One America News ran an extensive disclaimer before the broadcast.
The 2020 presidential election was three months ago, but one of the biggest backers of the false theory that it was rigged against former President Donald J. Trump has not given up his hope of overturning the results.
On Friday, Mike Lindell, the embattled chief executive of MyPillow who helped finance Mr. Trump’s legal efforts to challenge election results, aired a falsehood-laden film about election fraud on One America News.
The network promoted the two-hour film, titled “Absolute Proof,” on Twitter Thursday, urging viewers to join Mr. Lindell “for a never-before-seen report breaking down election fraud evidence & showing how the unprecedented level of voter fraud was committed in the 2020 Presidential Election.”
There has been no substantial evidence of fraud in the election, which President Biden won. Mr. Lindell’s theories have led to Twitter removing him and MyPillow from its platform and several major retailers cutting ties with the pillow manufacturer.
Before showing the film on Friday, the network ran an extensive disclaimer that described Mr. Lindell as “solely and exclusively responsible for its content,” and noted that “this program is not the product of OAN’s reporting” and was “presented at this time as opinions only.”
YouTube took down “Absolute Proof” on Friday, saying it violated the company’s presidential election integrity policy, which prohibits false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches changed the outcome of the vote.
Two companies that provide election technology, Dominion and Smartmatic, have filed defamation suits in recent weeks against people and organizations that have made baseless claims about the companies.
Here are three much-examined areas that come up in the film. One America and Mr. Lindell did not respond to requests for comment.
1. No, Dominion files were not manipulated.
The crux of many arguments that election fraud occurred, and repeated in Mr. Lindell’s film, is the unsubstantiated claim that Dominion software was somehow manipulated to delete votes for Mr. Trump, or to hide some sort of conspiracy.
Many of these unsubstantiated claims stem from an instance in Antrim County, Mich., when a clerical error in reporting results led the county to initially show a landslide vote in favor of Mr. Biden. The error was soon corrected, but conspiracy theorists have latched onto the incident as evidence that voting was rigged.
Files “were deleted from the Dominion system in Antrim County. We know that for a fact,” Matt DePerno, a lawyer who has fought to investigate the incident, told Mr. Lindell in the film. “Wow,” Mr. Lindell responded.
There has been no evidence that votes were manipulated in the county, and a hand-counted audit of votes in December affirmed the outcome there.
2. No, foreign countries did not interfere with voting machines.
Mr. Lindell interviewed retired Army Col. Phil Waldron, another member of the movement that fought to overturn the election. Mr. Waldron, who said his military background involves “information warfare,” pushed the unfounded claim that the Chinese government invested money in Dominion and therefore has access to its files and data.
“A lot of movements of votes, direct access to Pennsylvania voting precincts, county tabulation centers, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, all of that coming directly from foreign countries, China being the predominant one,” Mr. Waldron said.
He also claimed that overseas servers in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom somehow played a role in manipulating results. The manipulation, Mr. Waldron said, was “part of a coup that was aided and abetted by a foreign-threat nation-state, a peer enemy nation-state: China.”
Election officials and cybersecurity experts have said there is no credible evidence that China helped Mr. Biden win the election.
3. No, votes for Biden were not counted multiple times.
Melissa Carone, an information technology worker who said she was contracted by Dominion for the election, was brought on the show to tell Mr. Lindell that she watched thousands of ballots run through voting machines without ever seeing a single vote for Mr. Trump.
Ms. Carone, whose testimony was ruled “not credible” by a Michigan judge in November, told Mr. Lindell that when ballots jammed inside the machine, people tabulating the votes were re-scanning dozens of ballots and counting them twice.
“It’s like counting a deck of cards, you could sit there and run the same deck of cards through this tabulator over and over and over again,” Mr. Lindell observed.
Michigan election officials have said that ballots were “not scanned multiple times inappropriately.”
"claim" - Google News
February 06, 2021 at 07:22AM
https://ift.tt/3rq3vkr
Three false claims about the election made in Mike Lindell’s new film. - The New York Times
"claim" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2FrzzOU
https://ift.tt/2VZxqTS
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Three false claims about the election made in Mike Lindell’s new film. - The New York Times"
Post a Comment