Election security trial is a magnet for false 2020 fraud claims
A federal trial over the security of Dominion voting machines in Georgia wasn’t supposed to encompass unproven accusations of wrongdoing in the 2020 presidential election.
But it didn’t take long for conservatives’ endless quest to find fraud in Donald Trump’s loss to intrude.
Since a rogue plaintiff hired a new lawyer who also represents one of Trump’s co-defendants in a separate case, the trial has included questions about “pristine” counterfeit ballots, claims of ballot tampering and unsubstantiated allegations of wireless access to voting machines.
Then the right-wing website The Gateway Pundit amplified testimony about security vulnerabilities, “My Pillow Guy” Mike Lindell aired allegations of fraud on his show, and an activistwho wants to rid Georgia of all electronic voting equipment latched onto the case.
Conservatives’ belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump found new life in the election security case, originally filed primarily by liberal voters 6 1/2 years ago.
The main plaintiffs argue electronic voting equipment is unsafe for future use but disagree with the notion that it’s been manipulated so far.
Three vote counts showed that Joe Biden defeated Trump in Georgia in 2020, and multiple investigations have countered allegations of illegal ballot collection, dead voters and manipulation.
But the trial is a golden opportunity to question witnesses under oath, including state investigators and election officials.
Election skeptics were especially invigorated by testimony from University of Michigan computer science professor Alex Halderman, who used a pen to reach a button inside a voting machine, putting it in “safe mode” and allowing him to alter its programming.
“This trial is the ultimate soap opera,” said Amber Connor, a conservative Atlanta voter who has observed much of the trial and supports efforts to eliminate Georgia’s voting technology. “If we’re worried about voting technology, we should be worried about these machines and the tabulators. I was hoping people from both sides of the aisle would come together to lock down every vote.”
The interests of the plaintiffs diverged last month when one of the plaintiffs, Ricardo Davis, hired his own attorney, David Oles, a district chairman for the Georgia Republican Party.
Davis is a co-founder, along with Garland Favorito, of VoterGA, a group behind a pending lawsuit seeking to inspect Fulton County absentee ballots to try to find fakes. A judge dismissed the case in 2021 after investigators couldn’t find illegal ballots, but the Georgia Court of Appeals revived the lawsuit last year.
While the primary plaintiffs in the current election security case are asking the judge to bar touchscreen voting machines, Davis and Oles want to rid most technology from elections in hopes of moving to a system where ballots are filled out by hand and counted by humans instead of scanners.