Print this page
Published in News

Trump claims that election machines were borked

by on13 November 2020


More people must have voted for me

Former reality TV star US president Donald Trump seems to be having major issues with the fact that the country voted him out of the house.

Trump claims that the machines which recorded the voting had been tampered with to steal the election. Like Trump’s claims about Huawei, he presented no evidence, but he is refusing to concede the election.

Trump spent Thursday night on Twitter, and claimed without basis that “the horrible, inaccurate and anything but secure” vote machines used across the United States had allowed “thousands" of votes to be stolen and handed to his opponent, Joe Biden.

He claimed that Dominion Voting Systems, the software provider that local governments around the country use to run elections, “DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE”.

His all caps rant was based on a conspiracy theory that Dominion “software glitches” changed vote tallies in Michigan and Georgia last week.

The Dominion software was used in only two of the five counties that had problems in Michigan and Georgia, and in every instance, there was a detailed explanation for what had happened. In all the cases, software did not affect the vote counts.

In the two Michigan counties that had mistakes, the inaccuracies were because of human errors, not software problems, according to the Michigan Department of State, county officials and election-security experts. Only one of the two Michigan counties used Dominion software.

Problems in three Georgia counties had other explanations. In one county, an apparent problem with Dominion software delayed officials’ reporting of the vote tallies but did not affect the actual vote count. In two other counties, a separate company’s software slowed poll workers’ ability to check-in voters.

“Many of the claims being asserted about Dominion and questionable voting technology is misinformation at best and, in many cases, they’re outright disinformation”, said Edward Perez, an election technology expert at the OSET Institute, a nonprofit that studies voting infrastructure. “I’m not aware of any evidence of specific things or defects in Dominion software that would lead one to believe that votes had been recorded or counted incorrectly.”

Historically Trump might have had a point, as there had been several stories written over the years about the vulnerability voting machines had to hackers. However, a lot of these appear to have been fixed.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Chris Krebs said the 3 November vote had been “the most secure in history", and that Americans should trust the election result. Nor did the government agency find any evidence of votes being lost, deleted, or altered.

 

Last modified on 13 November 2020
Rate this item
(4 votes)