NYT, Nov. 20, 2020
How Sidney Powell inaccurately cited Venezuela’s elections as evidence
of U.S. fraud.
By Linda Qiu
Sidney Powell, a lawyer on President Trump’s election legal team who
represented the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, has
been a major source and promoter of viral conspiracy theories about vote
switching.
Since the election, Ms. Powell has advanced claims of voluminous voter
fraud and a rigged election. She falsely claimed that a supercomputer
called Hammer hacked votes, that Mr. Trump won the election by “millions
of votes” and that voting software company Dominion Voting Systems
altered the tallies.
Last week, she promised that coming evidence would overturn the
election’s results and said she would “release the Kraken,” a reference
to the 1981 movie “The Clash of the Titans,” reprising a catchphrase
that began trending on Twitter.
On Monday, Ms. Powell posted some of her so-called evidence on Twitter.
It consisted of three screenshots of an affidavit that she said was
signed by a former military official from Venezuela about elections
there. The screenshots were incomplete and did not include a name or
signature, and Ms. Powell did not respond to requests to view the full
document.
But according to her and excerpts from the affidavit, the elections
software company Smartmatic helped the Venezuelan government rig its
elections by switching votes and leaving no trail. The military official
said in the excerpts that the U.S. election was “eerily reminiscent” of
what happened in Venezuela’s 2013 presidential election, though no
evidence was provided that votes had been switched in the United States.
Ms. Powell promoted the affidavit and its claims in interviews on
conservative media that have amassed at least four million views on YouTube.
Smartmatic does not provide technology to the battleground states that
sealed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. And electronic
voting security experts said they were unimpressed with what Ms. Powell
presented.
“The essence of the affidavit is that voting machines could have been
hacked. This is not news,” said David Dill, a computer scientist at
Stanford University and founder of the Verified Voting Foundation.
“Every single vote that has been counted by computer in the U.S. in the
last 50 years was counted by a computer that ‘could have been hacked.’
So far as I know, none of them actually were.”
Dan Wallach, a professor of computer science at Rice University and an
expert on electronic voting system security, said: “If this class of
attack was happening, the odds of it going undetected is quite low. So
far, we have no evidence suggesting an abnormal number of spoiled ballots.”
Previous claims that Smartmatic’s voting machines were rigged in
Venezuela have been disputed and are “unsubstantiated,” according to The
Associated Press. It’s worth noting that Smartmatic accused the
Venezuelan government of election fraud in 2017, pointing out that its
machines were used when the opposition party won a majority in the
country’s National Assembly in 2015.
The excerpts from Ms. Powell also included numerous inaccurate claims to
imply a similarity between Venezuela’s elections and the U.S. election,
chiefly drawing dubious parallels between Smartmatic and Dominion, which
was used in several key states. Ms. Powell took the claims one step
further, telling the right-wing media company Newsmax that Venezuela’s
vote counting system was then “exported” to the United States.
The official she cited also said that Dominion’s system was “a
descendant” of Smartmatic’s system, that they “did business together”
and that Mr. Biden had overtaken Mr. Trump only when “vote counting was
stopped.”
Smartmatic and Dominion have denied any exchange of technology and
maintain that they are competitors. Dominion bought assets from a
company three years after Smartmatic sold the company. And Mr. Biden
overtook Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania and Georgia after days of consistent
counting, while maintaining a lead in Arizona that narrowed as tallying
continued.
The official also claimed to Ms. Powell that voting machines display and
print out a paper ballot showing the results the voter intended, while
the software itself “changes the information electronically.” But
Dominion’s system does not work like that.
“The process that we see happening in Georgia and elsewhere that use
similar ‘ballot marking device’ systems,” Mr. Wallach said, “is that the
voter selects their choices with a computer of some sort, which then
prints their ballot. The voter then typically carries that ballot to a
ballot box, often with a scanner on top, and deposits the ballot.”
Any difference or attack on the tabulation system would be caught in
postelection recounts, and “so far, none of them have caught anything
other than human errors in the tabulation process, such as forgetting to
load a memory card,” he said.
Mr. Dill said: “Courts demand strong evidence to overturn an election.
From that perspective, this affidavit does not help make a case.”
Linda Qiu is a fact-check reporter, based in Washington. She came to The
Times in 2017 from the fact-checking service PolitiFact. @ylindaqiu
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