It is the new angle of attack of the outgoing American president, Donald Trump, and his camp, which accuses the Democrats of having “stolen” the presidential election of November 3 for the benefit of Joe Biden. The Republican pointed out the Dominion electoral software which he said would have erased or reassigned millions of votes to his rival. An assertion, without proof, taken up by several far-right conspiratorial sites.
Dominion is one of the major pieces of software used by voting machines in the United States. It is published by Dominion Voting Systems, a Canadian company founded in 2003 with US headquarters in Denver, Colorado, which also produces voting machines. Dominion technology affected more than 71 million US voters in the 2016 election, in a total of 1,635 communities, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. This makes it the second largest supplier in the country, behind the company Election Systems & Software.
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Why is there an accusation of fraud?
On November 12, Donald Trump shared on Twitter an assertion by the one America News Network (OANN), a conservative media outlet, claiming that this software has “Wiped out 2.7 million Trump votes across the country”, but also that 221,000 votes in Pennsylvania, initially in favor of Donald Trump, were turned into votes for Joe Biden. A week later, Thursday November 19,
on Dominion, in which a reporter adds that the software suffers from numerous vulnerabilities that could explain why votes for Donald Trump were deleted. She quotes in particular the former administrator of the far-right 8chan forum, Ron Watkins, presented as an expert in computer security."Dominion-izing the Vote" https://t.co/ZOFsgDXsuH
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2020
On Twitter and Facebook, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress, Anna Paulina Luna, also reported “Whistleblowers” having worked for Dominion, and claiming, according to her, that votes were rigged using this electoral software.
For his part, outgoing president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani told another conservative channel Fox News on Sunday that Dominion was “A company of the radical left”.
“A foreign company, which has very close ties to Venezuela, and therefore China, and uses software from a Venezuelan company that has been used to steal elections in other countries. “
This accusation was echoed Thursday by Donald Trump’s team, during a press conference in which his lawyer, Sidney Powell, claimed that Dominion was software created by a Venezuelan company. She added that the technology was created by Venezuela’s former head of state Hugo Chavez to facilitate his own re-election. False Claims: Dominion Voting Systems has no connection with Venezuela.
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Are these accusations founded?
Le site de fact-checking Politifact points out that there have been problems in two states whose results are disputed by Donald Trump and which use the Dominion software. In Michigan, the software was not updated in a specific county, which led to a poor display of results giving Joe Biden the winner, but this error was corrected before the final county results were released.
In Georgia, in two counties, machines broke briefly on election day, but the problem was corrected by Dominion technicians, and polling station closures were pushed back for a few hours. These isolated incidents do not allow to doubt the veracity of the final results giving Joe Biden the winner.
To date, there is no firm evidence that Dominion was the subject of fraud, and the Republican camp has offered no evidence to support its accusations of sweeping cheating leading to Joe Biden’s victory. The government agency responsible for election security (CISA) itself declared on November 12 that there was no evidence of electoral fraud, and strongly contradicted outgoing President Donald Trump. “The election of November 3 was the most secure in the history of the United States”, the agency added. A few days later, Donald Trump announced the dismissal of Christopher Krebs, boss of this agency, which he himself had appointed in 2018.
On November 16, fifty-nine computer security experts elsewhere published an open letter, outraged that the fraud accusations were not supported by any evidence, and worried about the spread of such claims. Even the Fox News channel ruled that the accusations made by Donald Trump’s camp were not credible, both concerning Dominion and electoral fraud in general.
Dominion Voting Systems, for its part, defended itself in a press release against any failure of its software, and the home page of its site is now entirely devoted to refuting all accusations of fraud and malfunction including the software is the subject.
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Is the security of this software in doubt?
Since the 2016 presidential election, in which polling-related computer systems were targeted by hackers close to Russian intelligence, all electoral electronic equipment and software have come under close scrutiny by computer security specialists.
A report published in August 2019 by researchers who attended DefCon (a major cybersecurity conference) showed that many ballot-related equipment was still vulnerable to various types of cyber attacks, including material produced and edited by Dominion Voting Systems.
Vulnerabilities exist, but that doesn’t mean they’ve been exploited. First of all, the identified security vulnerabilities are linked to specific machines or specific networks. Altering millions of votes, as Donald Trump claimed, would involve a titanic fraud organization and very large numbers of participants – at present, no evidence to support this has been made public by the Donald Trump.
As computer security researchers wrote in a collective column published in mid-November: “Changing the course of an election requires much more than a simple technical vulnerability” on voting machines.
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