‘I Looked Into it’: Steve Doocy Debunks Trump’s Dominion Software Voter Fraud Conspiracy
Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy effectively shot down the notion that a software glitch of a voting machine company changed thousands of votes from President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.
Ordinarily, this would be a relatively pedestrian setting-the-record-straight instance for morning television. But the fact that Doocy is directly countering Fox News colleague Sean Hannity, and President Trump, is a rather remarkable moment for the pro-Trump morning show.
It happened during a Fox & Friends interview with legal professor Jonathan Turley, who baselessly claimed that thousands of votes in Michigan had been changed by the aforementioned software. “In Michigan, you had thousands of votes that were given to Biden that belonged to Trump,” Turley claimed. “Now, that doesn’t mean it was a nefarious purpose. This is a new software that apparently is vulnerable to human error.”
“I looked into it,” Doocy opened, correcting the record. “With that Dominion software, five counties in Michigan and Georgia had problems,” Doocy added, apparently citing a New York Times report that came to the same conclusion. “And the Dominion software was used in two of the counties and in every instance largely it was human error, a problem, but the software did not affect the vote counts.”
The latest conspiracy of voter fraud making the rounds in pro-Trump media circles is that a software glitch unfairly switched as many as hundreds of thousands of votes from Trump to Biden. On Thursday, Trump tweeted a debunked report from fringe-network OAN in all caps:
OAN “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN.”
Later Thursday night, Trump tweeted a Hannity segment, proclaiming that states in question “should immediately be put in the Trump win column,” parading his ignorance on how state-by-state electoral systems or legal challenges work.
To be fair, in the segment about potential systemic voter fraud, Hannity did clarify “I can’t say definitively tonight that happened. I don’t know — I can barely download an app.” It is a curious statement from an individual suggesting a grand and complex technology conspiracy.
The Associated Press has shot down this conspiracy theory, as has Internet hoax debunker Snopes has also called claims of Dominion vote switching false. Simply put, as of now there currently are no reputable outlets that are alleging that Dominion software glitches unfairly changed any election results, despite repeated claims made by pro-Trump surrogates.
Update – Mediate has received the following statement from Sean Hannity:
I never said votes were changed. As a matter of fact, I went out of my way to say I have no way of knowing if anything nefarious happened.
I did explain why Texas rejected their program twice in 2019, and once in 2013. I explained the criticism of the system that was printed in the NY Times, The criticism the system received from AP, and the criticism of the system from Princeton professor. They are all on the record being critical of the system.
I also added Dominion’s statement to my show that they believe the issue in Michigan was a human error.
I also added the American people only deserve the best system available, and if we as a country want confidence and integrity in election results, we owe to every American voter to have republican and democratic engineers examine the system.
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