STORY UPDATED Dec. 7, 2020 at 9:25 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to include more context that the claims of the forensic tests of Dominion Voting Systems machines in Ware County, Georgia, are being denied by some election officials, including the county’s own elections supervisor.
Alarm bells regarding the presidential election are now sounding in Georgia, where a U.S. congressman says a forensic test of Dominion Voting Systems machines revealed votes for President Donald Trump were being switched to votes for Democrat Joe Biden, although the claim is denied by some election officials.
On Friday, U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., tweeted out the results of the test, saying: “Yesterday we learned a forensics examination of a Ware County, GA #DominionVotingSystems machine found votes were switched from @realDonaldTrump to @JoeBiden. This is one machine in one county in one state. Did this happen elsewhere? We need to know! EXAMINE ALL THE MACHINES!”
Yesterday we learned a forensics examination of a Ware County, GA #DominionVotingSystems machine found votes were switched from @realDonaldTrump to @JoeBiden.
This is one machine in one county in one state.
Did this happen elsewhere? We need to know!
EXAMINE ALL THE MACHINES!
— Rep. Jody Hice (@CongressmanHice) December 4, 2020
The matter caught the attention of popular radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh on Monday, who explained, “They fed an equal number of votes for both Trump and Biden into the software, and it turns out an equal number of votes for Trump and Biden was spat out of the machine as a 26% lead for Biden.”
He called it “an exceptionally disturbing piece of evidence showing the extreme likelihood of massive voter fraud through Dominion Voting Systems.”
Limbaugh summarized how the test was reportedly conducted:
They used an equal number of votes. This is the thing to keep in mind here. They had sequestered Dominion equipment. Ware County ran an equal number of Trump votes and Biden votes through the tabulator, and the tabulator reported a 26% lead for Biden. Thirty-seven Trump votes in the equal sample run had been switched from Trump to Biden. So in actual algorithmic terms this means that a vote for Trump was counted as 87% of a vote and a vote for Biden was counted at 113% of a vote.
Now, you think that they’re just counting the number of votes and it’s straight up okay, there’s a Biden vote, there’s a Trump vote – no, no, no. They use all these complicated algorithms to try to speed up the tabulation. They spit this stuff through the tabulator and they wait for the tabulator to spit the results back.
So if you’ve got an algorithm that counts every Trump vote as only 87% of the votes and every Biden vote as 113% of a vote, then that’s how you end up with Biden ending up with 26% more votes than Trump with an equal number have been fed into the machine.
But did such a forensic test even occur? The chief election officer in Ware County told Lead Stories the claim is “100% fake.” No machines were sequestered and no test run was conducted, Elections Supervisor Carlos Nelson said. Lead Stories, which is one of Facebook’s official fact-checkers, also says an unnamed but high-ranking official with the Georgia secretary of state’s office also confirmed the report was erroneous.
On Saturday, after President Trump appeared in Valdosta, Georgia, to again voice his concerns about the election allegedly being stolen, Hice tweeted:
“.@realDonaldTrump just detailed the rampant fraud committed in the November election. If we don’t fix the systemic flaws and prosecute wrongdoing, it’ll happen again! @POTUS is fighting for America’s election integrity. It isn’t about party or candidate. It’s for the Republic!”
On Monday, Hice again took to Twitter to push back against claims by state leaders that there was no voter fraud in the election.
GA's leaders claim "no voter fraud" but can't defend their own argument.
PROVE IT!
INVESTIGATE!
The growing amount of evidence is against you… and so are the people!
— Rep. Jody Hice (@CongressmanHice) December 7, 2020
Via Wnd