The defamation lawsuit against Fox News, by voting equipment supplier Dominion Voting, is all the rage right now, as a point of discussion regarding the spread of disinformation and misinformation about voting. Election Law experts, and journalists who cover these issues, are pointing to this case as landmark. They all say Dominion has an excellent case.
To be clear, the Dominion case is not about online voting. It involves software used by scanning machines, that scan and tally paper ballots. It is the tallying software that the liars claimed was rigged in the 2020 election.
But, as I have long tried to make clear, the defamation of online voting is just an extension of the poisoning of public trust in all forms of electronic voting. So, for a company the size of Dominion to be fighting back -against those who lie and claim their tallying software is rigged – they are also fighting back against claims made against all forms of electronic voting, especially online voting.
They are claims that have been made for decades. But this time, Dominion and Smartmatic are fighting back.
Finally. I mean, it’s about time.
Smartmatic, in particular, is a large and trusted supplier of voting infrastructure. They are also one of many who offer online voting services both in the private AND public sector. Opponents of online voting have been lying about the security of Smartmatic products for years.
But the people Smartmatic would have had to sue ten years ago would have been different people than those today. Because the people defaming online voting for the last twenty years weren’t from Fox News. They were major election “integrity” groups like “Verified Voting Foundation” (I call them the Vilify Voting Foundation), and “trusted technical experts” such as VVF’s chief antagonist David Jefferson, or the out of touch author of “Broken Ballots” Barbara Simons. All of these people made it their life’s mission to vilify electronic voting as unsafe. Whenever the media wanted to cover the subject of online voting, journalists would inevitably turn to these people as the experts to trust. And every one of them said the public shouldn’t trust ANY form of voting that included the use of “riggable” software. And they have always strongly maintained that ALL computer software is riggable and unsafe to be used in voting.
Now, Lo and Behold, there are those pushing the lie that ballot scanning software has been rigged, and that the 2020 election results can’t be trusted.
Now, the media and election administrators are shocked, shocked that people would believe this lie.
There is no daylight between the lies about rigged scanning software by Dominion and Smartmatic in 2020, and the lies that have been spread about how easily such software CAN be rigged, over the last twenty years.
If they truly want to know who is responsible for this total breakdown of public trust in voting, they need to look at more than Fox News. But they certainly don’t need to look far.
I have been saying for over a decade, that virtually everyone who participates in election administration culture in America has bought into this concept that the hand counting of paper ballots is the ONLY truly trusted way to tally votes. This almost universal belief has defined election admin culture for a generation.
Sadly, I don’t expect this culture to change, despite the desparate situation our democracy finds itself in. Secretaries of State, County Clerks, Poll Workers, Journalists, and even companies like Smartmatic may look for who to blame.
The last place they will likely look is in the mirror.
More’s the pity.