The Wall Street Journal editorial board is bored with Trump's Dominion voting machine conspiracies

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published 18 November 2020

You won't get far reading or hearing about why President Trump actually beat President-elect Joe Biden without coming across Dominion Voting, a company that provides voting equipment to 28 states. Trump himself tweets conspiracy theories about Dominion, but "where's the evidence?" The Wall Street Journal asked in an editorial Wednesday. "Strong claims need strong proof, not rumors and innuendo on Twitter."

The Journal's editorialists sift through various claims and shoot them down — no, Dominion isn't tied to prominent Democrats or Venezuela; the handful of problems were caused by human error and corrected; there's no evidence any votes were switched, despite Trump's wild claims.

"No voting system is foolproof, and hiccups are inevitable in a country with roughly 3,000 counties," the Journal's editorial board notes. "The distributed nature of American elections is a strength on this point, since voting is handled by innumerable local officials instead of a few central authorities." So far, there's no good evidence of any voting problems that would come close to erasing Biden's leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or even Georgia, the editorialists write. Then they play the don't-be-like-Democrats card:

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If Georgia's recount doesn't find big irregularities, then these claims should be put to rest. In the George W. Bush years, the conspiratorial left focused on Diebold, a maker of electronic voting machines. It would be a mistake for anyone on the right to go down a similar dead end, especially if Georgia's paper ballots give the same result as the computers. [The Wall Street Journal]

There were certainly conspiracy theories swirling around Diebold, especially in the 2004 election, but the company also had pretty serious security issues and other problems with its voting software and hardware. That's a big reason it got out of the voting business in 2009.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.