Did Donald Trump's campaign gain control of voting machines in a small Georgia county and run tests that showed votes were flipped from Trump to Biden? No, that's not true: Articles and social media posts making the claim say the voting machines in Ware County, Georgia, were taken by the "Trump Team" for study and that they proved a flip of 37 votes out of a total of 14,000 for Trump. A high-level official with the Georgia secretary of state's office, which oversees elections said there is nothing true about the claim. Ware County's election manager also denied the report to a Politico reporter, but he did confirm that the recent hand recount of votes did add 37 votes into Trump's column. The false claim appeared to have started when the testimony of a witness cited in Trump's lawsuit to overturn the Georgia election was misinterpreted by a reporter. That witness told Lead Stories the reporter's story was "a myth."
The claim appeared in an article published by The Gateway Pundit on December 4, 2020 titled "BREAKING HUGE: Trump Team Has Dominion Machine from Small Georgia County - Shows Votes Flipped from Trump to Biden" (archived here) which opened:
The Trump team has obtained a Dominion voting machine in Georgia. The machine shows votes were moved from President Trump to Joe Biden. BOOM.
Yesterday on the War Room it was reported that the Trump team has obtained a Dominion voting machine in Georgia:
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BREAKING HUGE: Trump Team Has Dominion Machine from Small Georgia County - Shows Votes Flipped from Trump to Biden
The Trump team has obtained a Dominion voting machine in Georgia. The machine shows votes were moved from President Trump to Joe Biden. BOOM. Yesterday on the War Room it was reported that the Trump team has obtained a Dominion voting machine in Georgia: BREAKING: Trump team now has a Dominion machine from Ware County,...
The source for the Gateway Pundit article is a tweet by a Trump supporter, who in turn cited a short segment in the "War Room" video podcast of former Trump 2016 campaign manager Steve Bannon:
BREAKING: Trump team now has a Dominion machine from Ware County, #Georgia with EVIDENCE of Trump votes being switched to Biden.
BREAKING: Trump team now has a Dominion machine from Ware County, #Georgia with EVIDENCE of Trump votes being switched to Biden.
-- 𝙅𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙨 ¹⁷ 🇺🇸 (@JamesThe17th) December 3, 2020
Source: John Fredericks on Steve Bannon War Room
The tweet linked to this YouTube video:
Syndicated radio talk show host John Fredericks, a Trump supporter, was reporting for Bannon's "War Room" podcast from the Georgia capitol on Thursday, December 3, 2020, when he related what he saw in a written statement by Garland Favorito, who heads the pro-Trump group VoterGa. Favorito was simply reporting that the hand recount in Ware County added 37 votes to Trump's column and removed 37 from Biden's. Favorito's statement (see below) noted that the shift represented about one-half-of-one-percent of the county's 14,192 votes, "exactly double Biden's total statewide margin of point-26-percent of Georgia's nearly 5 million votes."
Fredericks, however, spun a whole new story about how Favorito had gained control of a Dominion voting machine in Ware County and used it to find out how the vote count was being inflated nationwide for Biden:
He's got a Dominion machine that they were able to do a forensics study on in Ware County. It's a small county. He's got evidence that this machine, Steve, has flipped the votes. They flipped votes. They flipped 37 votes in Ware County, he's got the evidence.
The Gateway Pundit repeated this false reporting as the basis for its article.
Favorito told Lead Stories in a phone interview on Sunday, December 6, 2020, that he never claimed to have controlled or studied a Dominion voting machine. He called the Gateway Pundit report "a myth":
The Gateway Pundit is just repeating this and never verified it. That was all a myth that was reported. Ware County did their own reporting.
Ware County Election Supervisor Carlos Nelson told me this is false: No one has obtained any machine from his office. There was a human-error tabulation issue discovered during the hand recount, the tallies of which were matched by the just-ended machine recount
Ware County Election Supervisor Carlos Nelson told me this is false: No one has obtained any machine from his office. There was a human-error tabulation issue discovered during the hand recount, the tallies of which were matched by the just-ended machine recount https://t.co/GGrYY5WHJJ
-- Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) December 4, 2020
... this involved absentee ballots and human error with tabulation equipment, which have nothing to do with the Dominion voting machines that people use to mark their ballots on Election Day at the precinct. Ware County elections workers scanned a batch of ballots but there was a jam during the tabulating process. So ballots needed to be re-scanned. The ballots were then rescanned/tabulated, but they forgot to erase the prior scan. As a result of the tabulation problem and the human error, the final numbers in Ware County were off. It wasn't caught until there was the Risk Limiting Audit was performed where ballots were counted by hand. A subsequent machine recount confirmed the handcount numbers. What are the numbers we're talking about? Very small, says Nelson. In the end, Biden's vote count dropped by 42 in Ware (4,211 to 4,169); Trump rose by 37 (9,865 to 9,903). One of those new Trump votes was an overvote that the elex board said clearly was intended for Trump. Nelson was clearly exasperated by the disinformation disseminated by Steve Bannon: 'Social media and people are gonna make what they can out of it to fit their narrative."
"I can tell you this is --I don't want to cuss -- this is a darned lie. Our vote machines are secure. There's no vote-flips" --Carlos Nelson, Ware County election supervisor https://t.co/ySgi2jeXxz
-- Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) December 4, 2020
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A partisan conservative website that regularly publishes hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and unsubstantiated claims, including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to NewsGuard the site does not maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability. Read their full assessment here.
