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Oct 20, 2024

Republicans target Dominion Voting Systems as early voting is underway

With early voting well underway in several states, Republicans are reviving an election conspiracy theory about voting machines that landed many Donald Trump allies in legal trouble after the 2020

With early voting well underway in several states, Republicans are reviving an election conspiracy theory about voting machines that landed many Donald Trump allies in legal trouble after the 2020 election.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., amplified a social media post on Friday in which an unidentified person claimed a friend’s ballot selections had been switched after they entered their vote into a voting machine.

“We vote on Dominion voting machines then it prints a paper ballot with our selections made on the machines,” Greene wrote in a post on X, claiming that the incident took place in Whitfield County, which she represents. “This voter’s printed ballot had been changed from their selections made on the machine.”

Greene later went on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ “InfoWars” show and repeated the claim, adding that the voter in question had cast their vote for Greene and for Donald Trump on the machine but it “kept on switching the votes.”

“That’s extremely concerning,” she said. “It sounds similar to what we heard in 2020.”

A spokesperson for Dominion Voting Systems told The Independent that its “understanding from the county is this instance was voter error and has since been resolved.” The Whitfield County Board of Elections also issued a statement saying that it was “aware of a Facebook post stating that a printed ballot didn’t reflect the voter’s selection. The issue was quickly resolved while the voter was still on-site.” The board added that there have been “no issues reported” with voting machines in Whitfield County.

In August, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, examined voting machines in Whitfield County and cleared them for use.

The Georgia lawmaker’s promotion of the claim, likening it to debunked conspiracy theories from 2020 about voting machines, is a worrisome echo of Republican efforts to deny that Trump lost the election four years ago. Those falsehoods led Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, another election systems company, to file a slate of defamation lawsuits against Trump allies and conservative media outlets. (Among them, Fox News settled Dominion’s suit against it for nearly $800 million last year.)

Legal risks aside, Republicans are already casting doubt on the security of voting machines and planting the seeds to challenge election results. Trump has repeatedly told supporters that widespread voter fraud is the only way he could lose the election, as he and his allies amplify false claims about Democrats attempting to cheat him out of a victory.

In Pennsylvania on Thursday, billionaire Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump and put $75 million into supporting the campaign, also baselessly suggested that Dominion voting machines were rigged and attacked mail-in voting. (Musk himself has voted by mail in multiple elections.) A spokesperson for Dominion told NBC News that “Hand counts and audits of such paper ballots have repeatedly proven that Dominion machines produce accurate results. These are not matters of opinion.”

In Georgia, GOP officials in DeKalb County filed a lawsuit earlier this month alleging that Dominion voting machines are vulnerable to security breaches. An attorney representing Raffensperger’s office said the lawsuit makes “same tired claims that have been rejected by courts again and again,” and a county judge swiftly tossed the suit, calling the alleged risks “purely hypothetical.”

There have also been reports this week of issues with voting machines in the Democratic stronghold of Shelby County, Tennessee, but county election officials said that it is likely due to voters not using a stylus to make a selection on the machine. Shelby County’s administrator of elections told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that no voting irregularities have been recorded.

Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking/trending news blogger for MSNBC Digital. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.