Reporter Discusses False Accusations Against Dominion Worker

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As Susan Dominus, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, approached her reporting for an article on the attacks on Dominion Voting Systems, a business that supplies election technology, she wanted to tell the story of one of the Dominion employees who was being vilified by supporters of President Trump.

She zeroed in on one man: Eric Coomer, whose anti-Trump social media posts were used to bolster false allegations that Dominion had tampered with the election, leading to death threats. Her article, published on Tuesday, is a case study in what can happen when information gets wildly manipulated. In an edited interview, Ms. Dominus discussed what she learned.

How did you come upon Eric Coomer — did you have him in mind all along? Or did you want to do something on Dominion and eventually found your way to him?

The Magazine was interested in pursuing a story about how the attacks on Dominion Voting Systems — a private business — were dramatically influencing the lives of those who worked there, people who were far from public figures. Many employees there were having their private information exposed, but early on, a lot of the threats were focusing on Eric Coomer, who was then the director of product strategy and security at Dominion. Eventually, people such as the lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and the president’s son Eric Trump were naming him in the context of accusations about Dominion fixing the election.

What was the biggest surprise you came across in your reporting?

I was genuinely surprised to find that Mr. Coomer had expressed strong anti-Trump sentiments, using strong language, on his Facebook page. His settings were such that only his Facebook friends could see it, but someone took a screenshot of those and other divisive posts, and right-wing media circulated them widely. The posts were used in the spread of what cybersecurity experts call malinformation — something true that is used to support the dissemination of a story that is false. In this case, it was the big lie that the election was rigged. I think to understand the spread of spurious information — to resist its lure, to fight it off — these distinctions are helpful to parse. Understanding the human cost of these campaigns also matters. We heard a lot about the attacks on Dominion, but there are real people with real lives who are being battered in a battle they had no intention of joining, whatever their private opinions.

There were so many elaborate theories of election fraud involving Dominion. How important were the accusations against Eric Coomer in that bigger story?

It’s hard to say. But Advance Democracy Inc., a nonpartisan nonprofit, looked at the tweets in its database from QAnon-related accounts and found that, from Nov. 1 to Jan. 7, Eric Coomer’s name appeared in 25 percent of the ones that mentioned Dominion. Coomer believes the attacks on Dominion were somewhat inevitable but considered his own role as “an accelerant.”

Why did so much attention focus on Dominion Voting Systems, as opposed to its competitors?

I’m not sure anyone fully understands that right now. But they happened to be heavily represented in swing states that went for Mr. Biden, such as Arizona, Michigan and Georgia. Election experts say that the elections went extraordinarily well, for the most part, especially given that there were record numbers of mail-in ballots due to Covid. But there were two instances, in places that used Dominion voting machines, where election officials made small mistakes (and skipped the necessary steps that would have caught those errors). Those, too, became fuel for subsequent malinformation campaigns. And then the Coomer story was amplified, too.

So is this story a cautionary tale about social media?

I think many people have taken it that way. But to me, it’s a case study in how one data point, which proved nothing, was taken, manipulated and transmitted with great speed, along various channels of right-wing media, until it reached the lawyers of the president of the United States, who were desperate for anything to delegitimize Joe Biden’s winning the election.

It’s also about a culture of implicit violence, which was seething in the background during those weeks leading up to Jan. 6. The threats against Mr. Coomer were serious enough that a private security firm his employer hired told him they did not think it was safe for him to go home. He is one of so many election officials or experts who have been subject to threats; many are leaving the field as a result.