This conspiracy theory has been debunked by various experts as reported by Reuters here and other fact checkers including Snopes, Factcheck.org and PolitiFact here , here and here . Texas country-punk band Vandoliers are standing in solidarity with drag performers and the LGBTQ+ community. Last month Dominion filed a $1.6bn defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the bogus claims. Even though it has a blue Nashville and a blue Memphis. VERIFY: No, AT&T was not auditing voting machines inside a building AT&T and Verizon and so on try and protect as best they can the security of their phone network from the rest of the internet, but its still part of the internet, Appel explained. Representatives for companies involved say there is no truth to the claims. Thank you for supporting our journalism. Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday morning filed three $1.6 billion defamation lawsuits against two pro-Trump media networks and an outspoken Trump ally, the latest in a string of suits from the . Dominion Voting Systems lost a sale of more than 1,400 new machines on Wednesday after commissioners for Stark County, Ohio, voted down the purchase against a recommendation from the. He also serves on 16 boards and commissions, on two of which he is the presiding member. The City of Rochester government and police did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment. RUMOR ALERT: Dominion Voting Systems Fraud Claims Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos is not ruling out legal action against President Trump, whose surrogates have spent nearly two months alleging the Nov. 3 election, which Trump lost, may . Last fall, when ES&S gave NBC News an exclusive tour at its headquarters in Omaha, Neb., Chief Executive Officer Tom Burt defended using modems when asked about the Sprint and Verizon modems seen in ES&S's testing area. There is no evidence to support the claim that City Blue Imaging, a longtime Rochester, New York, printing business that went up in flames on Christmas Eve, was under investigation for printing fake ballots. Dominion was founded in the wake of a different controversy: the failure of punch-card voting machines and their infamous hanging chads in the 2000 election. DNA found at the scene matched Warner's, according to an FBI press release. Its true that an AT&T-owned building in Nashville was one of many buildings damaged in Fridays. Warner died in the blast, according to authorities. The question is.. David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994 as a creative outgrowth of his wide-ranging interests in a variety of subjects (particularly folklo read more. Cynthia McFadden is the senior legal and investigative correspondent for NBC News. IE 11 is not supported. Shasta cuts ties with Dominion amid unfounded voting fraud claims - Los The post implies that the bombing was an attempt to stop the audit and cover up voter fraud. Videos from law enforcement officials and local businesses show that the explosion occurred on 2nd Avenue North in downtown Nashville. These are real, tangible things coming out of these baseless accusations.". Read more about our fact-checking work here . False claims about the election, Nashville - mcall.com The cities of West Bend and Mequon's Dominion machine audit found one vote changed each after their hand counts. These two tech experts also agree on the path forward, saying they are comforted by the fact that most Americans will vote this year on hand-marked paper ballots which are counted by machine and can be recounted by hand if the situation warrants. Even for elections nights., Appel agreed. All rights reserved. Spokespeople for both AT&T and Dominion told USA TODAY that AT&T was not contracted to audit Dominion voting machines, and no Dominion voting machines were being held in the AT&T building outside of which the RV exploded. Modems in voting machines are a bad idea, said Appel. Skoglund says those include the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida. The claim implies the explosion was an elaborate plot to destroy voting machines that might have yielded evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. The "Vulture", Dominion Voting Systems, AT&T, CNN, and Twitter "You may want to read a book some day to learn about my reference to rising like a #phoenix. While the post does not specify which building they believed the machines were held in, a Dominion Voting Systems spokesperson said by email that none of their machines were anywhere in the. Dominion told AFP the claim is "another bizarre lie being spread by known conspiracy theorists.". FACT CHECK: Does Joe Biden's Brother-In-Law Own Dominion Voting Systems? subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here, Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. The company put the building back on the market shortly thereafter; MetLife Inc., throughsubsidiary Prefco Fourteen, now owns the building, public records show. The same Facebook post also said Dominion voting machines were being audited in the AT&T building that was destroyed by a bomb in Nashville. On Christmas Day, an RV in Nashville, Tennessee, exploded, severelydamaging many of the buildings around it in the explosion. No amount of transparency at the county and state level can really combat the sort of megaphone that Trump wields, Kiniry says. But to draw that connection, a number of other groups are brought into the fold and it doesn't add up. Then, a plume of smoke rises behind three light poles. Skoglund said that they identified only one company among the systems they detected on line, ES&S. Early Christmas morning, police in Nashville came across an RV parked on Second Avenue, outside an AT&T transmission building, whileresponding to reports of shots fired in the area, Metro Nashville Police spokesperson Don Aaron told The Tennessean that day. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which provides cybersecurity frameworks for state and local governments and other organizations, recommends that voting systems should not have wireless network connections. With unfounded fraud claims swirling, red California county dumps Dominion voting machines. Behind it is the notion that if voting systems are not online, hackers will have a harder time compromising them. On Monday, The Associated Press debunked claims that Dominion has any connection with AT&T. EDITORS NOTE (Feb. 7, 2020, 11:15 p.m.): A previous version of this article stated that Kevin Skoglund and his team had found election systems using ES&S scanners with wireless modems connected to the internet in 11 states and the District of Columbia. TheBatman-shaped skyscraper was first owned by Prefco XIV, a limited partnership ofPitney Bowes, which bought the building in 1994 for $100.8 million, according to the building's deed. The post was flagged as part of Facebooks efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. He claimed on his podcast that he'd infiltrated a call with Denver-area antifa members that included a man identified as "Eric from Dominion.". Conspiracy theorists say the suicide bombing that rocked downtown Nashville was actually the result of a missile strike. reads the post caption from Red Pill Radio, a Facebook account that bears the slogan of the, However, the firm cited in that version of the claim Cerberus Capital Management doesnt own Dominion nor is it connected to Staple Street Capital, which, PolitiFact's partnership with Facebook here, Our ethics policy for PolitiFact journalists, WRAL partners with PolitiFact NC to fact check political stories. These claims present no convincing evidence and include conspiracy links that have been debunked. With the 2020 presidential election only ten months away, Appel and Skoglund believe all modems can and should be removed from election systems. The machines America votes on seem to be capturing the interest of some in Congress. There is no evidence that suggests that the explosion was election-related. "When we're in the realm of coupling disinformation from both foreign and domestic sources, and government and nongovernment sources, and none of it is really grounded in reality evidence doesn't help much," he said. While the companys website states that zero of its voting tabulators are connected to the internet, ES&S told NBC News 14,000 of their DS200 tabulators with online modems are currently in use around the country. Shortly afterwards, social media users began circulating variants of a conspiracy theory holding that AT&T had been engaged to undertake a "forensic audit of Dominion voting machines," the latter of which were frequent targets of false election fraud claims made by President Donald Trump and his supports after Trump lost his re-election bid in November 2020: The implication of the conspiracy theory was that the explosion had been intended to destroy the machines before they were audited in order to cover up evidence of massive voting fraud. The bomb squad was en route. As of now, the person of interest identified by the FBI in connection with the explosion, Anthony Quinn Warner, is believed to have been "paranoid about 5G technology" (another frequent subject of conspiracy theories) rather than possessing any election-related motive. Recently, however, there are signs that elections companies, like some election officials, are pushing back against the false accusations. The FBI confirmed that a man named Anthony Warner was responsible for the bombing and was killed in the blast. The video, which was posted by a Facebook page called Red Pill Radio on Dec. 28, shows the outline of buildings and a highway in Nashville. hide caption. The accusation started with a conservative activist in Colorado, Joe Oltmann. AT&T not conducting voting machine audit near Nashville explosion site. AP'S ASSESSMENT: False. ( here and here ). It also claims the AT&T building that was affected by the bomb is where those machines were being stored. ", More:Nashville police bodycam footage shows raw moments of chaos before and after explosion. There is no evidence to support the claim that the explosionin Nashville and fire in Rochester, New York,that occurred around the holidays point toward a broader conspiracy to hide election malfeasance. Jim Greer, a spokesperson for AT&T,also told USA TODAY the claims are "not true.". 2023 Tennessee Secretaryof State |Web and Social Media Policies. So, the explosion just happened to be at the AT&T location where they just so happen to control the cooling system for the super computer and house the dominion voting machines and drives for forensic audit, Wait, the bombing in Nashville was at the AT&T data center right after they got the contract to audit the Dominion voting machines? read another post. That flood reached Dominion the week after the election, according to Zignal, and misinformation related to the company's machines has been mentioned more than 10 million times since then. In an all-caps tweet on Saturday night, Trump highlighted a report from One America News Network (OANN), a right-wing outlet, that claimed voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems. In 2006, Cerberus Capital acquired it, according to a 2006 News Channel 5 Nashville report. The printing business took to social media to debunk the claim itself. He has independently become part of the broader Dominion conspiracy theories, though, with some claiming he's Joe Biden's brother-in-law. There is no evidence that suggests that the explosion was election-related. NewsGuard, which vets news sources based on transparency and reliability standards, found recently that among the top 100 sources of news in the U.S., sources it deemed unreliable had four times as many interactions this year compared with 2019. The bomb is in this vehicle and will explode." That's false. Bogus conspiracy theory spreading online claims the Nashville bombing was an attempt to cover up voter fraud. This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. So many government officials like Manfra have said the same thing over the last few years that it is commonly accepted as gospel by most Americans. Reuters found no evidence that Cerberus Capital Management (www.cerberus.com/) owns Dominion. A Dominion spokeswoman said other company employees have also gone to more secure locations, been threatened and been digitally stalked. Democrats ask Fox not to push 'propaganda' on 2020 election Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. A team of election security experts used a Google for servers to challenge claims that voting machines do not connect to the internet and found some did. The 35 systems Skoglunds team found represent a fraction of total voting systems nationwide, though he believes they only captured a portion of the systems that are or have been online. Kevin Skoglund, senior technical advisor at the National Election Defense Coalition. Some users seemed to recognize the story as fake, but others didnt. The ATT building in Nashville that was affected by the bomb was owned by Cerebus (sic) Capital. Facebook post:The Nashville bombing was an attempt to stop an AT&T audit into Dominion software and cover up election corruption. If you have super majorities, Tennessee is like an R plus twenty state. On Tuesday, Coomer sued the Trump campaign and a number of allies, alleging defamation. We should be unplugging all of these machines from the internet, Skoglund said. Dominion is a company that supplies voting machines in more than two-dozen states, including Ohio. The full text on this page is automatically extracted from the file linked above and may contain errors and inconsistencies. Law enforcement authorities have suggested that Warner may have been paranoid about 5G technology, a QAnon-related conspiracy theory that makes an array of unproven claims including that ithelps spread COVID-19and is used as a spying tool by the government. Fact check: No, Joe Biden's brother-in-law does not own Dominion Voting Systems, Nashville police bodycam footage shows raw moments of chaos before and after explosion, Three firefighters hurt battling three-alarm blaze in Rochester, "Nashville bombing: What we know about downtown explosion on Christmas morning, FBI Memphis Special Agent in Charge Announces Identity of Remains Discovered in Nashville Explosion Site; Multi-Agency Investigation Continues, FBI identifies suspect in Nashville bombing, After devastating fire, City Blue Imaging looks toward future. 2023 www.statesman.com. Its true that an AT&T-owned building in Nashville was one of many buildings damaged in Fridays bombing, causing widespread communications outages. 'It was a missile strike': Trump fans go nuts claiming Nashville bomb The services and oversight found in the Secretary of State's office reach every department and agency in state government. New York State Police Director of Public Information Beau Duffy told Reuters via email they were unaware of any state police investigations relating to the claims linking the paper company to ballots. More:Neighbor recalls warning, countdown before Nashville explosion. Kevin Monahan is a producer for the NBC News Investigative Unit. On Christmas morning of 2020, a recreational vehicle exploded on the streets of Nashville near a building owned by AT&T that lies one block from the companys office tower. A widely sharedpost on Facebook alleges that four days before the bombing, a rumor circulated that AT&T was awarded a contract to audit Dominion's voting machines, which were supposedly being sent to Nashville. John Bazemore/AP Newsmax TV aired a stunning fact-check on Monday of claims made on the network about voting companies used in the 2020 presidential election. And I don't know that all these jurisdictions are aware of that because ES&S is advertising otherwise.. The three largest voting manufacturing companies Election Systems &Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic have acknowledged they all put modems in some of their tabulators. The AT&T buildingon Second Avenueis owned by BellSouth Telecommunications, an operating company of AT&T, according to local records. Fact check: Nashville bombing-Dominion Voting Systems link is a Now the process of counting these votes . Dominion Voting Systems Official Is In Hiding After Threats : NPR - NPR.org Reuters debunked this claim here . AT&T does not hold a contract to audit Dominions software or machines and did not have any of the companys equipment in its Nashville building. The post, which has been shared almost 900 times,makes two claims:A buildingdamaged in the Nashville explosion was holding Dominion Voting Systems machines set to be audited, and in New York, the company that burned was under investigation for printing and shipping fake ballots to Pennsylvania. All of these businesses were reported to be damaged in the blast (here). In the wake of the Christmas morning explosion in Nashville, Tenn., a baseless conspiracy theory started circulating online that claims Nashvilles downtown AT&T complex, which was damaged in the blast, had gotten a contract to conduct a "forensic audit" on Dominion Voting Systems machines. Dominion Voting Systems Inc - Company Profile and News Claims that two buildings that were destroyed on Christmas Day were both holding evidence related to the 2020 U.S. presidential election are untrue. Those modems that ES&S [and other manufacturers] are putting in their voting machines are network connections, and that leaves them vulnerable to hacking by anybody who can connect to that network.. "You can see as theres a line flying in, theres a little bit of a glow and then theres the explosion," a narrator says in the video. Report spreads debunked claims about Dominion machines in Michigan "Thats an interesting coincidence.". An Expert on Voting Machines Explains How They Work - Scientific American Once they had identified such systems, they contacted the relevant election officials and also provided the information to reporter Kim Zetter, who published the findings in Vices Motherboard in August. All rights reserved. Some of that money was spent on tabulators with wireless modems. Full text of Commercial and Financial Chronicle : April 6, 1940, Vol MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has promised for months since the 2020 election that he had obtained Dominion, Smartmatic and ES&S voting machines, and they would be on full. Social media posts from the event tagged the far-right group the Proud Boys. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. Dominion Voting Systems story should terrify AZ - The Arizona Republic There can still be security holes that allow hackers to get into the phone network.. Jake Rollow, director of communications for the Michigan Department of State, said in a statement to NBC News, Even though the results are unofficial, if these unofficial results were disrupted or manipulated, it could still cause confusion on Election Day., "The department will consider the advisory commissions recommendations to improve the security of the process," Rollow continued. The bomb was located in a recreational vehicle owned by Warner. Please note the instructions and videos shown here have been prepared by the manufacturers and are general in nature. "I'm in fear for my family's safety. Generally speaking, the media in those locations are kinda clamoring to get unofficial results as quickly as possible., When asked if the desire for speed was at odds with accuracy and security, Burt said, its not my place to judge that.. Americans should continue to seek information from verifiable, trusted sources, such as law enforcement authorities, Dominion Voting Systems added. Jim Greer, associate vice president for corporate communications at AT&T, was blunt in an email response to PolitiFact: "That is not true," he wrote. "It does appear that the intent was more destruction than death," said David Rausch, director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, inan interview on NBC's "Today." Yet internet sleuths are searching for their own answers, some looking atthin ties toconspiracy theories about the 2020 election as evidence of a broader plot. . The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has dismissed the claim of an election hacking and vote manipulation operation known as Hammer and Scorecard. (here). Didi Martinez is an associate producer with the NBC News Investigative Unit. Dominion Voting Systems, a company beset by dubious election fraud claims in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, said "human error" was to blame after machines in a Pennsylvania. Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software. The explosion disrupted AT&T wireless and internet services, leading to widespread 911 issues in the Nashville area, The Tennessean reported. All those. After that podcast went out, the threats quickly arrived. In an email to PolitiFact, a Dominion spokesperson said the company and AT&T are calling on everyone to reject these baseless rumors: "Americans should continue to seek information from verifiable, trusted sources, such as law enforcement authorities.". The broadcast then began a 15-minute countdown,before the RV exploded, according to The Tennessean. Much of the voting equipment was by Dominion. . SIOUX FALLS, S.D. Mike Lindell Claims Dominion Voting 'Cover-Up' Is 'Coming Apart' The bomber was lateridentified by U.S. Attorney Don Cochranas Anthony Warner, 63, according to The Tennessean. So did the type of explosives used to detonate the blast. In February, Dominion filed a lawsuit against Lindell and his company, alleging he defamed them by repeatedly claiming to have evidence their voting machines fraudulently flipped votes. Select an Infowars smear of Dominion Voting Systems. Spokespeople for both AT&T and Dominion have confirmed that AT&T did not hold a contract to audit Dominion, nor had any of Dominions equipment been moved to Nashville in preparation for such an audit. Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers' Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo How Eric Coomer Became the 'Perfect Villain' for Voting Conspiracists Spokespeople for AT&T and Dominion confirmed to the AP that AT&T had no contract to audit Dominion machines, and no Dominion machines were to be sent to Nashville. The House Committee on Administration held a congressional hearing yesterday which was the first time the heads of the three major vendors, representing at least 80 percent of U.S. voting machines, appeared together for questioning. Dominion Voting Systems previously sent OAN letters threatening to sue, accusing the network of spreading the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that the election-technology company manipulated. Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook. Some of Trump's supporters have focused on Coomer as the supposed evil mastermind. In the weeks following the election, the election technology firm Dominion Voting Systems has been the target of baseless allegations of election fraud, according to the Washington Post.Now a viral Facebook post attempts to connect President-elect Joe Biden to the company by claiming his sister is married to Stephen Owens, who, the post alleges, owns Dominion Voting Systems. A Michigan judge ordered the release Monday of an independent forensic audit report of the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Antrim County, which flipped from a win for Democrat Joe Biden to President Donald Trump after a glitch was discovered and corrected. The post implies that the bombing was an attempt to stop the audit and cover up voter fraud. Did AT&T Have a Contract to Audit Dominion Voting Systems? The post also mentions the Kraken or supercomputer and says that the cooling system for this computer was located in the AT&T building. Note that aspects of Tennessee law may differ with what is seen on the videos. The AT&T building the posts likely refer to was not the one outside which the bomb exploded on Christmas morning. One of the largest voting machine suppliers in the U.S. Dominion Voting Systems sued Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who represented former President Donald Trump, after they . Some posts take the claim a step further, alleging that the former owner of the building was a board member of a firm that owns Dominion. The building of City Blue Imaging (www.cityblueimaging.com/), a printing company in Rochester, New York, burnt down on Christmas morning after catching fire the night before ( here , here and here ). A spokesperson for Dominion Voting Systems told Reuters via email: Dominion calls on the media and the public to reject the baseless rumors circulating on social media, which suggest without evidence that there was some election-related connection to the Nashville explosion.. See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays. Shasta will be the first of 40 California counties that used Dominion in the November 2022 election to drop the voting system, Shasta County Clerk/Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen told the . Once a hacker starts talking to the voting machine through the modem, the hacker cannot just change these unofficial election results, they can hack the software in the voting machine and make it cheat in future elections, he said. Dominion Going After Right-Wing Media Stars Over Voting Fraud Joe Bidens Brother in Law, Steven Owens, is the cofounder of Staple Street Execs along with William Kennard (mentioned above).. Dominionwas acquired by private equity firm Staple Street Capital, co-founded by financiers Hootan Yaghoobzadeh and StephenOwens, in 2018. Fact-checkers have debunked claims that the explosion was the result of a missile strike. "Bombing investigations can take years," Darrell DeBusk, an FBI spokesman based inTennessee, told The Tennessean. Last week, Dominion filed its fourth defamation lawsuit, this one a $1.6 billion whopper charging that Fox News spread the bogus conspiracy claim in order to boost ratings that plummeted after. for the blast that rattled downtown Nashville on Christmas morning, social media users have invented their own far-fetched theories. THE FACTS: As federal officials work to piece together a motive for the blast that rattled downtown Nashville on Christmas morning, social media users have invented their own far-fetched theories. It's just the latest example of how people's lives are being upended and potentially ruined by the unprecedented flurry of disinformation this year. But election integrity advocates worry the disinformation won't truly begin to recede until political leaders such as Trump stop questioning the election's legitimacy. Everyone Dominion, Smartmatic Suing Over Election Conspiracy - Insider