Patricia Calhoun
Audio By Carbonatix
For almost five years now, Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems has stayed busy “setting the record straight” on its home page, countering endless, and baseless, accusations about election-rigging in the November 2020 election.
Those accusations were fueled by the presidential candidate who lost that election: On November 12, 2020, Donald Trump tweeted this: “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.”
Dominion — which moved its headquarters from Canada to Colorado in 2009, and provides voting systems for a majority of the states in this country, as well as almost all Colorado counties — fought off attacks like those tweeted by Trump and repeated by his minions. As the site notes, “Numerous third-party reviews, recounts, and audits have consistently affirmed the security and accuracy of our systems, including judges and courts of law.”
Among other things, the Dominion “has taken legal action to set the record straight and defend our company,” the site says. “We have secured favorable court rulings in defamation lawsuits against Newsmax Media, Inc. & Newsmax Broadcasting, LLC and Fox News Network, LLC & Fox Corporation, reaching a historic settlement with Fox in 2023 that marked one of the largest defamation settlements in U.S. history.”
And now it has one more: On September 26, the $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit that Dominion filed in January 2021 against Rudy Guiliani, which accused the former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer of “a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion” consisting of “demonstrably false” allegations, was dismissed after a settlement was reached.
The terms of that settlement are confidential…but with other recent losses, Guiliani doesn’t have much left to give.
This wasn’t the only recent action involving election rumors, either. Also on September 26, a federal judge in Minnesota ruled that MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who lost his Dominion defamation suit this summer, had defamed Smartmatic, another election company. That case stemmed from Lindell’s accusation that California Smartmatic machines were rigged to change votes for Donald Trump to votes for Joe Biden in 2020.
By the way, the Dominion “setting the record straight” page notes this: “Dominion and Smartmatic are separate companies. Dominion does not use or license Smartmatic software.” Nor does Dominion have connections to the Chinese government or George Soros, it adds.
This has been a winning season for Dominion. In June, a jury determined that Lindell had defamed then-Dominion employee Eric Coomer, although the size of the judgment was less than Coomer was going for. Then again, Lindell could be more broke than Guiliani at this point. Lindell has said he’s going to appeal the judgment; in the meantime, he has enough faith in the election system that he’s eying a run for governor of Minnesota.
Dominion’s reputation took a major hit through all the election-denial campaigns; employees were threatened, and the company had to change offices several times, moving from its original home in the Old Spaghetti Factory building downtown to various private, and protected, spaces. No payments from America’s one-time mayor or a disgraced pillow magnate are going to soften those blows.
