John Poulos, Dominion CEO, says company did not switch, delete votes

Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos shot down allegations that his company flipped votes away from President Trump, testifying Tuesday that any errors in vote-counting in states that used his technology were made by humans, not his product.

Mr. Poulos was testifying under oath to Michigan lawmakers, who are probing the 2020 election and trying to get to the bottom of President Trump’s claims of nationwide massive fraud.

But in Georgia, another state where Mr. Trump says he was denied a rightful victory, the Republican secretary of state said the problem wasn’t the vote-counting, the problem was the president and his team got out-hustled.

“The job of a political party, in this case the Republican Party, is to raise money and get out the vote. They got outworked,” Brad Raffensperger, the secretary, said in an online forum hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Mr. Trump continued to fuel questions surrounding the election, a day after the Electoral College met in state capitals across the country and cast ballots to make Democrat Joseph R. Biden the winner.

“Tremendous evidence pouring in on voter fraud,” the president tweeted on Tuesday. “There has never been anything like this in our Country!”

The president and his supporters have zeroed in on Dominion, which supplies voting technology for jurisdictions in 28 states. This week Allied Security Operations Group, an outfit that claims to have studied the voting patterns in Michigan’s Antrim County, a Dominion client, released a report alleging a massive error rate.

The GOP-leaning county initially showed Mr. Biden with a vote lead. Those results were corrected.

Mr. Poulos said the problems were “human error,” not the technology. He said local officials didn’t update tabulator machines properly.

The local county clerk, a Republican, also pushed back on the report blaming Dominion technology, according to The Detroit News.

“I did read the report and find that there are many misleading statements that are simply not accurate,” Sheryl Guy said.

A similar dynamic has played out across the country, with Mr. Trump and his supporters making claims and local officials — often Republicans — shooting them down as either out of context or flatly wrong.

Mr. Poulos rebuffed claims that his company, where he remains CEO though he sold a majority stake in 2018, has overseas servers, could be breached over the internet, and has ties to the late Venezuela dictator Hugo Chavez or China — all of which have been claimed by critics this year.

The CEO said those allegations were “beyond bizarre” and “complete lies.”

He acknowledged past ties to Smartmatic, founded by three Venezuelan engineers and later bought by a company in which the Venezuelan government had an ownership stake. But he said that partnership with Smartmatic ended.

“We certainly do not use any of their intellectual property or source code,” he told the Michigan Senate’s oversight committee.

He told lawmakers questions about voter eligibility and registration have to be directed to election officials.

“We do not run elections,” he said.

Mr. Raffensperger compared combatting rumors to playing the arcade game Whac-A-Mole, with a new rumor popping up each time a previous one had been deflated.

“There’s no truth to anything, everything they’ve said, we have the facts on our side,” he declared.

He said suggestions that Mr. Trump was denied victory by fraud weren’t true — and the other results in the state prove it. Republican House candidates combined won 33,000 more votes than Mr. Trump. And in the Atlanta metropolitan area, Sen. David Perdue, a Republican, ran 19,000 votes ahead of Mr. Trump, suggesting the issue wasn’t fraud but voters who uniquely rejected the president’s reelection bid.

Mr. Trump lost the state to Mr. Biden by 12,000 votes.

Mr. Raffensperger said Mr. Trump was a victim of “his whole campaign strategy.”

He spoke on a virtual panel with the secretaries of state for Pennsylvania and Michigan and the elections director in Wisconsin. Along with Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina, they represent the critical battlegrounds in this year’s election.

They characterized the disconnect between claims by Mr. Trump’s supporters and the reality of the election as a matter of expertise and experience.

“For most people the election process is new and mysterious to them every four years,” said Meagan Wolfe, director of Wisconsin’s Election Commission.

The Survey of the Performance of American Elections, run by the MIT Election Data & Science Lab, shows the losing party is usually more ready to be suspect of the results of an election, with Republicans generally more suspicious.

In 2012, when President Obama won reelection, 84% of Democrats were confident the outcome was correct. That dipped to 69% when Mr. Trump won in 2016, but soared to 93% this year. By contrast just 44% of Republicans were confident of the vote in 2012, rising to 80% in Mr. Trump’s victory, plummeting to just 23% this time.

Despite Mr. Trump’s warnings about mail-in voting, support for the idea rose in 2020 compared to 2016, according to the SPAE. That was powered chiefly by Democrats embracing the idea.

A bigger surprise, though, was a rise in support for photo ID among Democrats.

Party leaders are generally opposed to asking voters to show ID, and indeed have proposed legislation in Congress to eliminate state ID rules. But voters overall — including rank-and-file Democrats — find the prospect of showing ID appealing.

Charles Stewart, founding director of the Election Lab, presented those findings during the BPC’s virtual forum Tuesday.