Even the host of Fox & Friends is saying President Donald Trump’s latest conspiracy theory about widespread voter fraud is false.
During Friday morning’s broadcast of the president’s favorite morning show, co-host Steve Doocy fact-checked Jonathan Turley after the Fox contributor baselessly alleged that the software system from Dominion voting machines had switched “thousands of votes” from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. The false claim has been making the rounds in right-wing media for days, finally making its way to the president’s Twitter feed this week.
Framing the president’s longshot lawsuits and recount efforts in several key states that he lost by significant margins as merely an attempt to “confirm the validity of the votes,” Turley referenced Trumpworld’s accusation that Dominion’s software could have impacted the final voting tallies in many states and precincts.
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“Well, the thing is, we have had glitches in this,” the law professor said. “In Michigan, you had thousands of votes that were given to Biden that belonged to Trump. Now, that doesn’t mean it was a nefarious purpose. This is a new software that apparently is vulnerable to human error.”
“And it was used—it was rather ubiquitous,” he added. “It was used in a great number of states—half of the districts in Michigan. That’s one of the reasons why some of us are saying take a look at this and open it up to make sure the software systems like that functioned correctly and if they were vulnerable to human error that human error didn’t occur. Those types of errors can affect a lot of votes.”
Co-host Brian Kilmeade, meanwhile, helpfully noted that the president had “tweeted that out,” prompting Doocy to interject and correct the record.
“I looked into it,” Doocy noted, apparently reading from a New York Times article. “With that Dominion software, five counties in Michigan and Georgia had problems. And the Dominion software was used in two of the counties and in every instance, largely it was human error, a problem, but the software did not affect the vote counts.”
Besides various fact-checkers knocking down the bogus claim about changed votes, the federal government’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency said in a statement: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”
Turley, meanwhile, isn’t the only Fox News personality to peddle the Dominion software conspiracy theory. Pro-Trump hosts Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo have all credulously pushed the theory, citing outrageous claims made by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and reporting by discredited ex-Fox News contributor John Solomon.
(While giving oxygen to the baseless Dominion allegations, to be fair, Hannity did note on Thursday night that he “can't say definitively tonight that happened.”)
The president even praised both Hannity and Dobbs for devoting airtime on Thursday night to the debunked conspiracy.
“Must see @seanhannity takedown of the horrible, inaccurate and anything but secure Dominion Voting System which is used in States where tens of thousands of votes were stolen from us and given to Biden,” Trump blared on Twitter. “Likewise, the Great @LouDobbs has a confirming and powerful piece!”
Twitter immediately flagged the president’s tweet as potential misinformation, noting his claim about election fraud is disputed.
