In a tweet that has been shared hundreds of thousands of times, President Donald Trump claimed that 2.7 million “Trump votes” across the country were deleted due to Dominion voting machines. The president also claimed that hundreds of thousands of votes were switched from him to Joe Biden.
The White House did not respond to the VERIFY team’s request for the source of the president’s claim. The president’s tweet tagged conservative news outlet One America News Network (OANN).
THE QUESTION
Did voting machines cause hundreds of thousands or even millions of votes to be deleted or changed?
THE ANSWER
According to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, (CISA) an agency under the oversight of the Department of Homeland Security, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
WHAT WE FOUND
The president’s tweet referenced a now deleted report by OANN.
An archived version of that report shows that OANN reported the same numbers based on an “un-audited analysis of data obtained from ‘Edison Research.’” They write that this analysis “States using ‘Dominion Voting Systems’ may have switched as many as 435,000 votes from President Trump to Joe Biden.”
OANN did not link to or provide direct access to the “un-audited report,” but the VERIFY team was able to contact Edison Research directly. Larry Rosin, the President of Edison Research, told the VERIFY team in an email that this report was “fiction.”
“We never created any report,” he said, “and we have no evidence of voter fraud.”
Rosin also told the VERIFY team that “Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security has come out to say there is no truth.”
While the Department of Homeland Security has not publicly addressed these claims, one of the U.S. agencies it oversees has. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a statement, Thursday, after the president’s tweet.
The statement explains that “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
It also says that “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.”
The VERIFY team previously looked into separate claims that a glitch in Dominion voting machines had led to counting errors in Michigan. While there was an issue with the “unofficial” count online, Michigan State officials investigated and found that it was the result of human error, not the voting machines.
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