How We Know Dominion Voting Machines Didn’t Affect the Election Outcome

I n the face of clear evidence that President Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump and his surrogates have promoted wild and demonstrably false conspiracy theories that voting machines changed the votes needed to deliver Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Last week, President Trump shared a One America News report claiming that Dominion voting systems “DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.” On Thursday, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell said at a press conference that Dominion voting machines “can say that a Biden vote counts as 1.25, and a Trump vote counts as 0.75 and those may be the numbers that were actually used here. It’s not just the swing states that were affected. The algorithm was likely run across the country to affect the entire election.”

One reason why we know with certainty that these claims are false is that the state of Georgia just conducted a hand recount of all the paper ballots in the entire state. That is, with bipartisan observers, human beings looked at each paper ballot and tallied them all up. If there were problems with vote-counting machines, Georgia’s hand recount would have found them.

There was no evidence of Powell’s claim that the machines counted a Biden vote as anything more than one vote and a Trump vote as anything less than one vote. Trump did gain about 1,400 votes during the hand recount because officials missed some votes in their tally on Election Night. But there was no evidence whatsoever of any systemic problem with the vote-counting machines.

The conspiracy theory about Dominion Voting Systems seems to have sprung up because Michigan’s Antrim County, a reliably Republican county in the northern part of the state, initially showed Biden winning the county on Election Night due to the misallocation of some 6,000 votes.

“It was a human error,” Anrtim County clerk Sheryl Guy tells National Review. Guy, a Republican, says the problem stemmed from changing ballots in October to add two candidates running in local races (school board and village trustee). “We re-ordered ballots,” Guy says, but “we didn’t reprogram” the system to appropriately adjust for the changed ballots. The error was quickly caught and corrected because the numbers were so out-of-whack with typical results.

The Michigan secretary of state’s office noted in a memo that the error “would have been identified during the county canvass,” when bipartisan observers “review the printed totals tape from each tabulator.” Hand recounts aren’t necessary to prove that the vote counts were accurate: Every state has its own laws in place to double-check vote counts during its canvassing or auditing process designed to catch errors made on Election Night.

But hand recounts do provide an additional level of transparency and trust that the vote-counting machines got the count right. Just take a look at the transparency of the partial recount going on in Wisconsin right now:

In Wisconsin, some counties use Dominion voting machines while some don’t. If the Trump campaign thought the Dominion voting-machine conspiracies were remotely plausible, wouldn’t they want this level of scrutiny in the counties that used the Dominion machines? One would think so, but in Wisconsin, the Trump campaign only requested hand recounts in the state’s two largest (and two overwhelmingly Democratic) counties — Milwaukee and Dane, neither of which uses Dominion voting machines, according to the office of Wisconsin’s secretary of state. The Trump campaign’s recount strategy in Wisconsin tells you how serious the campaign is about the Dominion voting conspiracy theory.

Of course, Georgia’s statewide hand recount already told us everything we needed to know about the Dominion conspiracy, and it should remove any sliver of doubt that there were significant problems with vote-counting machines in the 2020 election.