Fox News is on trial from Tuesday in Delaware for relaying the thesis of a rigged presidential election in 2020. We explain who is Dominion, the electronic voting company, which is suing the most watched cable news channel in the USA.
Until now accustomed to the backstage, she now finds herself on the front of the stage. The American company Dominion, which specializes in the sale of electronic voting hardware and software, is claiming $1.6 billion in damages from Fox News. She accuses the conservative television channel of having held her responsible for an alleged rigging of the 2020 presidential election. company victim of a conspiracy theory.
How did Dominion become known?
Dominion Voting System is a Canadian company founded in 2003 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado. It was so named in reference to the “Dominion election act” adopted in 1920 in Canada. A text that has removed the obstacles that have so far prevented women and members of certain racial and economic groups from voting. As the story goes New York Timesthe ambition of John Poulos, one of the founders, was to make elections more accessible to citizens with disabilities.
The company has become one of the main suppliers of electronic voting systems in the United States – a market dominated by the private sector – by selling touch-screen voting machines, but also ballot scanners and printers. It also provides software to organize a turnkey ballot and ensures the maintenance of equipment. Its clients are, for the most part, “counties”, local governments. As of the 2020 presidential election, Dominion operated in 28 states.
Why did Dominion find itself at the center of a controversy?
After failing to get re-elected in November 2020, Donald Trump accused – without proof – Joe Biden’s camp of fraud of all kinds during the ballot. His advisers, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and attorney Sidney Powell had blamed Dominion for allegedly rigging the election through his voting machines on Fox News. According to them, the company was linked to the regime of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos shows @andersoncooper how his voting machines work and addresses the baseless claims against his company. https://t.co/wn1KbxWLfv
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 24, 2022
According to Dominion, Fox News purposely lied to retain its audience. The company added to the file messages from journalists showing that they did not really believe in the thesis of a rigged election. THE March 31, one of the judges in charge of the case declared that he was “crystal clear that no assertions about Dominion in the 2020 election (was) true“.
Is Dominion the only one to have been singled out?
Despite the lack of evidence, Dominion’s impeachment on Fox News prompted elected Republicans to defend counting the ballots by hand rather than by machines. However, sAccording to a study published in 2018 in the academic journal Election Law Journalmanual counting is less reliable than machine counting.
Other critics point to the lack of regulation of the sector. Thus, after the revelations of attempted Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, some elected officials, such as the Democrat of Maryland Jamie Raskin, called for reform of the electronic voting system, encouraging greater transparency in the financing of private companies. machine managers.
Beyond Dominion, are there other e-voting controversies?
Last January, after Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in the Brazilian presidential election, supporters of the outgoing president demanded access to the source code of the electronic ballot boxes, contesting the result of the ballot. In Brazil, electronic ballot boxes have been used since 1996, but they have only recently become the subject of controversy, especially since Jair Bolsonaro claims that they allow fraud.
Political parties, justice and the army were allowed to inspect their source code, also tested by experts and no trickery was revealed.
Electronic or postal voting means doubt, fraud, chaos! We see it in the United States as in #Brazil !
The Macronists have tried to impose it in France on several occasions: don’t let them!
And let’s eliminate all machine voting in France!— Florian Philippot (@f_philippot) January 9, 2023
In France, citing the United States and Brazil, Florian Philippot estimated in January on Twitter that electronic voting, “it’s doubt, fraud, chaos”. Comments fueling conspiracy theories which wrongly claim that Emmanuel Macron won the 2022 presidential election with the help of bugs in electronic voting.