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More than a year after the company reached a record-breaking settlement with Fox News over similar claims, Elon Musk promoted a debunked conspiracy theory that suggested Dominion Voting Systems had manipulated the outcome of the 2020 election.
During a town hall in Pennsylvania to promote Donald Trump’s campaign on Thursday, the world’s wealthiest man rattled off a series of false claims about elections, including alluding to a conspiracy theory that Dominion was part of a plot to rig the election against Trump.
“When you have mail-in ballots and no proof of citizenship, it’s almost impossible to prove cheating,” he said. “Statistically there are some very strange things that happen that are statistically incredibly unlikely. There’s always this question of, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they were used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County [Arizona] but not in a lot of other places. Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?”
He added that “the last thing I would do is trust a computer program.”
The following day, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia claimed that a Dominion machine “changed” a voter’s ballot in her district. Early voting in the state started this week.
“It had switched,” she told conspiracy theory-fuelled media network InfoWars on Friday.
“They had to start over, and they went through it several times, and it kept on making the same error. Kept on switching the votes. And so this is something we’re just starting to look into today … We will be following up.”
A spokesperson for Dominion told The Independent that he company’s “understanding from the county is this instance was voter error and has since been resolved.”
“The false claim that voting machines can switch votes has been repeatedly debunked.”
Last year, Fox News agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit from Dominion that accused the network of spreading false statements about its business in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. The network settled for more than $787 million, marking the largest-ever settlement of its kind in American history.
Dominion has also filed lawsuits against former Trump-allied attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and election conspiracy theorists Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne, as well as right-wing media networks One America News and Newsmax, over similarly false statements about the company.
A Dominion spokesperson refuted Musk’s statements: “Fact: Dominion does not serve Philadelphia County. Fact: Dominion’s voting systems are already based on voter verified paper ballots. Fact: Hand counts and audits of such paper ballots have repeatedly proven that Dominion machines produce accurate results. These are not matters of opinion. They are verifiable facts.”
Election officials, courts and Trump’s own administration and campaign have failed to produce any evidence of widespread election fraud. Musk’s suggestion that Dominion produced irregularities in Arizona and Pennsylvania — two states that Trump lost in 2020 — is also not grounded in reality; election officials from both parties have repeatedly verified the results in those states, and the company’s machines were not even used in Philadelphia.
The persistent false narrative that Trump lost the 2020 election due to fraud also fuels his 2024 campaign. At least 14 of the 82 state electors chosen to represent the Republican Party this year are tied to “fake elector” schemes in several states. Some are currently under criminal prosecution. Another 16 falsely believe President Joe Biden only won because of widespread fraud.
