Iran Press/ Iran News: The misinformation war by right-wing Republican leaders and media outlets including Fox News has thrust America’s voting machine suppliers into a national struggle to protect their businesses.
The misinformation war by right-wing Republican leaders and media outlets including Fox News has thrust America’s voting machine suppliers into a national struggle to protect their businesses.
Industry leaders Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software are waging a political and public relations ground war to beat back threats to their state and local government contracts, rooted in bogus conspiracy theories about vote manipulation.
The companies are nonetheless taking the election-denial movement seriously as the belief in voter-fraud fictions continues to gain mainstream acceptance on the right. About two-thirds of US Republicans say they believe the election was stolen from Trump, Reuters polls show.
Whenever companies "face a tsunami of suspicion and distrust of their products, that poses an existential threat to their livelihood and survival,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a US nonprofit that promotes the use of secure voting technology.
Dominion faces the most intense opposition because the company has featured prominently in right-wing theories alleging its equipment flipped votes from Trump to Biden in 2020. In all, Dominion has faced campaigns in at least a dozen jurisdictions across eight states by officials or activists seeking to replace Dominion voting systems based on unproven fraud allegations, according to a Reuters review of government records and interviews with local officials.
Among the risks: a statewide voting-systems contract Dominion holds in Louisiana, which Trump won handily. Officials, there have indefinitely delayed awarding a new contract worth about $100 million amid pressure from pro-Trump, anti-machine activists.
In Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections, five counties facing voting-machine protests — in the states of Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Minnesota — plan to institute hand-counting of ballots as a check on their machine counts by Dominion or ES&S tabulating equipment. Among them is Nye County, Nevada, where commissioners voted unanimously to recommend dumping Dominion touch-screen voting machines after a pressure campaign by nationally prominent election deniers.
Voting vendors also face well-funded national campaigns targeting their machines. Such protests could gain steam nationally depending on the election outcome. Election deniers who support ending the use of electronic voting systems are campaigning in battleground states such as Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania for governor or secretary of state — the top voting administrator.
Attacks on voting machines exploded after the 2020 election, led by Trump himself. He tweeted on Nov. 12, days after the election, that Dominion “deleted” votes or “switched” them to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. As Trump’s misinformation went viral, Denver-based Dominion faced an onslaught of Republican voter rage.
Since then, false claims about Dominion and other voting-technology companies have caught fire, spread by local and national politicians, aspiring pro-Trump congressional candidates, Republican activists, and right-wing media. Some have alleged without evidence that Dominion machines were rigged in plots involving Chinese communists, Venezuelan socialists, or Antifa, the loosely organized US anti-fascist movement.
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