The NPR Politics Podcast - Dominion Makes Voting Machines. Its Employees Have Been Forced Into Hiding.

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

President Trump's baseless electoral fraud conspiracies have frenzied his supporters, some of whom have made violent threats against Americans who work for Dominion, a voting technology company. Some of its employees have gone into hiding; they fear that their lives will never be the same.This episode: political correspondent Scott Detrow, voting reporter Miles Parks, and Colorado Public Radio reporter Bente Birkeland.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's Susan Davis. And before we start the show, we want to ask you to support your local NPR station. By supporting them, you're supporting all of us on this podcast. Our lives were upended this year, and we at NPR and all of your local stations have tried to cut through the noise to make sure you know the facts about the election, the coronavirus, and so many other stories. So if you've got some dollars to spare, head to donate.npr.org slash politics to get started. And thank you. Hey, this is Ian from Philadelphia, and I just successfully completed my first semester of college after the COVID-19 pandemic inspired me to retire from the restaurant industry at age 29. Today's podcast was recorded at 1226 Eastern on Tuesday, December 22nd. Some things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, here's the show. I continue to maintain that the restaurant industry is the hardest industry to work in.

So your work is very much appreciated. Even before this year, that was true. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the Biden transition. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And we are joined by Benta Birkeland of Colorado Public Radio.

Hey there. Happy to be here. So today we're going to talk about just, you know, the huge amounts of misinformation that are still out there about the election. This has been an ongoing story for several months. And, you know, before we get into the other stuff, it's worth remembering that despite losing the election, President Trump has not conceded. He continues to sow disinformation. He continues to try and overturn an election in which the Electoral College has already voted.

But just focusing on the disinformation side, like, Miles, how can we even begin to quantify how much is out there right now? It's really hard to do. I mean, I think I've been thinking about disinformation for a couple years now. And this year, it's really been stark how we all have our individual internets. And no one's really thinking, you know, about what other people are seeing or the quantity of what other people are seeing. But a lot of organizations have popped up in the last couple years trying to quantify it. NewsGuard, which is this organization started by former journalists that basically labels news organizations based on their transparency and their reliability. They've been tracking this for the last couple of years.

And they found that this year, sites that they consider unreliable news sources have had four times as much engagement as they did last year. So I mean, that is just like, it really, really, we've been we were talking after 2016, as if disinformation and misinformation was a big problem. It is only growing exponentially. And is that stat after these various efforts by different social media giants to limit the spread of disinformation? It is. I mean, this the thing is, a lot of this stuff just slips through the cracks, you know, especially when it comes to the election disinformation, where some of it just maybe gets a label or something like that, but most of it doesn't get taken down. And there's all sorts of ways that people who are unreliable and are trying to spread unreliable information are able to allude to that information or spread that information without doing it in a way that actually gets you banned. And Betty, you've been doing some reporting on the real life consequences of all of this. Yes, I recently talked to Eric Coomer. He's the director of product strategy and security

for Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems. And that company has found itself at the center of numerous conspiracy theories about election theft. And some of Trump's supporters have come to focus on Coomer as the supposed mastermind behind this plot to steal the election. Those claims are not true. But for the last month or so, Coomer has been living in hiding, didn't feel it was safe to be in his own home. I actually am in fear for my safety. I'm in fear for my family's safety. These are real, tangible things coming out of these baseless accusations. I feel like that's worth just kind of pausing and noting for a second that this is somebody who feels the need to go into hiding because this fake information, this disinformation that's out there being distributed by the president's allies, retweeted by the president, has put him in danger. Yeah, I mean, some of these allocations are pretty severe. They accuse him of treason.

They call for him to be publicly executed, for his head to be cut off. People describe being warriors and they have to do the work of men to repeal evil. And Kummer says he's just not sure what the end is here. And he doesn't know when things will ever go back to normal. Yeah, it's just like this crazy reminder. I feel like we keep getting reminders over the last couple of weeks as these threats have hit election officials across the country that, you know, the election system is not some, you know, faceless bureaucratic thing. These are all real people at the local level who are kind of like at the front lines who have been doing the work for years preparing for this election. And now when you actually kind of make this effort to undermine that work, the threats are coming to real people with real families and real lives. And this, I mean, we saw that Georgia official give that really impassioned press conference making this point, but these false claims are not going away. And in fact, they continue to be amplified by news outlets like Fox News and Newsmax. Yeah. And now we're seeing basically these news organizations who have been a huge part in promoting a lot of these conspiracy theories now forced into this situation where they're starting

to seemingly walk some of these claims back. You know, we've seen Newsmax and Fox News over the last couple of days release packages that basically undercut or fact checked a lot of the claims that guests have been making on their networks for the last few weeks. Newsmax has no evidence to the contrary. Dominion has stated the company has no ownership relationship with the Pelosi family, the Feinstein family, the Clinton family, Hugo Chavez or the government of Venezuela. Neither Dominion nor Smartmatic has any

relationship with George Soros. And it seems like to be directly connected to this threat from Smartmatic, one of the voting companies that's in competition with Dominion, they've threatened legal action based on some of these claims. So it'll be interesting to see over the coming weeks whether there is a further kind of walking back of some of these claims as the temperature continues to get raised when it comes to legal threats. And we have the metrics from social media of when you clarify something, it is almost all the time goes nowhere near as far and wide as the official as the original disinformation. And then the question is, how receptive are people

to that message? When I talked to Coomer, he said people are dedicated to believing whatever they need to, to fit their worldview. And I think a lot of us were surprised to see Colorado in the middle of this. We are a state that the president was not focused on in terms of, we weren't a swing state. Trump overwhelmingly lost in Colorado. We've been doing mail voting for a long time and have the so-called gold standard of elections because we have really stringent audits and signature verifications. So I think

how everything has evolved with Dominion and certainly with Coomer, it was surprising. He said he never saw this happening and the company gamed out a lot of different scenarios of what could potentially go wrong during this election. And the company facingamed out a lot of different scenarios of what could potentially go wrong during this election. And the company facing threats and people like Eric Coomer facing threats wasn't on their radar. Does he have any sense or any feeling of when his life could return to normal? Because, you know, this isn't just continuing to be spread around. It's continuing to be amplified from some of the most high profile people in the country. Right. And he said some of these conspiracies are merging with QAnon and he doesn't see an end in sight.

He said one thing to me that just stuck with me. He said some of the threats he's received have made very clear that these actors are in it for the long haul. The wishes are that I forever have to look over my shoulder, and I probably will. Wow. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk more about just how these systems actually work in reality and how that's clashing up against this disinformation about them. I'm Guy Raz, and on NPR's How I Built This, how Tim Ferriss, as an entrepreneur, author, investor, and podcaster, turned himself into a multimillion-dollar brand. Subscribe or listen now.

And we're back. frustrating things as reporters, and I'm sure election officials are a thousand times more frustrated than this than reporters are, is that these claims have continued, and each time they are disproven, that does not affect the conversation. Nobody ever says, oh, you're right, there was a recount. Oh, you're right, signatures were verified. My mistake. I mean, let's just, we've talked about this before, but it's worth emphasizing again, that backups and verification and paper trails are a big part of this, and that there were multiple recounts in a lot of these key states. Yeah, and what's really weird too, is the kind of juxtaposition of over the last, if you look at the last decade, you know, the amount of claims that we're seeing because of the rise of the Internet and social media have only exponentially increased, as we talked about.

At the same time, elections are more secure now than they ever have been. You know, we have systems in place. It's different all over the country 10 years, there has been a steady trajectory toward paper ballots, ways that make it less likely that either mistakes or hacking could happen. Basically, elections are continuing to get safer every two and every four years. But these claims don't reflect that and they don't reflect the reality of voting in America, as we've talked about. What's the conversation been like from local officials? You know, I think we've seen strong bipartisan support of Colorado's voting system and the audits and all the safeguards that are in place.

Several Republican state lawmakers asked for an election integrity hearing at our Capitol recently, and Republican elected officials, former elected officials were the ones testifying, you know, essentially defending the state system. And so we are seeing a lot of pushback. I haven't talked to any county clerks who say, look, things aren't weren't smooth. And we there's been widespread fraud. I mean, no one has said that at the local level. But to Miles point, how do you convince someone of something when they just don't believe you? I mean, there's no amount of evidence you could provide for a certain segment of the population, especially when there's so much misinformation

out there that they're getting bombarded with or seeking out. So given that pretty grim reality, I mean, have either of you heard experts give any ideas on ways forward to fix this problem? Yeah, that's something I've been really interested in. I talked to a number of voting technology experts over the last week, basically asking that question. You know, we've seen this year more paper get used in elections than we have in recent history. And yet we're seeing these claims. Does that basically put a limit on how much of this problem you can fix with technology or with perfect systems? I talked to Ben Adida, who runs a nonprofit election technology company called Voting Works.

Here's what he told me. You could have a really great voting system that is transparent, that is secure, that is reviewed by people from all parties. And if you don't have agreement on the norms of how you carry out an election, that wouldn't be enough, right? So there's an element of what we're seeing right now that I don't think a better voting system could address. Basically, if you don't have the leaders of both parties, high government officials saying that they're confident in the voting system, even if you show people hard evidence, these experts say, basically, that's not going to be enough. You're going to need to have people like President Trump say that the election was legitimate for these millions of people to believe it is.

A small bit of positive news. I was talking to a Republican election worker in Colorado, and she said she's still fielding a couple hours of phone calls a day from people upset about the election. But she said the vast majority of the time after she has a one-on-one conversation with them and explains the checks in the system, people come away feeling really good and not feeling concerned. So she's been able to make some headway with one-on-one conversations with voters. So maybe just a lot of one-on-one conversations going forward is one tiny step in that direction, I guess. All right.

Well, Benda, thanks for your reporting. And what's the best place if people want to read your whole story on this man from Dominion who is in hiding right now? Where's the best place people can find that? You can find the reporting on CPR.org. All right. Well, thanks, as always, for joining the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm Scott Detrow.

I cover the Biden transition. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.