Thread by @washingtonpost

Texas businessman Russell J. Ramsland Jr. sold everything from Tex-Mex food to light-therapy technology.

Then he sold the story that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. wapo.st/33wKYZK

Beginning in late 2018, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to conservative lawmakers, activists and donors at an aircraft hangar used by his company, Allied Security Operations Group.

The ideas eventually reached allies of Trump.

In late 2019, Ramsland was repeating the idea that election software used in the U.S. originated in Venezuela and saying nefarious actors could secretly manipulate votes on a massive scale.

As the election neared, he privately briefed GOP lawmakers and met with DHS officials.

After the 2020 election, Trump was surrounded by those repeating Ramsland’s claims, like Rudolph W. Giuliani and conservative lawyer Sidney Powell.

In seeking to overturn the election, Trump repeated many of Ramsland’s claims and spread them into the mainstream.

ASOG’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen "provided the appearance of substance and fact to something that had no substance or fact,” said Matt Masterson, a former senior U.S. cybersecurity official who led a team tracking the integrity of the 2020 election for DHS.

Of all the ways in which Ramsland pushed the stolen-election narrative, arguably the most damaging was a report his company ASOG wrote on Dominion machines in Michigan’s rural Antrim County, said Masterson.

ASOG’s report claimed that Dominion’s systems were “intentionally and purposefully designed” to generate ballot errors and then to shunt those ballots to electronic adjudication, where administrators could change votes at will, with no oversight.

The report claimed that audit logs for Dominion machines in Antrim County showed an alarming 68 percent “error rate.”

The day after the report’s release, Trump tweeted "68% error rate in Michigan Voting Machines.... Did Michigan Secretary of State break the law? Stay tuned!"

At a rally in Washington on Jan. 6, Trump referenced “the troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems."

He called the vote “the most corrupt election in the history, maybe, of the world,” and urged his supporters to march to the Capitol. By the thousands, they complied.

The baseless claim that the election was stolen has taken root for millions of Americans. It has been cited as a motivation for legislation to curtail access to polls and spurred Dominion to file billion-dollar lawsuits.
wapo.st/33wKYZK

The enduring myth that the 2020 election was rigged was not one claim by one person. It was many claims stacked one atop the other, repeated by a phalanx of Trump allies.

This is the origin story of a core set of those claims.
wapo.st/33wKYZK