Today many right-wing accounts are spreading claims that election software from Dominion Voting Systems caused widespread problems.
We looked into each claim of problems and found that they were either caused by human error or didn't affect vote counts. nytimes.com/2020/11/11/tec…
Some Republicans have pointed to voting and vote-counting issues in five counties in Michigan and Georgia.
The Dominion software was used in only two of those counties, and in every instance there was a detailed explanation for what had happened.
In the two Michigan counties that had mistakes, the inaccuracies were because of human errors, not software problems, according to Michigan officials. Only one of the two counties used Dominion.
In one Georgia county, Dominion software did delay reporting of the vote tallies, but didn't affect the actual vote count. Here's the county's report.
In two other counties, a separate company’s software slowed poll workers’ ability to check-in voters. gwinnettcounty.com/web/gwinnett/h…
“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 @eddieperezTX, an election-technology expert.
It's appropriate to want to better understand how the machines that underpin our democracy work. But in the case of this election, there is no evidence of widespread problems.
The claim: “Software glitches” in Michigan & Georgia screwed up vote counts.
The facts: They didn't.
We investigated. Mistakes in two Michigan tallies were due to human error & were quickly fixed. In Georgia, software problems didn’t affect vote counts. nytimes.com/live/2020/2020…
Let's start with Antrim County, Mich.
Unofficial results had Biden up by 3,000 votes. That didn’t seem right in the Republican stronghold, so election workers checked again.
Turned out they had set up the reporting system incorrectly. They fixed it. Trump had 2,500 more votes.
In Oakland County, Mich., the winner of one local race was changed from Democrat to Republican after election workers caught and fixed a separate human error.
The votes from one city, Rochester Hills, had been mistakenly counted twice. wxyz.com/news/error-in-…
Let's fact check the latest big voter-fraud claim: Software glitches misreported votes in Michigan.
Facts: One county caught and fixed an error in its unofficial tallies. This came even before a 2nd layer of thorough checks designed to catch such issues. freep.com/story/news/pol…
So: Yes, there was an error in the unofficial vote tally for one Michigan county.
And then county workers checked the numbers, discovered the error and fixed it. This was all before the official vote-count verification, which is more thorough & is designed to catch such issues.
We know this because of reporting by @paulegan4 at the Detroit Free Press.
State officials said the error occurred because Antrim County didn't update its election-management software.
The vote count was accurate. The problem came when the unofficial tally went to the state.
NEW: Conservative Twitter exploded yesterday with claims of proof that dead people voted in Michigan.
We looked into it. The evidence indicates that this was not fraud, but rather something much less salacious: Run-of-the-mill clerical errors. nytimes.com/2020/11/06/tec…
It began Wednesday night with tweets from @fleccas, an Ivy League offensive lineman turned right-wing internet journalist.
He had indeed found some bizarre voter files on the state of Michigan website. It appeared people born between 1900 and 1902 had sent in absentee ballots.
By Thursday morning, his posts were the talk of the Republican internet. Candace Owens, James Woods, Jack Posobiec were all sharing them, reaching millions of people. The Gateway Pundit put up a story. This was clear proof of election fraud, many said.
President Trump just tweeted again about claims of "secretly dumped ballots" for Biden in Michigan.
This is false.
These claims are based on screenshots of a mistaken unofficial tally on one site's election map that was caused by a typo that was corrected in about 30 minutes.
I know this because I just spent all day reporting it out.
I spoke to the election official in Shiawassee County who made the mistake; the election-data provider that reported it; and even the Republican consultant who tweeted the images that went viral. nytimes.com/live/2020/2020…
Here is that Republican consultant, @MattMackowiak, owning up to the fact that his screenshots did NOT show election fraud but rather an honest mistake that was quickly corrected.
“I certainly wasn’t intending to make a typo appear fraudulent,” he said.
New data shows that YouTube has cut its recommendations of fringe channels, helping reduce its spread of disinformation.
The changes have also had a knock-on effect: Fox News is now YouTube's most recommended channel alongside election-related videos. nytimes.com/2020/11/03/tec…
In several recent analyses by @gchaslot & @MarcFaddoul of recommendations on popular news videos, YouTube consistently steered people toward Fox News more than any other channel, sometimes by a wide margin.
Fox News also far outperforms other news outlets on Facebook.
Here are the top Facebook pages ranked by their share of total interactions with posts that mentioned the election, Biden or Trump over the past week. (Interactions are the only such data FB makes available.)