The FBI confirmed that a man named Anthony Warner was responsible for the bombing and was killed in the blast. "That's all still speculation at this point as we continue in our investigation with all of our partners. AT&T does not hold a contract to audit Dominions software or machines and did not have any of the companys equipment in its Nashville building. In the wake of the Christmas morning explosion in Nashville, Tenn., a baseless conspiracy theory started circulating online that claims Nashville's downtown AT&T complex, which was damaged in. There is no evidence to support the claim that City Blue Imaging, a longtime Rochester, New York, printing business that went up in flames on Christmas Eve, was under investigation for printing fake ballots. Lindell told the Minnesota Reformer, that he and a friend were on their way home from duck hunting in Iowa and were in the Hardee's drive through when three cars with four FBI agents surrounded his vehicle. Now the process of counting these votes . The coalition says it is no longer certain that the number of states is correct, so the figure has been removed from the article. (Photo by James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images). The media intelligence platform Zignal Labs, in an analysis performed at NPR's request, found that misinformation narratives related to vote-by-mail systems alone were mentioned across the media spectrum more than 40 million times since Election Day. subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here, Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. But the company did not account for the new voting centers, so the Williamson County. Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos is not ruling out legal action against President Trump, whose surrogates have spent nearly two months alleging the Nov. 3 election, which Trump lost, may . Last fall, when ES&S gave NBC News an exclusive tour at its headquarters in Omaha, Neb., Chief Executive Officer Tom Burt defended using modems when asked about the Sprint and Verizon modems seen in ES&S's testing area. The Genesius Times describes itself as the "most reliable source of fake news on the planet" and that it strives "to provide the most up-to-date, accurate fake news on the Internet,", "Nashville explosion a missile strike??" Yet internet sleuths are searching for their own answers, some looking atthin ties toconspiracy theories about the 2020 election as evidence of a broader plot. And then run the ballots through the machine a few times. Its disgusting. Hismotive is unknown. Coomer oversees product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems, the Denver-based company that has suddenly found itself at the center of many of President Trump's false claims about. All quotes delayed a minimum of 15 minutes. New York State Police Director of Public Information Beau Duffy told Reuters via email they were unaware of any state police investigations relating to the claims linking the paper company to ballots. Warner died in the blast, according to authorities. The Company offers voting systems and scanning devices, as well as resource planning, training management, quality control . All rights reserved. In the weeks following the election, the election technology firm Dominion Voting Systems has been the target of baseless allegations of election fraud, according to the Washington Post.Now a viral Facebook post attempts to connect President-elect Joe Biden to the company by claiming his sister is married to Stephen Owens, who, the post alleges, owns Dominion Voting Systems. The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has dismissed the claim of an election hacking and vote manipulation operation known as Hammer and Scorecard. (here). On Tuesday, Coomer sued the Trump campaign and a number of allies, alleging defamation. A Dec. 14 Facebook video, viewed more than 23,000 times, claimed in its caption that "Trump WON The Election NEW Evidence Shows" because "a forensics report done on Dominion voting machines . Similar claims have been shared in hundreds of public posts, according to CrowdTangle, a social media insights tool. Even if an election is run perfectly, it doesn't matter to a sizable portion of the public who believes it was unfair. This weekend, both Fox Business Network and Newsmax appeared to answer those demands with segments debunking some claims. We therefore again respectfully request that EAC investigate and take action to correct this serious issue., Once you add that modem, you are de-certifying it, Skoglund said. Some users seemed to recognize the story as fake, but others didnt. Dominion Voting Systems lost a sale of more than 1,400 new machines on Wednesday after commissioners for Stark County, Ohio, voted down the purchase against a recommendation from the. And I don't know that all these jurisdictions are aware of that because ES&S is advertising otherwise.. NBC News reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, which declined to comment on the topic of modem security in voting machine tabulators and scanners. Some of the posts attempted to further link AT&T to Dominion by claiming a former owner of the AT&T building was a board member of a firm that owns Dominion. Breitbart, by Hannah Bleau Original Article. Whether it's the standard online trolls, voicemails that are left almost on a daily basis, being called a traitor to this country, I can't even begin to describe what effect this has had on my life," he said. An executive for a voting machine company that has been the target of conspiracy theories in the aftermath of Donald Trump's 2020 election loss and been baselessly accused of swinging the. In preparing for this November's election, the company gamed out all sorts of worst-case scenarios, but it wasn't on anyone's radar that Dominion and its employees could become the targets of threats. Dominion Voting Systems, Inc. provides voting machines and tabulators. APS ASSESSMENT: False. One of the largest voting machine suppliers in the U.S. Dominion Voting Systems sued Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who represented former President Donald Trump, after they . Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday morning filed three $1.6 billion defamation lawsuits against two pro-Trump media networks and an outspoken Trump ally, the latest in a string of suits from the . "The minute I saw it, it left a big pit in my stomach," he said. While the post does not specify which building they believed the machines were held in, a Dominion Voting Systems spokesperson said by email that none of their machines were anywhere in the. The reason? AT&T not conducting voting machine audit near Nashville explosion site. The company, which sells electronic voting hardware and software, contends that some Fox News employees deliberately amplified false claims by Trump supporters that Dominion machines had changed . Those networks are among the defendants Coomer is suing. So we will clear it up: Its fake. This material may not be reproduced without permission. Read more about our fact-checking workhere . We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet, he said. The bomb is in this vehicle and will explode." Earlier this week, Skoglund showed NBC three election systems were still online even after officials had been told they were vulnerable. Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. The company put the building back on the market shortly thereafter; MetLife Inc., throughsubsidiary Prefco Fourteen, now owns the building, public records show. Their evidence: a grainy black-and-white video. The City of Rochester government and police did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment. The post implies that the bombing was an attempt to stop the audit and cover up voter fraud. Its crazy, the amount of misinformation that you see, Mealy said. There's a third company, Clear Ballot Group which is currently under testing by the state of Florida, the official audit review of their software began May 17th, but that is not . CLAIM: AT&T got a contract to do a forensic audit of Dominion Voting Systems machines and those machines were recently moved . Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook. Owners of Dominion Voting Systems,(the company many people are accusing of voter fraud) are former executives from Cerebus," another post reads. NewsGuard, which vets news sources based on transparency and reliability standards, found recently that among the top 100 sources of news in the U.S., sources it deemed unreliable had four times as many interactions this year compared with 2019. This conspiracy theory has been debunked by various experts as reported by Reuters here and other fact checkers including Snopes, Factcheck.org and PolitiFact here , here and here . AT&T got a contract to do forensic audit on Dominion voting machines and those machines were being moved to Nashville this past week, read one post. DNA found at the scene matched Warner's, according to an FBI press release. The investigation of the Nashville bombing is ongoing, but the Facebook post is inaccurate and ridiculous. Serious political tensions and fears of COVID-19 have led record-breaking numbers of Americans to vote early this year, either by mail or in person. According to the post, that firm ownedthe AT&T building outside of which the Christmas bombing occurred. Social media users have been sharing content online that claims AT&T had a contract to do a forensic audit on Dominion Voting Systems machines and that the Dec. 25 explosion in Nashville,. Powell is named in Coomer's suit, along with the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Fact-checkers have debunked claims that the explosion was the result of a missile strike. The state of Michigan is currently grappling with this issue. That user did not respond to USA TODAY's request for comment, either. More:Fact check: No, Joe Biden's brother-in-law does not own Dominion Voting Systems. Shortly afterwards, social media users began circulating variants of a conspiracy theory holding that AT&T had been engaged to undertake a "forensic audit of Dominion voting machines," the latter of which were frequent targets of false election fraud claims made by President Donald Trump and his supports after Trump lost his re-election bid in November 2020: The implication of the conspiracy theory was that the explosion had been intended to destroy the machines before they were audited in order to cover up evidence of massive voting fraud. One theory shared thousands of times on Facebook over the weekend tries to connect the explosion to voting machines used in the Nov. 3 election. Once they had identified such systems, they contacted the relevant election officials and also provided the information to reporter Kim Zetter, who published the findings in Vices Motherboard in August. A spokesperson for Dominion Voting Systems told Reuters via email: Dominion calls on the media and the public to reject the baseless rumors circulating on social media, which suggest without evidence that there was some election-related connection to the Nashville explosion.. This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Our mission is to exceed the expectations of our customers, the taxpayers, by operating at the highest levels of accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and accountability in a customer-centered environment. He also serves on the boards of Ford Motor Company, MetLife and Duke Energy Corporation (here). It was an assurance designed to bolster public confidence in the way America votes: Voting machines are not connected to the internet.. The bulletin circulated among state election officials earlier this week and publicly shared online, Friday marks the first time CISA has used its vulnerability disclosure program to probe . More than a month ago, Eric Coomer went into hiding. It is no longer federally certified. Here are the facts: CLAIM: President-elect Joe Biden's sister is married to Stephen Owens, the co-founder of the private equity firm Staple Street Capital, which owns Dominion Voting Systems . This is part of The Associated Press ongoing effort to fact-check misinformation that is shared widely online, including work with Facebook to identify and reduce the circulation of false stories on the platform. Posts online claim that the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville was an attempt to cover up election fraud because AT&T was conducting an audit of Dominion Voting Systems machines and that. False. The FBI confirmed that a man named Anthony Warner was responsible for the bombing and was killed in the blast. "You may want to read a book some day to learn about my reference to rising like a #phoenix. ES&S has repeatedly advertised its DS200 with internal modem a critical component to ES&Ss voting systems as being EAC certified when, in fact, it is not, the letter said. Singer reportedly funded the original investigation On Thursday night, the group performed their set at the Shed in Maryville, Tennessee, with all six of its members wearing dresses in protest of the state's newly enacted law on public drag performance. That agreement is long over, and they no longer have the . Thank you for supporting our journalism. The company recently threatened a number of groups repeating the claims with lawsuits, including One America News Network, Newsmax and Fox News. The ATT building in Nashville that was affected by the bomb was owned by Cerebus (sic) Capital. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which provides cybersecurity frameworks for state and local governments and other organizations, recommends that voting systems should not have wireless network connections. Other posts on social media have gone a step further, alleging that Dominion is tied to the bombing through ownership of the affected AT&T building. That's false. Some of the posts (here) try connect the explosion to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama by claiming that William Kennard, Obamas EU ambassador and Clintons FCC chair, is on AT&Ts board and owns the Nashville AT&T building that was destroyed in the blast. Dominion was the first to snap. Hart said that it has approximately 1,600 such tabulators in use in 11 counties in Michigan. There may not be answers to the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville anytime soon. The question is.. IE 11 is not supported. Both companies have denied the posts claims, saying that there was no such audit and that Dominions machines were not recently transported to Nashville. The claim: Dominion Voting Systems is tied up in the Nashville bombing, based on the affected AT&T building's ownership and that the cellular company was contracted to audit Dominion's. "AT&T got a contract to do forensic audit on Dominion voting machines and those machines were being moved to Nashville this past week," one Dec. 27postsays. The machines America votes on seem to be capturing the interest of some in Congress. Theres a small percentage of jurisdictions in the country -- a lot of them are in Florida -- who have decided they want to modem unofficial results to the election office, he said. The claim: Dominion Voting Systems is tied up in the Nashville bombing, based on the affected AT&T building's ownership and that the cellular company was contracted to audit Dominion's. Dominionwas acquired by private equity firm Staple Street Capital, co-founded by financiers Hootan Yaghoobzadeh and StephenOwens, in 2018. A Facebook post (here) shared more than a thousand times has falsely claimed: In New York a printing press company, under investigation for printing and shipping fake voting ballots into Pennsylvania, burned to the ground Xmas morning.. The full text on this page is automatically extracted from the file linked above and may contain errors and inconsistencies. This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Kevin Monahan is a producer for the NBC News Investigative Unit. why?" Once a hacker starts talking to the voting machine through the modem, the hacker cannot just change these unofficial election results, they can hack the software in the voting machine and make it cheat in future elections, he said. Some just say AT&T had a contract to conduct a forensic audit on Dominion Voting Systems. No available external evidence suggests AT&T was involved in any such audit, either. the dominion voting system that was the subject of an enormous amount of controversy, is a dramatic improvement over prior forms of voting. In a letter obtained by NBC News sent to the EAC on Tuesday, the nonprofit public interest group Free Speech for People and the National Election Defense Coalition asked the agency to look into whether ES&S violated agency regulations by implying that DS200 voting machines with modems are EAC certified. Now, the alleged Dominion Voting Systems tie. Others are not so sure, and the state has set up an advisory committee. The complicated theory began circulating soon after an RV exploded in downtown Nashville. The 23-page report signed by a former Republican congressional candidate with a history of spreading misinformation about Michigan's election claims Dominion "is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.". The post was flagged as part of Facebooks efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. Modems in voting machines are a bad idea, said Appel. "And I probably will. David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994 as a creative outgrowth of his wide-ranging interests in a variety of subjects (particularly folklo read more. Reuters debunked this claim here . Donald Trump went after media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his network Fox News in rants on Truth Social where he once again pushed the baseless and debunked claim that the . Select an Infowars smear of Dominion Voting Systems. The row housed Simply the Best $10 Boutique at 176 (here), Ensemble boutique at 174 (www.ensemblenashville.com/) and the Pride & Glory Tattoo Parlor at 172 (www.prideandglorytattoo.com/), as well as apartments on the upper floors (here). For election systems to be online, even momentarily, presents a serious problem, according to Appel. There is a bomb. It really is. There is no evidence that suggests that the explosion was election-related. Some on social media have speculated that AT&T was contracted to audit Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology supplier that has become central to false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. On Monday, The Associated Press debunked claims that Dominion has any connection with AT&T. The bomber was lateridentified by U.S. Attorney Don Cochranas Anthony Warner, 63, according to The Tennessean. Full Story. "I actually am in fear for my safety," Coomer said recently, speaking by video call from an undisclosed location to Colorado Public Radio. Detailed voter instructions for the Infinity voting unit, How to Vote an Optical Scan Ballot with Unisyn Equipment, Public Records Policy and Records Request Form. Last week, Dominion filed its fourth defamation lawsuit, this one a $1.6 billion whopper charging that Fox News spread the bogus conspiracy claim in order to boost ratings that plummeted after. The explosion disrupted AT&T wireless and internet services, leading to widespread 911 issues in the Nashville area, The Tennessean reported. Some posts have said the Nashville explosion was caused by a missile. CNN didnt report that Anthony Warner, the person authorities have identified as the bomber, died from COVID-19. A public relations firmtold the Associated Presson behalf of Dominion that the company "has no connection to AT&T, the building, Nashville, family members of the Bidens or the Clintons, and Staple Street is not owned by Cerberus. Jim Greer, Assistant Vice President of Corporate Communications at AT&T, told Reuters via email: None of the things in the post are true.. The explosion injured three other people and damaged businesses in downtown Nashville, including an AT&T switching center, which resulted in widespread communications outages.