PRES. JR BIDEN JR 100DAYS/Day18: WASHINGTON- Three False Election Claims Made in Mike Lindell’s New Film

There has been no substantial evidence of fraud in the election, which President Joe Biden won. 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 Friday, the network ran an extensive disclaimer that described 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 Lindell did not respond to requests for comment.

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1. No, Dominion files were not manipulated.

The crux of many arguments that election fraud occurred, and repeated in Lindell’s film, is the unsubstantiated claim that Dominion software was somehow manipulated to delete votes for Trump, or to hide some sort of conspiracy.

Many of these unsubstantiated claims stem from an instance in Antrim County, Michigan, when a clerical error in reporting results led the county to initially show a landslide vote in favor of 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 Lindell in the film. “Wow,” 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.

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2. No, foreign countries did not interfere with voting machines.

Lindell interviewed retired Army Col. Phil Waldron, another member of the movement that fought to overturn the election. 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,” Waldron said.

He also claimed that overseas servers in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom somehow played a role in manipulating results. The manipulation, 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 Biden win the election.

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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 Lindell that she watched thousands of ballots run through voting machines without ever seeing a single vote for Trump.

Carone, whose testimony was ruled “not credible” by a Michigan judge in November, told 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,” Lindell observed.

Michigan election officials have said that ballots were “not scanned multiple times inappropriately.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2021 The New York Times Company

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