Trump’s claims about Dominion Voting machines

President Donald Trump has so far been unwilling to concede to Joe Biden, and his latest argument is that the voting machines must have been rigged. Where’s the evidence? Strong claims need strong proof, not rumors and innuendo on Twitter.

Chatter is swirling around Dominion Voting, a company that supplies equipment in some 28 states. What seems to have launched this theory was an early misreport of results in Antrim County, Mich.

A different problem hit Gwinnett County, Ga. The county ended up readjudicating some votes until Nov. 5. Sounds like the usual boring IT snafu.

Other pundits mash together all sorts of stuff. A couple of counties in Georgia had trouble with electronic poll books, but that would affect wait times at precincts, not final vote totals. There’s footage from a House hearing a few years ago, at which Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel said that voting machines could theoretically be hacked. Where’s the proof they actually were in 2020? “Vulnerabilities,” Appel wrote in a blog post, “are not the same as rigged elections, especially when we have paper ballots in almost all the states.”

No voting system is foolproof, and hiccups are inevitable in a country with roughly 3,000 counties.

But so far there’s no good evidence of voting problems that would come close to Biden’s lead of 73,000 votes in Pennsylvania or 145,000 in Michigan.

If Georgia’s recount doesn’t find big irregularities, then these claims should be put to rest. In the George W. Bush years, the conspiratorial left focused on Diebold, a maker of electronic voting machines. It would be a mistake for anyone on the right to go down a similar dead end, especially if Georgia’s paper ballots give the same result as the computers.