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Coomer watched the video in shock. He is adamant that he has not attended any antifa phone calls and is disgusted by the accusation that he has done everything to change the election results. The Trump campaign and its allies have filed more than 60 lawsuits in this country for alleged election fraud, but no court has found convincing evidence to support the idea that Coomer, the Dominion, or anyone involved in the vote count changed the election results. Biden checks of paper ballots in highly contested states like Georgia and Arizona confirmed Biden’s victory; and leading Republicans, including Attorney General Bill Barr and Trump’s official in charge of election cybersecurity, They reaffirmed the fundamental facts of the election: Overall, the results were correct, the electoral process was secure, and no widespread scams that could have changed the outcome.
Oltmann is now the subject of a defamation lawsuit filed by Coomer. It currently names 14 parties as co-defendants, including Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and the Trump campaign, who were responsible for spreading Oltmann’s allegations about the alleged antifa phone call. (Dominion has filed separate defamation suits against Giuliani, Powell, Fox News, and others. Lawyers for Giuliani, Powell, and the Trump campaign declined to comment. Fox called the Dominion case “baseless” and defended its right to disclose. “both sides” Oltmann’s best defense would be to have his claims about that phone call verified – he even said there were 19 people – but so far he has refused to do so.
Watching the video, Coomer felt a second strong emotion: a strong sense of regret – because the Facebook posts were actually real. Why, he thought, didn’t he delete them? Coomer could only imagine how his words would reach almost any Republican, let alone someone who had already heard on Fox News that the Dominion had voted for Biden. He told me he believed every word of what he said on Facebook, but was honest later when his colleagues asked him what he thought: He screwed everything up. At a time when well-funded efforts to sow electoral distrust were already underway, Coomer gave conspiracy theorists a valuable resource, a grain of sand they could turn into something that felt like proof—a false promise.
elections The United States is impossibly roundabout. Each county – and in some states, each municipality – conducts its own election, creating a patchwork system where voters in one location can have a very different voting process than their neighbors just a few miles away. This difference can breed distrust: if voters in one county believe that the election process has been managed properly, different methods in other counties may seem suspicious to them.
Local governments also rely on private companies such as Dominion and rivals ES&S and Hart InterCivic, which together control 90 percent of the voting machine market, to provide machines, software and technical support. For Americans who suspect or try to cast doubt on an election outcome, these relatively obscure, private companies offer an obvious target. In 2004, after George W. Bush narrowly won the presidency, Democrats focused on possible irregularities in Ohio, 20 electoral votes would give the presidency to John Kerry. The voting machines used in Ohio that year came from Diebold, whose CEO Walden O’Dell was a longtime Republican fundraiser. A year before the election, O’Dell wrote a letter to nearly 100 people inviting them to a fundraising event: “I am determined to help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,” he wrote. Language reinforced distrust of Diebold machines among some Democrats. O’Dell later said the letter was a “big mistake” and Diebold eventually sold his voting machine business.
Dominion was founded after a different controversy: the failure of hole-punch voting machines in the 2000 election – and their notorious hangers. After Congress funded a bill to replace these machines, many countries purchased direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines that completely eliminated paper ballots. The limits of this approach were revealed in 2006 when a Congressional race using DRE machines made by ES&S in Sarasota, Fla., produced the unlikely outcome for partisans and neutral observers. ES&S stood by the results, but doubts and uncertainties lingered as there was no paper vote.
The Dominion was in a good position at the time. John Poulos, the company’s CEO and co-founder, started in 2003 and served a small group of clients who preferred paper voting. Additionally, Dominion has developed a chart that keeps a digital display of paper ballots so they can be easily audited. (They also sold machines with audio interfaces and headsets that catered to the needs of visually impaired voters, allowing independence and anonymity.)
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