a big heist had been pulled off, there’s no way we would already know it.

“The only way you would know it is with a complete audit of the votes and a forensic analysis of the equipment nationwide,” Miller said. “There is no way it could have been determined in the time that has elapsed since the election. It’s just not possible.”

Perez points out that the genesis of the vote stealing/Dominion Voting Systems saga seems to lie in a number of cases last week that involved small-scale human error and were corrected long before they became part of the official count.

“These wild claims of massive technological mischief are stemming from a dubious connecting the dots exercise that started with simple cases of human error in Michigan and Georgia,” he said.

We wrote about one of the cases in Shiawassee County, Michigan. Here’s how we summed it up: “A data input error that briefly showed an unusually large uptick in votes for Joe Biden in Michigan prompted suspicions online and an unfounded claim of voter fraud. The error came down to a typo by a county’s reporting that was quickly corrected.”

But the five cases in the two states, some involving Dominion Voting equipment, triggered conspiracy theories on right-wing social media accounts. The New York Times investigated and found that there was no nefarious intent in any of them, and that at any rate, all were promptly detected and corrected.

And one other thing is clear: There is no credible evidence of switched and/or deleted votes, and federal, state and local officials have said so.