Dominion accuses Sidney Powell of defamation, sues for $1.3 billion



Attorney Sidney Powell, who filed multiple unsuccessful lawsuits alleging a widespread conspiracy of voter fraud in the 2020 election, was sued for defamation on Friday by Dominion Voting Systems.

Dominion, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, was central to claims Powell and others made about votes being switched from President Trump to President-elect Joe Biden and foreign interference in the election. The lawsuit seeks $1.3 billion from Powell, who claimed that Dominion machines used software manufactured in Venezuela to help Hugo Chavez fraudulently win elections, among other unproven accusations. Dominion is an American company based in Denver and Toronto and has no ownership ties to the government of Venezuela.

"Powell's wild accusations are demonstrably false," the company said in its complaint. "Acting in concert with allies and media outlets that were determined to promote a false preconceived narrative about the 2020 election, Powell launched a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion that reached millions of people and caused enormous harm to Dominion."

Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Sidney Powell is thorough.https://t.co/NsW05nJ0wQ
— Jerry Dunleavy (@Jerry Dunleavy)1610116519.0

"As a result of the defamatory falsehoods peddled by Powell ... Dominion's founder, Dominion's employees, Georgia's governor, and Georgia's secretary of state have been harassed and have received death threats, and Dominion has suffered enormous harm," Dominion's lawsuit states.

Last month, Dominion and Smartmatic, another voting machine company named in conspiratorial claims about the 2020 election, each sent letters to Fox News, One America News Network, Epoch Times, and other media outlets and personalities who repeated Powell's claims threatening imminent legal action. In response, Fox and other outlets aired segments with corrections debunking some false claims about the election. Still, more lawsuits from Dominion are likely.

Powell was also issued formal notice by Dominion, and the company requested that she retract her claims, which the lawsuit recounts.

"After Dominion sent Powell a letter putting her on formal notice of the facts and the death threats and asking her to retract her false claims, Powell doubled down, tweeting to her 1.2 million Twitter followers that she heard that '#Dominion' had written to her and that, although she had not even seen Dominion's letter yet, she was 'retracting nothing' because '[w]e have #evidence' and 'They are #fraud masters!'" it states.

"Dominion brings this action to set the record straight, to vindicate the company's rights under civil law, to recover compensatory and punitive damages, to seek a narrowly tailored injunction, and to stand up for itself and its employees," the lawsuit declares.

"It's very easy to say something on Twitter without evidence," Dominion chief executive officer John Poulos told reporters Friday. "It is another thing to have to come forward in a court of law and identify your basis for making these statements."

Fox News runs segment debunking voting machine claims after legal threats from Smartmatic



After Fox News was threatened with legal action by election software company Smartmatic, it repeatedly ran a "fact-check" segment over the weekend that debunked many of the claims regarding Smartmatic that had been made by its on-air hosts, in an apparent retraction of those claims.

Smartmatic sent a number of right-leaning media outlets — including Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN — a demand letter last Monday accusing them of defaming the company with numerous false statements and threatening legal action if some claims that were made on air were not retracted.

The segment first ran Friday on "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on the Fox Business channel. The segment was introduced by Dobbs, who said, "Lots of opinions about the integrity of the election, the irregularities of mail-in voting, of election voting machines and voting software. One of the companies is Smartmatic. And we reached out to one of the leading authorities on open source software for elections, Eddie Perez, for his insight and views. Eddie is the global director of tech development at the Open Source Technology Institute. We asked him for his assessment of Smartmatic and recent claims about the company."

The clip then cut to Perez being interviewed by someone — clearly not Dobbs, although the interviewer was not identified — asking Perez questions about the Smartmatic controversy.

This is very bizarre. Lou Dobbs ran a segment tonight basically debunking his own lies about Smartmatic voting mach… https://t.co/H7otrUvgGv
— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar)1608338115.0

Among other things noted by Perez in the segment, Perez stated:

  • Smartmatic software was not used anywhere in the United States outside Los Angeles County.
  • Perez has not seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to flip votes in the 2020 presidential election or any other election.
  • Dominion and Smartmatic are separate companies, and neither has an ownership interest in the other.
  • Perez is aware that an executive at Smartmatic has a "relationship" with one of George Soros' many foundations, but he is not aware of any other relationship between Smartmatic and Soros.
  • There is no evidence that Smartmatic sent United States votes to foreign countries for tabulation.
According to Forbes, the segment was repeated in its entirety numerous times over the weekend, particularly on shows hosted by Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, who have been among the loudest voices at Fox in casting doubts on the reliability of Dominion voting machines and Smartmatic software.

A spokesperson for Fox would not confirm to Forbes that the segment was aired as part of a deal with Smartmatic or that it was aired as an attempt to avoid litigation, but instead merely characterized the segment as "fact-checks," apparently of its own on-air personalities. A spokesperson for Smartmatic would not comment to the Guardian about whether the video meets the demands of the company's letter, "due to potential litigation."

Dominion forensic audit in Antrim County, Michigan, reportedly shows evidence of 'intentional' fraud, but officials are vehemently denying the claim



The forensic audit of Dominion Voting Systems machines in Antrim County, Michigan, turned out a 68% error rate, indicating that the machines may have been "intentionally designed" to allow for fraud, according to the Trump-linked cyber analysts who inspected it.

The report, which if true raises further suspicions regarding the 2020 election, was immediately disputed by state officials and Dominion representatives.

What are the details?

The forensic audit was ordered last week by Judge Kevin Elsenheimer of the 13th Circuit Court after a county resident, William Bailey, requested it in a lawsuit challenging the integrity of the 2020 election results. Bailey's lawsuit contested the outcome of a local proposal to allow a marijuana dispensary in town. However, the audit's results were also pertinent to the presidential election, especially considering it was in Antrim County where 6,000 votes had been incorrectly switched from President Donald Trump to Democratic challenger Joe Biden in early vote tabulation, before being corrected.

The audit was conducted by Allied Security Operations Group, a cyber firm co-founded by Russell Ramsland Jr. who has been cited as expert testimony in several of the battleground state lawsuits filed by Trump's legal team. The audit was reportedly conducted in the presence of several county officials.

What does the report say?

In the newly released report, Ramsland concluded that "the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results."

"The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity," he stated in the report. "The results of the Antrim County 2020 election are not certifiable. This is a result of machine and/or software error, not human error."

Antrim County officials originally blamed the vote-flipping on a system glitch before later assessing that a Republican election official failed to update the system before the vote tabulation.

"It is critical to understand that the Dominion system classifies ballots into two categories, 1) normal ballots and 2) adjudicated ballots," he continued. "Ballots sent to adjudication can be altered by administrators, and adjudication files can be moved between different Results Tally and Reporting (RTR) terminals with no audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicates (i.e. votes) the ballot batch. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity because it provides no meaningful observation of the adjudication process or audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicated the ballots.

"A staggering number of votes required adjudication. This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles still stored on the server. This is caused by intentional errors in the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency or audit trail," the report stated. "Our examination of the server logs indicates that this high error rate was incongruent with patterns from previous years. The statement attributing these issues to human error is not consistent with the forensic evaluation, which points more correctly to systemic machine and/or software errors. The systemic errors are intentionally designed to create errors in order to push a high volume of ballots to bulk adjudication."

Videos posted to YouTube by election officials in Coffee County, Georgia, recently purported to show how ballots can be switched or filled out in the Dominion system after they are sent to adjudication.

Matthew DePerno, the attorney representing Bailey, went into further detail about how he believes the machines were designed to create fraud during an interview with reporter John Solomon.

"We found that the Dominion Voting Systems is designed intentionally to create inherent and systemic voting errors. What I mean by that is when you run a ballot through the machine, even if it's a blank ballot, it will have a 68% chance of creating an error," DePerno told Solomon. "When you create an error, this machine does not reject the ballot. What it does instead is send it to a folder and that folder will then accumulate the ballots until the time that someone decides that they need those ballots. And then those ballots will be bulk adjudicated by someone. Could be offsite, could be onsite somewhere sitting at a computer. And, without any oversight, they can click one button, lope the entire batch of ballots to one candidate and then send them back to the tabulator."

What has been the response?

In a news release, Michigan officials decried the report as "another in a long stream of misguided, vague and dubious assertions designed to erode public confidence in the November presidential election."

"Let's be clear: Michigan's Nov. 3 general election was the most secure in our state's history," Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in response to the report. "There continues to be no evidence of widespread fraud, as affirmed by state and federal agencies including Attorney General William Barr, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency."

"If the Trump campaign had any actual evidence of wrongdoing — or genuine suspicion thereof — they could have requested a hand recount of every ballot in the state. They did not, instead choosing to allow shadowy organizations claiming expertise to throw around baseless claims of fraud in an effort to mislead American voters and undermine the integrity of the election. Their actions are a corruption of the courts and the rule of law, as the release of today's report clearly demonstrates," she continued, later calling into question Allied Security Operations Group's credentials.

Dominion representatives have also maintained that the allegations in the report are incorrect.

A spokesperson for the company, Michael Steel, told Fox News in November that switching votes from one candidate to another on the machines was "physically impossible." He added that "if any electronic interference had taken place, the tally reported electronically would not match the printed ballots."

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Dominion CEO John Poulos wrote: "There is no secret 'vote flipping' algorithm. Third-party test labs, chosen by the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and accredited by a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, perform complete source-code reviews on every federally certified tabulation system. States replicate this process for their own certifications. Post-election canvassing and auditing also exist to provide additional assurance of the vote totals' accuracy."

VIDEO: Election officials in Coffee County, Ga., allegedly demonstrate how Dominion machines can switch votes, fill out blank ballots



Election officials from a small county in Georgia are arguing they can prove the much-maligned Dominion Voting Systems machines used in several battleground states during the 2020 election are fraught with security risks.

What are the details?

In a pair of videos posted on YouTube Wednesday, Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Martin appeared to demonstrate how, with relative ease, the machines can be used to wrongfully tabulate votes in a range of ways — such as to scan the same ballots multiple times, switch votes, or even fill out blank ballots.

"So there's my blank ballot that I want to adjudicate, and I'm going to vote for Doug Collins ... and I just counted that vote," Martin said on the video, showing other election officials how someone could allegedly scan a blank ballot into the system and then proceed to fill it out in adjudication.

Earlier in the recording, Martin showed how a batch of ballots could allegedly be scanned through the system and accepted more than once. She also demonstrated how an election worker could view a filled-out ballot in adjudication and, from there, switch votes from one candidate to another.

Dominion Voting Machine Flaws -- 2020 Election Coffee County, Georgia Video 1youtu.be

Dominion Voting Machine Flaws -- 2020 Election Coffee County, Georgia Video 2youtu.be

At one point, the camera was taken outside of Martin's office in order to demonstrate the perspective of a poll observer watching the process. The officials conclude that someone watching from that distance would not be able to adequately assess what was happening.

As the second video concludes, you can hear someone say, "It works fine for honest people ... those who intend to do wrong, though ... certainly can."

What else?

In the videos, election officials do not allege that widespread fraud occurred in Coffee County, rather they point to the potential for fraud in any county where the Dominion voting machines were used.

It should be noted that officials in the video appeared to be running tests with the ballots and not actually counting them toward 2020 election totals. Whether the system has the same security settings for tests and official counts was not immediately clear.

TheBlaze attempted to contact Martin several times for more information about the tests but has not yet received a reply.

Anything else?

Dominion has denied that any ballot manipulation occurred during the 2020 election. A spokesperson for the company, Michael Steel, told Fox News in November that it was "physically impossible" to switch votes on the machines. That statement would appear to be misleading if what Martin demonstrates in the video is true.

Steel also alleged that if any electronic interference occurred, it would be found out when cross-referenced with printed ballots.

Coffee County, as of Thursday, had refused to certify the results of its electronic recount. County officials claimed in a letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that they could not certify the electronic recount numbers given their "inability to repeatably duplicate creditable election results."

Raffensperger has since launched an investigation into the county and certified the statewide results given the fact that the discrepancy of votes in the county was not large enough to change the outcome of the election.

Judge allows forensic audit of Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan



A federal judge has ordered that a forensic inspection of Dominion voting machines can take place in Antrim County, Michigan, where 6,000 votes had been incorrectly flipped from President Trump to Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the early tabulation of votes, before being corrected.

The ruling, however, makes no mention of the presidential election. Rather, Judge Kevin Elsenheimer's order is in response to a lawsuit filed by plaintiff William Bailey, a local resident who is challenging the results of a proposal to allow a marijuana retailer in his village. The proposal initially failed before passing during re-tabulation, a change which Bailey alleges didn't count three damaged ballots, according to MLive.com.

Nevertheless, President Trump's legal team indicated they are the ones who have been granted access to inspect the voting machines.

"The big news coming out of Antrim County, Michigan, this morning ... is that a judge actually granted our team access to 22 of the Dominion voting machines for us to conduct a forensic audit," Trump attorney Jenna Ellis told Fox News Sunday morning.

"So our team is going to be able to go in there this morning and we'll be there for about eight hours to conduct that forensic examination and we'll have the results in about 48 hours and that will tell us a lot about these machines," she added.

.@JennaEllisEsq on the Antrim County, Michigan judge that gave Team Trump access to 22 Dominion voting machines to… https://t.co/IstQE81xsC
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022))1607264218.0

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani called the ruling a "big win" on Twitter.

The error, which incorrectly awarded 6,000 votes to Biden which had actually gone for Trump, was originally described as a technical malfunction with the counting equipment. However, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson later clarified that the error was a result of a Republican clerk "accidentally [not updating] the software used to collect voting machine data and report unofficial results." She suggested that the "human error" would have have been detected during a county canvass anyway.

But the president's legal team has been suspicious of that claim and allege that what happened in Antrim County was representative of what happened all over the state and all over the country — the difference being that in Antrim County the bad actors attempting to rig the election were simply caught.

It was not immediately clear why Ellis suggested it was Trump's team that would be conducting the inspection, but it likely had to do with the presence of members of Allied Security Operations Group during the audit. ASOG, a group affiliated with Trump's legal team, was responsible for producing a report used as evidence in Bailey's lawsuit.

According to the Detroit Free Press, Antrim County announced on Saturday that ASOG technicians would conduct the audit in the presence of county clerk Sheryl Guy, county administrator Pete Garwood, county attorney Haider Kazim, three county commissioners, a county IT technician, and a member of the sheriff's department.

Judge orders Georgia officials not to 'erase' data from Dominion voting machines in 3 counties



A federal judge on Sunday barred state officials in Georgia from wiping Dominion voting machines in three Atlanta-area counties after Republicans electors filed an emergency motion seeking their inspection.

What are the details?

U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten Sr.'s order — which applies to voting machines in Cobb, Gwinnett, and Cherokee counties — came about after pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell filed a lawsuit in the state alleging the machines were manipulated to procure an election victory for Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Plaintiffs in the case, including conservative teen pundit C.J. Pearson, are seeking an order to allow them to forensically inspect the machines for evidence of fraud.

"Defendants are hereby enjoined and restrained from altering, destroying, or erasing, or allowing the alteration, destruction, or erasure of, any software or data on any Dominion voting machine in Cobb, Gwinnett, and Cherokee Counties," the order stated. "This temporary restraining order shall remain in effect for ten days, or until further order of the Court, whichever comes first."

Batten also ordered the group of defendants, which includes Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), to "file a brief setting forth in detail the factual bases they have, if any, against allowing" forensic inspections of the machines in the three counties. They have until Wednesday to do so.

According to the order, in a hearing on Sunday, state officials demonstrated opposition to a forensic inspection of the machines and argued they don't have the authority to instruct county officials on the matter.

What else?

In their emergency motion filed on Friday, plaintiffs argued that the vote count certified by Georgia officials last week, which declared Biden the winner of the state's 16 electoral votes over President Donald Trump, is "wrong."

"Tens of thousands of votes counted toward Vice President Biden's final tally were the product of illegality, and physical and computer-based fraud leading to 'outright ballot stuffing,'" they stated.

"Georgia's election process depends entirely on voting machines, tabulators and software purchased from Dominion Voting Systems Corporation that was compromised. Computerized vote recording and tabulations are controlled by software programs that were designed to cheat, and which were open to human manipulation," the motion continued.

Batten noted in his order that the defendants argued "allowing such forensic inspections would pose substantial security and proprietary/trade secret risks."

Anything else?

On the same day that Batten issued the order, a machine recount in Georgia requested by the Trump campaign was forced to stop when a server maintained by Dominion crashed in Fulton County.

Election officials said the crash was due to an unspecified problem but maintained that Dominion technicians had been dispatched to resolve the issue.

The current tally in the state shows Trump trailing Biden but just under 13,000 votes, or a margin of 0.2%.

Dominion voting machine server crash causes delay in Georgia recount



The third count of presidential votes in Georgia hit a snag Sunday when a server maintained by Dominion voting machines — which have become a point of controversy — crashed in Fulton County after about 88% of the votes had been recounted. Officials in Georgia say that the count will resume on Monday morning and expect the recount to be completed by the deadline of Dec. 2.

Everything that happens with Dominion voting machines has become the subject of intense scrutiny after glitches in Michigan appeared to reverse the totals in initial reporting between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Many conservatives on social media — including the president and his legal team — have cast doubt on the security of the machines.

According to Fox News, election officials notified the outlet of the unspecified problem with a newly deployed mobile server on Sunday night and indicated that technicians had been dispatched to resolve the issue.

The current tally in Georgia shows President Trump trailing Biden by about 13,000 votes, but the Trump legal team has challenged the results and has sharply criticized Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for failing to do enough to challenge the results of the election, which Raffensperger in particular has strongly stood behind. The Trump campaign has additionally requested (and obtained) multiple recounts of the results in Georgia. The campaign claims that the previous recount's failure to include signature matching (which the state says is now impossible since envelopes have been discarded per usual procedure when ballots are opened) renders the results of these recounts suspect.

Dominion has aggressively denied that its machines either were or have been tampered with in Georgia or any other state. The company has also encouraged workers to work from home and to hide their social media profiles because they claim that their workers have been subjected to "persistent harassment and threats against personal safety" due to the scrutiny of the election results.

Last week, a spokesman for Dominion stated that it was "physically impossible" to alter votes in the Dominion system and noted that whenever someone casts a vote on a Dominion machine, it produces a paper receipt that is kept by the county. "If any electronic interference had taken place, the tally reported electronically would not match the printed ballots, and in every case where we've looked at — in Georgia, all across the country — the printed ballot, the gold standard in election security, has matched the electronic tally," the spokesman said.

Sidney Powell promises 'massive' Georgia lawsuit by Wednesday that will 'save' Trump's presidency



Sidney Powell, the pro-Trump attorney who is reportedly working on compiling evidence to prove that manipulated voting software skewed the results of the 2020 election, vowed that a "massive" lawsuit in Georgia would be filed by Wednesday and that it, along with similar lawsuits, would ultimately "save" Donald Trump's presidency.

"I think no later than tomorrow," Powell told Fox Business Network's Lou Dobbs on Tuesday regarding the lawsuit. "It's just going to be — it's a massive document. And it's going to have a lot of exhibits."

"Do you think that we're going to see the Trump presidency saved?" Dobbs asked.

"Yes, I definitely do," Powell responded. "There's no issue in my mind but that he was elected in an absolute landslide nationwide."

It is just the latest assurance provided by Powell over the last couple of weeks. The former defense attorney for Gen. Michael Flynn has repeatedly promised she would "release the Kraken" of evidence proving that Trump won the election "in a landslide." However, to date no such evidence has been submitted resulting in the overturning of results, which show former Vice President Joe Biden winning enough Electoral College votes to become the next president.

In Georgia, Biden narrowly defeated Trump by just over 12,000 votes.

BREAKING NEWS: Sidney Powell Tells Lou Dobbs Her Lawsuit In Georgia May Be Filed As Soon As Tomorrow www.youtube.com

Nevertheless, Powell contended that she and her team are hard at work compiling evidence for lawsuits in several battleground states.

"We will be rolling them out as fast as we possibly can, because it affected the entire country," she said. "It's all so clear that there was foreign intrusion into our voting systems, and that's going be the real — where the rubber meets the road."

"There's no doubt that the software was created and used in Venezuela to control the elections and make sure that Hugo Chavez was always reelected as the dictator of Venezuela, in what appeared to be 'free and fair elections,'" she added later during the interview. "But they were manipulated by the software used in the Dominion machines and used by other machines in the United States, frankly. And we are just continuing to be inundated by evidence of all the frauds here, and every manner and means of fraud you could possibly think of."

The news comes on the heels of the Trump legal team appearing to distance themselves from Powell. In a statement over the weekend, Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis and Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani made clear that Powell was "not a member" of the legal team and "not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity," but "is practicing law on her own."

Everything we know about DOMINION systems voting machines



Steven reviews the weekend violence in D.C. at the pro-Trump march, and then turns to examine the use of Dominion systems voting machines in the 2020 election. Finally, he looks at the science on catching COVID twice and whether the "experts" were right in the outrage over Rand Paul's recent comments.



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