Trump’s legal team claims issues with Dominion voting software

President Trump’s legal team on Sunday said accusations of rigged voting machines not only cast doubt on the election results but also demand a national security investigation.

Dominion Voting Systems’ widely used ballot-scanning machines and vote tabulation software are suspected of inflating vote totals for presumed President-elect Joseph R. Biden. Those suspicions so far are not fully substantiated.

The company, however, is not a stranger to election integrity concerns, including a corporate lineage with links to the late Venezuelan socialist strongman Hugo Chavez.

“It was designed to rig elections,” Sidney Powell, a leader of the Trump legal team, told Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo on her “Sunday Morning Futures” program.

Ms. Powell said Mr. Trump should fire CIA Director Gina Haspel for allowing the software to be used throughout the U.S.

“It should never have been installed anywhere,” she said.

Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, another point man for the Trump legal team, called for a national security investigation.

“It was used to cheat in elections in South America,” he said. “I can’t imagine you would [use] that unless you were out of your mind.”

The suspicions stem from the discovery on election night that Dominion ballot scanners and software switched 6,000 votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden in Antrim County, Michigan. The mix-up was caught and corrected, and the correction is reflected in Mr. Biden’s 150,000-vote lead in Michigan’s tally.

Speculation of widespread vote switching ensued because Dominion Voting Systems provides voting technology to more than two dozen states. The company claims on its website to service 40% of America’s voters.

Claims that the company’s technology could have been manipulated adds to the drama of Mr. Trump’s election challenges, which includes a barrage of state and federal lawsuits to reverse Mr. Biden’s projected win.

“Rigged election. We will win,” Mr. Trump tweeted Sunday in all capital letters.

The left-leaning mainstream media outlets dismiss concerns about Dominion voting machines as a conspiracy theory.

The Associated Press reported in a “fact check” that there was no evidence to support Mr. Trump’s claims that election technology deleted large numbers of votes for him.

“I never say anything I can’t prove,” Ms. Powell said.

Dominion said allegations that its machines contributed to election fraud are “100% false.”

“Dominion Voting Systems categorically denies false assertions about vote switching issues with our voting systems,” the company said in a statement posted on its website.

The website linked to a report by the Homeland Security Department’s cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency report vouching for the integrity of the Nov. 3 election.

“The systems and processes used by election officials to tabulate votes and certify official results are protected by various safeguards that help ensure the accuracy of election results. These safeguards include measures that help ensure tabulation systems function as intended, protect against malicious software, and enable the identification and correction of any irregularities,” the security agency’s report said.

Republican officials raised alarm when a Dominion ballot-scanning machine in the Republican stronghold of Antrim County reported unofficial results showing Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump by about 3,000 votes.

Election officials then discovered the ballot scanner and reporting software had been misconfigured and gave votes for Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. After fixing the mistake, Mr. Trump won the county by roughly 2,500 votes.

Michigan officials blamed the mix-up on human error.

Critics contend that voting machines that are vulnerable to accidental vote-switching could be manipulated by bad actors.

It’s not only Trump supporters making accusations of potential ballot tampering through Dominion’s machines and software.

Georgia poll watcher Garland Favorito, a co-founder of the election integrity group Vote GA, identified suspicious ballot counts in a sworn affidavit filed to the Georgia secretary of state.

“I concluded from looking at these results that this was an irregularity, since there was no obvious reason for President Trump’s totals to have decreased while former Vice President Biden’s totals increased dramatically,” he said in the affidavit.

He witnessed an unexplained 20,000-vote increase for Mr. Biden and a 1,000-vote decrease for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Favorito, who said he is neither a Republican nor a Trump supporter, said the “artificially inflated” votes for Mr. Biden emanated from the same Dominion software used in Michigan.

“The software appears to have thrown votes from Trump to Biden here too,” he told Real Clear Investigations. “Or Biden ballots were manufactured.”

A recount is underway in Georgia.

Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts led three other Democratic lawmakers in warning that Dominion Voting Systems and two other voting technology firms were “trouble-plagued” and “prone to security problems.”

The letters demanding answers from the companies were also signed by Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin.

Dominion’s corporate origins trace back to Smartmatic, a voting technology company established in 2000 that had ties to Chavez.

Smartmatic was founded by three Venezuelan engineers and incorporated in Delaware with headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida. By 2004, the company had vastly expanded and bought Bizta, an electronic voting company in which Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government both owned large stakes.

In 2005, Smartmatic bought Sequoia, one of the top U.S. companies producing automated voting systems.

U.S. officials began to take notice.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, New York Democrat, wrote in May 2006 to Treasury Secretary John W. Snow demanding an investigation of Venezuelan government influence in U.S. voting systems.

“As you can imagine, having a foreign government invest in or buy a company that services U.S. elections could raise concerns about the integrity of the elections conducted by these machines,” she wrote.

Subsequent scrutiny of Sequoia voting and optical scan machines, which basically were rebranded Smartmatic systems, found tabulation errors similar to those of disputed elections under Chavez in Venezuela.

While under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., Smartmatic in 2006 sold Sequoia to Bain Capital, the corporate raider firm with ties to Sen. Mitt Romney, Utah Republican.

In 2010, Sequoia was purchased by Dominion, at the time a little-known Canadian company that manufactured voting machines.