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Dominion Voting Systems, which makes software that local governments across the country use to help organize their elections, is now at the center of unsubstantiated claims that “software glitches” led to vote counting errors 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 each case there was a detailed explanation of what had happened. In all cases, the software did not affect the vote count.
In the two buggy Michigan counties, the inaccuracies were due to human error, 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.
The problems in three Georgia counties had other explanations. In one county, an apparent problem with the Dominion software delayed the officials’ reporting of the vote counts, but did not affect the actual vote count. In two other counties, software from a separate company reduced the ability of poll workers to register voters.
“Many of the claims being made about Dominion and questionable voting technology are misinformation at best, and in many cases total disinformation,” said Edward Perez, an expert in electoral technology at the OSET Institute, a non-profit organization that studies voting infrastructure. . “I am not aware of any evidence of specific things or defects in Dominion software that could lead one to believe that votes have been incorrectly recorded or counted.”
Right-wing voices on the internet this week have incorrectly claimed Dominion was responsible for vote counting errors, and President Trump shared a Breitbart article on Twitter that incorrectly linked Michigan’s problems with separate problems in Georgia.
Many of those people have said, contrary to the evidence, that Dominion software was used to exchange votes. Some people even suggested that the company was following orders from the Clintons, a conspiracy theory that President Trump shared on Twitter. On Wednesday, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s attorney, said he was in contact with “whistleblowers” for Dominion, although he did not provide evidence.
Dominion, originally a Canadian company now effectively headquartered in Denver, makes machines for voters to cast and poll workers to count, as well as software that helps government officials organize and track the results of the elections.
Georgia spent $ 107 million on 30,000 of the company’s machines last year. In some cases, they turned out to be headaches in the state’s primary elections in June, although officials largely attributed the problems to a lack of training for poll workers.
Dominion did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In Antrim County, Michigan, unofficial results initially showed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. defeating Trump by approximately 3,000 votes. But that didn’t seem right in the Republican stronghold, so the poll workers double-checked.
It turned out that they had configured Dominion’s ballot scanners and reporting software with slightly different versions of the ballot, which meant that votes were counted correctly but reported incorrectly, state officials said. The correct counts showed that Trump beat Biden by roughly 2,500 votes in the county.
In Oakland County, Michigan, elections officials also spotted an error after first reporting the unofficial counts. They realized they had mistakenly counted the votes for the city of Rochester Hills, Michigan, twice, according to the Michigan Department of State.
The reviewed counts showed that a sitting Republican county commissioner had kept his seat, not lost it. Oakland County used software from a company called Hart InterCivic, not Dominion, although the software was not at fault.
Both errors, which seemed to go against the Republicans, fueled conspiracy theories in conservative corners of the internet. That prompted a response from Tina Barton, the Republican secretary in Rochester Hills, Michigan, the city that had its votes briefly counted twice.
“As a Republican, I am concerned that this is being intentionally mischaracterized to undermine the electoral process,” she said in a video she posted online. “This was an isolated mistake that was quickly rectified.”
Michigan officials added that the errors occurred in unofficial counts by counties and were fixed before another layer of checks aimed at detecting such errors. In that review, two Republican “tellers” and two Democrats certify the vote count in each county, reviewing the voting books, ballot summaries and tabulation tapes.
In Gwinnett County, Georgia, vote counting was delayed due to an apparent problem with the Dominion software, according to a detailed explanation from county officials. The software correctly counted votes, the county said, but would not send some counts to the state’s central database. Joe Sorenson, a spokesman for Gwinnett County, said the county has since been able to report accurate totals to the state, but it is unclear what exactly happened to the software.
Georgia’s Spalding and Morgan counties had separate problems with the systems that register voters at the polls. Those so-called Poll Pads were made by a company called KnowInk, not Dominion, said Harri Hursti, an expert on election security in Georgia.
“People are comparing apples to oranges on behalf of Dominion,” Hursti said.
Pérez, the electoral technology researcher, said it was fair to ask for more transparency and accountability from companies that make the technology that underpins the elections, but there is no evidence of widespread fraud or errors in the 2020 race.
“It is reasonable for citizens and politicians to analyze the role of private providers in the machinery of democracy and ask questions,” he said. “That does not mean that the elections are rigged.”
Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting.
