Dominion voting machines changed votes in the 2020 election

What we know

One of Trump's longest-running conspiracy claims is that Dominion Voting Systems machines deleted or switched votes to steal the 2020 presidential election.

These claims were examined and rejected across the board. Courts dismissed related lawsuits, the FBI found no supporting evidence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) called the 2020 election the most secure in American history. Even Trump's own Department of Justice concluded there was no evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome.

Dominion also pursued defamation litigation over these claims, and Fox News agreed to a large settlement in 2023 in a related case. The consistent finding of every official body that examined the machines is that they did not change votes.

Specific incidents cited as evidence of vote switching were examined individually and found to have mundane explanations. In Antrim County, Michigan, a reporting error caused by a human mistake in updating software after a late ballot change briefly displayed incorrect results before being corrected, a normal part of the unofficial reporting process that has nothing to do with the certified vote count. Georgia election officials conducted a hand recount of the entire state's presidential ballots specifically to test Dominion machine accuracy against paper ballots, and the hand count matched the machine count within a very small margin consistent with normal human counting variance, providing direct physical verification that the machines had not altered results.

Dominion's defamation lawsuits against Fox News, Newsmax, and individuals including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell forced the disclosure of internal communications during litigation discovery. Those communications, made public through court filings, showed that some of the people and networks promoting the vote-switching claims privately expressed doubt about them even while publicly repeating them, evidence that directly undercuts the idea that the claims were made in good faith based on genuine uncertainty about the machines' reliability. The financial scale of the defamation settlements underscores how seriously courts treated the factual claims at stake: Fox News agreed to pay Dominion 787.5 million dollars in 2023 rather than proceed to trial, one of the largest defamation settlements in US media history, a outcome legal analysts say reflected the weakness of the network's position once internal communications became part of the public record. Independent election security experts, including those who testified before Congress and in court proceedings, have consistently stated that voting machine software audits and paper ballot reconciliation processes used across multiple contested states in 2020 provided verifiable, redundant checks against the specific type of large-scale vote manipulation the claim describes. Every one of these independent verification layers pointed to the same conclusion. Courts across several states reached this same conclusion independently of one another. This convergence of court, agency, and audit findings leaves little room for doubt.

Common claims

• Dominion machines deleted Trump votes.Not supported
• The 2020 election was stolen through voting machines.Not supported

Evidence hierarchy

All sources

• Joint statement on election securityCISA · 2020
• NBC News politics coverageNBC News · 2023
• Fact check: Dominion voting machines didn't delete or switch votesUSA Today · 2020
• Fact check: Georgia's vote change was human error, not vote flippingUSA Today · 2020
• Dominion Voting Systems and the machines behind the 2020 conspiracy theoriesBBC News · 2020

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