The Washington Post - USA (2020-11-22)

A12 EZ M2 THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020

BY NEENA SATIJA

President Trump and his allies
have sought to cast doubt on the
results of the 2020 presidential
election by challenging every-
thing from poll-watching pro-
cedures to the dates on absentee
ballots to the addresses on file for
voters. In recent days, Trump and
his legal advisers have found a
new target: Dominion Voting Sys-
tems, a company that supplies
voting technology for election ju-
risdictions across the United
States.
Egged on by Trump-friendly
One America News and lawyers
Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney
Powell, the president has accused
Dominion of deleting votes for
him with a system that is “horri-
ble, inaccurate and anything but
secure.” Trump’s advisers also
claim Dominion’s software was
created at the behest of former
Venezuelan president Hugo
Chávez to win that country’s elec-
tions.
While there’s no evidence for
any of those accusations — The
Washington Post’s Fact Checker
debunks the alleged ties to Ven-
ezuela in detail — they’re bringing
fresh attention to the way U.S.
elections are run and to private
companies like Dominion that
have long played a starring role in
the process. They’ve also deeply
unsettled cybersecurity and elec-
tion administration experts, who
worry that valid concerns about
election integrity are now being
overshadowed by claims that have
no basis in reality.
The bottom line is that private
companies do play a huge role in
running elections in the United
States, and observers across the
political spectrum have com-
plained about it for years. But that
doesn’t mean that any votes have
been stolen. Here’s what you need
to know.

What is Dominion, and how
long has it been around?

Dominion Voting Systems was
founded in 2003. It started out as a
Canadian company and was later
incorporated in the United States;

it now has offices in Denver and Toronto. The company offers software and hardware for elections, including computer programs to manage databases and election audits, touch-screen voting machines, ballot scanners and ballot printers. Jurisdictions across the United States have used the company’s products, some for years. Domin- ion says it serves more than 40 percent of American voters and that its products are used in 28 states. Alongside Dominion, which did not respond to requests for comment for this story, two other companies help administer most elections in the country: Election Systems & Software, which is based in Omaha, and Hart Inter- Civic, based in Austin. All three companies are privately owned.

What kinds of voting products does Dominion make, and where are they used? Dominion’s main voting machine offering, like that of most of its competitors, is called a ballot- marking device. Voters mark their choices on a touch screen, and when they’re finished, the machine spits out a paper record with a summary of their selections. Voters then feed the paper into a scanner so their vote can be tabu- lated. The company makes a cou- ple of different variations of this machine, branded as the Image- Cast. In one variation called the ImageCast Precinct, the scanner and the touch-screen machine are combined into one device. ImageCast machines are used to varying degrees in more than half a dozen states. Georgia, one of the few states that buys election equipment centrally rather than leaving the decision up to each county, spent more than $100 million to deploy the ballot-marking devices statewide beginning last year. Colorado also uses Image- Cast machines statewide, though only a small fraction of voters cast their ballots this way because most Coloradans vote by mail. In many other election jurisdictions, including some counties in

California, the majority of voters use hand-marked paper ballots when they vote, but there is one ImageCast or similar machine per precinct to accommodate voters with disabilities or language needs. Trump allies have claimed that Dominion products are concen- trated in states that went for Presi- dent-elect Joe Biden, but that’s not true. Some counties in Florida use ImageCast machines, for instance, as well as election man- agement software offered by the company. Utah’s largest county also uses Dominion products.

What do we know about the security of Dominion’s voting technology system? Dominion says its equipment goes through multiple layers of security checks. The company also says that its ballot-marking devices are just as secure as hand- marked paper ballots because they produce a paper record that

can be used to audit an election afterward. Cybersecurity experts aren’t so sure. They say it’s still possible for a bad actor to manipulate the machines so that the paper that gets printed doesn’t actually reflect a voter’s true selections. To make matters more complicated, the paper records produced by some ballot-marking devices — including the ImageCasts used in Georgia — convert voters’ choices into a bar code, which is what gets scanned to tabulate their vote. Computer hackers could manipulate those bar codes, too, experts say. (The company calls that an unlikely scenario and reiterates that its products have passed security tests performed by inde- pendent, federally accredited lab- oratories.) Whatever the risks may be, though, scientists and election administrators all agree that there’s no evidence any such risks have been successfully exploited dur-

ing the November elections.

How can we square concerns about voting technology integrity with the claims that Trump and his allies are making? Wenke Lee, a computer science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, puts it this way: If your home has a security system, it’s probably not foolproof. “Does that mean that yesterday some- body broke into your house? Come on,” he says. Lee and many other cybersecurity experts who argued against Georgia’s pur- chase of ballot-marking devices say the current allegations made by Trump and his allies have no merit. “Scientists like me have been warning for literally years and years that computer voting machines pose cybersecurity risks,” said Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor who is in the middle of

reviewing the security of Domin- ion’s electronic voting system in Georgia. “All of that is very different from drawing the conclusion that the 2020 election was rigged, which is an absolutely extraordi- nary claim.” Concerns about touch-screen voting devices aren’t isolated to Dominion. The other two leading voting technology companies sup- ply similar machines to jurisdictions across the country, including places that voted for Trump. Many counties in Texas use machines from Election Systems & Software, for instance, and some of those machines don’t produce any kind of paper record at all. “It’s an industry-wide concern,” Halderman said. “There’s no logi- cal reason to be singling out one company.” Halderman also argues that if Republicans were really con- cerned about election integrity, they would have more seriously considered comprehensive legislation aimed at fixing the problem. Instead, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has consistently blocked it.

What does the company say in response to Trump’s claims? Dominion says none of Trump’s claims — some of which it has responded to on its website — have any merit. “Conspiracies about @dominionvoting seem to grow more bizarre each day,” the company wrote in a tweet Wednesday linking to its response. The next d ay the company tweeted, “Assertions about vote deletion & switching are com- pletely false.” Dominion has also pointed to assurances from local and federal election officials that there is no evidence that any voting system was compromised during the election. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” reads a statement from a coalition of federal cybersecurity officials, local election administrators and voting technology companies. [email protected]

A look at Dominion, the firm Trump falsely claims helped steal the election

KEVIN D. LILES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Supporters of President Trump rally Saturday outside the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta, protesting what they say without evidence was an election rigged against the president.

BY SHANE HARRIS

Throughout his presidency,
Donald Trump has strong-armed,
browbeaten and coerced adversar-
ies and allies alike to accede to his
will. Electoral defeat has neither
changed nor chastened him.
On Friday afternoon, Michi-
gan’s top Republican lawmakers
were asked to the White House to
meet with the president, prompt-
ing alarm that he’d push them to
disrupt the vote certification in
their state, where President-elect
Joe Biden won by about 156,
votes. Trump has falsely claimed
that he was the victor.
The Michigan Republicans de-
clined to endorse that position and
said in a statement after the meet-
ing that they would follow the
“normal process regarding Michi-
gan’s electors.” The president is
now considering inviting Pennsyl-
vania lawmakers to the White
House, according to reports.

In person and on Twitter, Trump has targeted officials in several states, including from his own party, as he seeks to upend, discredit and invalidate the election and spread baseless claims that a victory was stolen from him. These are unprecedented actions for a modern president, but for Trump, they are standard operating procedure. “I don’t think there’s anything surprising about what we’re seeing right now, but it’s still shocking,” said Susan Hennessey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of “Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Of- fice.” “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Trump is relying on precisely the same tactics that have served his purposes during his presidency,” Hennessey said. As he mounts what legal experts overwhelmingly describe as a fu- tile effort to remain in office, Trump has reached deeply into that familiar arsenal. In a move reminiscent of his ill-fated phone call to Ukraine’s president, whom Trump tried to pressure into investigating then- candidate Biden, Trump earlier this week called a GOP official in

Wayne County, home to Detroit, who had voted to certify the results there. (Biden won 68 percent of the vote in the county.) After speaking with Trump, the official and her fellow Republican on the board of canvassers tried to rescind their decision to confirm the vote, which the Michigan secretary of state said was impossible. The official, Monica Palmer, said Trump had called to check on her well-being, after she received threats following her vote. When state officials haven’t toed Trump’s line about a stolen election, he has gone after them on Twitter, his favorite stalking ground, where he routinely ridi- cules and harangues officials from his own administration. Last week, he questioned whether the top elections official in Georgia was really a Republican and asked why the GOP governor hadn’t intervened to investigate groundless allegations of fraud that Trump said rendered the results in a state Biden also won “very unfair and close to meaning- less.” The most prominent administration official to contradict the president met with what Trump appears to consider the ultimate

humiliation — firing by tweet. On Tuesday, Trump dismissed Chris- topher Krebs, the top official in charge of election security, after his agency issued a statement call- ing 2020’s election “the most secure in American history.” Trump assailed Kreb’s clean bill of health as “highly inaccurate” and insisted falsely that across the country, dead people had voted, observers were barred from poll- ing places and “glitches” in voting machines had flipped votes from Trump to Biden. Krebs joined the growing club of government officials who’ve been pushed out for displeasing or defying the president, including FBI Director James B. Comey, from whom Trump demanded “loyalty” in a private dinner at the White House; Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a relentless target of Trump’s attacks — even after he left the administration — for re- cusing himself from investigations of the 2016 campaign; and former National Security Council official Alexander Vindman, whom Trump dismissed from his White House position after the Army offi- cer raised red flags about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president. There’s another common

thread running through Trump’s pattern of interventions: They of- ten backfire. Terminating Comey sparked a special counsel investi- gation that became the bane of Trump’s term. His phone call with the Ukrainian president, Volod- ymyr Zelensky, led to Trump’s im- peachment. And now, his attempts to influence the Republican lawmakers from Michigan appear to have fallen flat, potentially fore- closing another avenue in Trump’s post-election gambit. After meeting with Trump, Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield said in a joint statement that they “had not yet been made aware of any informa- tion that would change the out- come of the election in Michigan,” a strong signal that they would not be a party to Trump’s attempts to invalidate Biden’s win. And they noted: “Michigan’s certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and in- timidation.” Meanwhile, in Georgia, the tar- gets of Trump’s Twitter rages certi- fied the 12,000-vote win for Biden in that state. “The numbers reflect the verdict of the people, not a decision by the secretary of state’s

office or of courts or of either campaign,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, shortly before Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed the certification. Trump’s actions may prove to have been hopeless from the start, but they could do lasting damage to voters’ confidence in the integrity of the election system. For a president who values winning above all else, it was apparently worth the effort. “Fundamentally, the difference between Trump and all modern presidents is he has no goals other than his own power, his own fame, his own image as a winner,” said Richard Primus, a constitutional law professor at the University of Michigan. In the end, Trump may have failed to appreciate the limits of his own powers of persuasion. “Donald Trump has always thought he could buy his way out of a tight spot,” said Timothy Naf- tali, a presidential historian and former director of the Richard Nix- on presidential library. “He is so used to trading on his celebrity. His problem, time and again, is the Constitution is deaf, dumb and blind to celebrity.” [email protected]

In last-ditch attempt to stay in o∞ce, president’s favored tactics falling short

Unprecedented pressure campaign uses familiar methods to intimidate

BY JON SWAINE

A lawsuit brought by President
Trump’s campaign that sought to
block the certification of Penn-
sylvania’s election results was
dismissed by a federal judge on
Saturday evening.
U.S. District Judge Matthew W.
Brann granted a request from
Pennsylvania Secretary of State
Kathy Boockvar to dismiss the
suit, which alleged that Republi-
cans had been illegally disadvan-
taged because some counties al-
lowed voters to fix errors on their
mail ballots.
The judge’s decision, which he
explained in a scathing 37-page
opinion, was a thorough rebuke
of the president’s sole attempt to
challenge the statewide result in
Pennsylvania.
Brann wrote that Trump’s
campaign had used “strained le-
gal arguments without merit and
speculative accusations” in its
effort to throw out millions of
votes.
“In the United States of Ameri-
ca, this cannot justify the disen-
franchisement of a single voter,
let alone all the voters of its sixth
most populated state,” Brann
wrote.

In a statement, Trump’s attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and legal adviser Jenna Ellis said they would appeal the decision and expected the case to reach the Supreme Court. “We are disap- pointed we did not at least get the opportunity to present our evidence at a hearing,” their statement said. Trump was beaten in Pennsyl- vania by Joe Biden, who current- ly holds a lead over the president of more than 81,000 votes. Coun- ties are due to file their official results Monday to Boockvar, who will then certify the statewide tallies. Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) said in a statement after Brann’s decision that Trump had “ex- hausted all plausible legal op- tions” in the state and acknowl- edged that Biden won the election. “I congratulate President- elect Biden and Vice President- elect Kamala D. Harris on their victory,” said Toomey. The lawsuit’s dismissal con- cluded a tumultuous 12-day legal bid by the president to overturn the popular vote in one of the election’s hardest-fought battle- grounds. Giuliani personally took

charge of the case and appeared at a hearing Tuesday in William- sport, Pa., in an attempt to justify it. Five other attorneys who rep- resented the president withdrew from the case. The president’s defeat was the latest in setbacks that he has suffered in a scramble to overturn losses in key states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, Trump’s campaign sued Boockvar and a group of counties won by Biden, alleg- ing that they had violated the campaign’s constitutional rights by allowing voters to “cure” ad- ministrative errors on their mail ballots. Brann wrote on Saturday that Trump’s attorneys had haphaz- ardly stitched this allegation together “like Frankenstein’s Mon- ster” in an attempt to avoid unfavorable legal precedent. In trying to depict “ballot cur- ing” as illegal, Trump’s attorneys misstated a decision by Pennsyl- vania’s Supreme Court. Brann noted in his order Saturday that the court had in fact “declined to explicitly answer whether such a policy is necessarily forbidden.” The president’s campaign

sued together with two voters from counties that Trump won, both of whom had their mail ballots rejected because of ad- ministrative errors. Brann wrote on Saturday that throwing out the election result would not reinstate the pair’s right to vote. “It would simply deny more than 6.8 million people their right to vote,” the judge wrote. Giuliani and Ellis described Brann late Saturday as an “Obama-appointed judge,” refer- ring to his appointment to the federal bench by Trump’s Demo- cratic predecessor in 2012. But Brann is a registered Republican and a former member of the conservative Federalist Society. Toomey, who played an influen- tial role in his appointment, said Brann was “a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist.” Toomey urged Trump to accept defeat and facilitate the transi- tion to the Biden administration. Trump has refused to concede and falsely insists that he won the election. Trump’s lawsuit in Pennsylva- nia initially included formal allegations that Boockvar and Demo-

cratic-leaning counties also violated the campaign’s rights by preventing Republican observers from watching votes being counted, which the defendants denied. Those claims were scrapped in a revised version of the suit filed last Sunday. Giuliani and other Trump advisers initially denied that the claims had been dropped, then said they had “strategically decided to restruc- ture” the suit, before finally say- ing in court filings that the claims were removed by mistake. Giuliani asked the judge for permission to restore the deleted claims about count observers in a proposed third version of the lawsuit, but his request was dismissed by Brann along with the rest of the campaign’s legal effort. The judge said Trump’s campaign did not have standing to bring the lawsuit but that even if it had standing it would have failed based on the merits of its case. The suit’s dismissal left Trump without even a long-shot strategy for overturning his defeat to Biden in Pennsylvania, which the president has baselessly attribut- ed to fraud.

State law requires Boockvar and Gov. Tom Wolf, both Demo- crats, to certify the election results and appoint the state’s presidential electors based on the popular vote. The leaders of the state’s Republican-controlled legislature have said they will do nothing to interfere with that process, even as some Trump supporters have urged them to sabotage it. The state’s Supreme Court is considering an appeal from Trump’s campaign that seeks to throw out about 8,000 ballots in Philadelphia where voters did not include details such as the date on their ballot envelopes. Earlier on Saturday, a group of Republicans, led by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), filed a lawsuit in the state’s Commonwealth Court that seeks to block certification of the results on the grounds that the 2019 state legislation creat- ing a universal vote-by-mail system was unconstitutional. Trump said in a tweet on Saturday that Kelly’s legal effort was “not at all frivolous.” [email protected]

Aaron Schaffer and Keith Newell contributed to this report.

In scathing opinion, federal judge dismisses Trump campaign lawsuit in Pa.

The Washington Post - USA (2020-11-22)

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