Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Fox Settlement Is a Victory for Dominion. But the Misinformation War Continues.

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      False claims about election fraud remain a problem, spreading in various places online, voting and media experts said.There are 787 million reasons to consider Fox News’s settlement of the defamation lawsuit a stunning victory for Dominion Voting Systems. Whether the millions of dollars that Fox is paying to Dominion will put to rest false claims about the 2020 presidential election or help deter misinformation more broadly remains far less clear.In the blinkered information bubbles where the lies about Dominion’s rigging the vote were fabricated and spread, conspiracy theories about the company continue to thrive — at least among those resistant to overwhelming evidence, including new disclosures about Fox News and its most famous hosts that Dominion’s lawsuit revealed.And Dominion is only one part of a broader conspiracy theory that the American electoral system is corrupt. That view, despite all the proof to the contrary, is still cheered on by former President Donald J. Trump, who remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024.“Part of the strength of that conspiracy theory is that it has so many different strands that yield the conclusion of a rigged election that you could actually destroy one thread or one strand, and you’d still have enough strands to sustain it,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a founder of FactCheck.org.The $787.5 million settlement, one of the largest ever for a defamation case, undoubtedly has a punitive effect on Fox, even though it allowed the company to avoid a potentially embarrassing trial. Like the verdicts last year against Alex Jones, the broadcaster who defamed the families of schoolchildren killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School and was ordered to pay them more than $1.4 billion, the outcome showed that lies can be costly for those who spread them.Alex Jones was found liable for defamation after spreading falsehoods about the Sandy Hook school shooting.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesYet Mr. Jones has continued his broadcasts on Infowars, the conspiratorial news site, while employing legal strategies that could help him evade some of the financial penalty.For researchers who study disinformation, the abrupt end to the lawsuit against Fox dashed hopes that a lengthy trial — with testimony from hosts who repeated accusations against Dominion they knew to be false — would do more to expose the dangerous consequences of pushing falsehoods and conspiracies.Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights and accountability, was among those expressing disappointment. She said that the settlement — for half of what Dominion originally sought — reflected Fox’s “desire to avoid further damning facts coming out during trial.”“Yet money alone won’t bring us accountability, and it doesn’t correct the ongoing harms Fox News causes to democracy,” she said. “If $787.5 million is the cost to tell a lie, repeatedly, what’s the cost of curing that lie?”Fox was spared extended and potentially damaging testimony. The network did not have to issue an apology on air. Instead, in a carefully crafted statement, Fox acknowledged “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false” and touted its “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”While the major news networks pivoted to cover the trial’s abrupt end on Tuesday, Fox devoted just six minutes and 22 seconds to the topic across three segments. None of its prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, who had once bolstered the voter fraud myths and was named as a defendant in Dominion’s lawsuit, mentioned the case.Instead, Mr. Carlson began his show with a segment about violence in Chicago, airing video clips largely showing Black Chicagoans during a weekend of violence. “This is why we used to shoot looters,” he said. That was followed with an interview with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and new owner of Twitter.“So what would you be thinking about when you’re watching Tucker Carlson?” Ms. Jamieson said. “Not the Fox settlement, but crime in the cities, interesting interview with Musk. And now our media diet for the day has told you what matters.”None of Fox’s prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, mentioned the settlement on air.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesA similar phenomenon unfolded in other news organizations on the political right in the wake of the settlement. The Gateway Pundit, a site known for pushing voter fraud conspiracy theories, devoted one 55-word story to the settlement on Tuesday, which was not updated.Far more words were expressed in comments left by readers, where nearly 4,000 missives raised fresh conspiracy theories. Among them was a tale that Fox News’s settlement was actually a shrewd maneuver that would help Dominion extract debilitating sums from Fox competitors, including the conservative news networks One America News and Newsmax, which have also been sued by Dominion.In the two hours following the settlement’s announcement, there was a significant spike in references online to the discredited film “2000 Mules,” which spun an elaborate theory of people delivering thousands of ballots in drop boxes, according to Zignal Labs, a company that tracks activity online. The references surged again on Wednesday after a prominent commentator on Twitter, Rogan O’Handley, chided those “cheering over” the settlement. “We know it was rigged,” he wrote.On Telegram, the freewheeling social media app,users claimed without evidence that the deal was a way for Fox to launder money; that the network was in cahoots with Dominion to engineer an election coup; that Dominion was trying to avoid a trial that would expose its corrupt practices; and that the judicial system was controlled by the Mafia.Even if the Dominion victory makes news organizations think twice before reporting lies about election technology vendors in the future, the damage has already been done.Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said the settlement would do little to protect election workers who were abused by anonymous conspiracy theorists or voters led astray by false narratives about ballot fraud.“Lies about our elections have really inundated our society, and I don’t think that’s changing,” he said. “Not all of those lies involve the potential for a defamation suit; it’s really the extreme cases where people are going to be able to collect monetary damages.”Legal experts said that the Dominion case against Fox had several important characteristics that set it apart. The voting technology company had compiled evidence suggesting that some Fox hosts had shared the false election fraud narrative with viewers despite privately expressing serious misgivings about the claims. The company had also submitted filings claiming that the election lies repeated by Fox caused Dominion to lose business.In fact, the judiciary has emerged as a bulwark in the fight against false information, and not only in extreme cases focused on defamation, like those involving Fox News or Mr. Jones. Court after court rejected legal challenges to the balloting in 2020 for lack of evidence. This week, an arbitration court ordered Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, who claimed among other things that China had rigged the vote, to pay a $5 million reward to a software engineer who debunked the claims as part of a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest.The legal traditions that allowed Dominion’s lawyers to receive the damning emails of Fox executives and anchors and make them part of the public record were essential in proving the allegations were baseless as a matter of record.“Before we give up on the capacity of the system to work to determine what constitutes knowable fact in the moment, we should say the courts have worked well up to this point,” Ms. Jamieson said.Election misinformation will almost certainly remain a problem heading into the 2024 presidential election. Dealing with it will be difficult, but not hopeless, Mr. Norden said. While some hard-core conspiracy theorists may never be convinced of the legitimacy of the vote, many people are simply unfamiliar with the mechanics of American elections and can have more faith in the system if exposed to accurate information.“We know what’s coming, and there’s an opportunity ahead of the next election to build more resilience against that with most of the public,” Mr. Norden said. “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem through defamation suits alone, but there’s a lot that we can be doing between now and November 2024.” More

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      Mike Lindell Loses Arbitration Case and Must Pay $5 Million

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      An arbitration panel ruled that the MyPillow founder had failed to pay a computer software expert who disproved his false election claims as part of a contest.Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and Trump ally who has been a leading voice in pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, must pay $5 million to a software forensics expert who debunked a series of false claims as part of a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest, an arbitration panel said on Wednesday.Mr. Lindell issued the challenge at a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota in 2021, saying he had data that would support his claims that there was Chinese interference in the election and offering the seven-figure prize to anyone who could prove the data had no connection to the 2020 election.Because the software expert Robert Zeidman successfully did so, the panel, composed of three members of the American Arbitration Association, ordered that Mr. Lindell would have to pay up.“Almost everyone there was pro-Trump, and everyone said, ‘This data is nonsense,’” Mr. Zeidman said in an interview on Thursday, identifying himself as a Republican who voted twice for former President Donald J. Trump. “A false narrative about election fraud is just really damaging to this country.”The ruling against Mr. Lindell was earlier reported by The Washington Post.Mr. Zeidman, 63, who is from Las Vegas, filed the arbitration claim against Mr. Lindell in November 2021 after the contest’s organizers rejected his findings. The claim was filed in Minnesota, Mr. Lindell’s home state.The arbitrators ordered him to pay Mr. Zeidman within 30 days.Mr. Lindell, who has spent millions of dollars on partisan reviews of voting data and efforts to bolster election skeptics across the country, vowed in an interview to challenge the panel’s ruling.“This is disgusting,” he said. He questioned Mr. Zeidman’s credentials and mused about how he had been granted admission to the symposium.Mr. Zeidman, who described himself as a “well-known” pioneer in the field of software forensics, said that he used his connections in the Trump world to obtain an invitation to Mr. Lindell’s symposium. “Friends of mine said, ‘You should go because you might win $5 million,’” he said.When conference organizers gave Mr. Zeidman and other attendees data to dissect, he said that he expected it might take weeks to analyze. But once he started going through the files, he said he quickly concluded that the data was bogus. He presented his findings to Mr. Lindell’s representatives in a 15-page report.The $5 million claim against Mr. Lindell is a pittance compared with a pending $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit that the election equipment company Dominion Voting Systems filed against him in 2021 over his assertions that its machines were part of a plot to steal the election. This week, the company reached a $787.5 million settlement with Fox News as part of a similar defamation lawsuit.Brian Glasser, a lawyer for Mr. Zeidman, cast doubt on whether Mr. Lindell would be able to successfully challenge the arbitration decision in court, saying the bar was particularly high. Mr. Lindell would have to prove “manifest injustice,” a legal term for an unduly harsh outcome, he said.Mr. Glasser also noted that the contest rules set by Mr. Lindell prescribed binding arbitration in the event of a dispute.Still, Mr. Lindell insisted: “It’s going to end up in court.”Mr. Zeidman said he planned to give some of the money to nonprofit groups, use part for a start-up business and spend some supporting a voter integrity project. He does believe there was voter fraud in 2020. “The question is how much and was it actually enough to swing the election? I can’t say that,” Mr. Zeidman said.He has joined the bipartisan political organization No Labels, he said, and won’t be supporting Mr. Trump for president in 2024.“I’d rather see a presidential candidate who is not an extremist,” he said. More

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      What Next for Dominion After Its $787.5 Million Fox Settlement

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      The election technology company has several more defamation lawsuits pending against public figures and news outlets.Dominion Voting Systems did more on Tuesday than settle its lawsuit against Fox News for $787.5 million: It also set the tone for the many related defamation cases it has filed. Legal experts say the settlement with Fox News, one of the largest defamation payouts in American history, could embolden Dominion as it continues to defend its reputation, which it says was savaged by conspiracy theories about vote fraud during the 2020 election. The company has several cases pending against public figures including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive, and news outlets such as Newsmax.The targets of Dominion’s remaining lawsuits, few of which have deep pockets and legal firepower at Fox’s level, will likely take a cue from Dominion and Fox’s face-off, legal experts said.“Even though it was a settlement, it certainly was a victory for Dominion,” said Margaret M. Russell, a law professor at Santa Clara University. “For other possible defendants, I don’t think this will make them double down; it will make them fearful.”Dominion is the second-largest election technology company operating in the United States, where there are few other major players. The company, whose majority owner is the private equity firm Staple Street Capital, was made “toxic” by the false fraud narratives in 2020, one of Staple Street’s founders said in court documents. At one point, Dominion estimated that misinformation cost it $600 million in profits.Fox said in its court filings that Dominion did not have to lay off employees, close offices or default on any debts, nor did it suffer any canceled business contracts as a result of the news network’s coverage. Fox said in one filing that Dominion had projected $98 million in revenue for 2022, which would make Tuesday’s settlement the equivalent of eight years of sales.Dominion’s customers are largely officials who oversee voting in states and counties around the country; the company served 28 states, as well as Puerto Rico, in the 2020 election. The false stories about fraud that were directed at the company were embraced by some local election officials.In court documents, an expert enlisted by Dominion said that the company had very low early contract termination rates and very high contract renewal rates before the 2020 election, but blamed the preoccupation with the false fraud claims for prompting some clients to exit deals after the vote.Now, Dominion has emerged from its tussle with Fox in a stronger position to win back any skittish clients or score new business, legal experts said.Last month, the judge in Dominion’s case against Fox reviewed evidence of the false claims and wrote that it “is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” effectively confirming that the company was aboveboard.The secretary of state of New Mexico, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, applauded Tuesday’s settlement.“The harm done by election lies/denialism since 2020 is immeasurable, but this settlement against Fox News provides accountability & sends a strong message we’re happy to see,” Ms. Toulouse Oliver wrote on Twitter. During the midterm primaries last year, she blamed “unfounded conspiracy theories” when she sued officials in Otero county who had cited concerns about Dominion machines in their refusal to certify election results.Fox acknowledged in a statement on Tuesday that some of the claims it had made about Dominion were false, saying that the admission “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”John Poulos, Dominion’s founder and chief executive, said in a statement on Tuesday that Fox caused “enormous damage” to his company and “nothing can ever make up for that.” He also thanked the election officials who make up Dominion’s clientele, and nodded to Staple Street’s support. “Lies have consequences,” a lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems said during a news conference.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesDominion drew some complaints that by settling, it had given up the opportunity to extract an apology from Fox or force it through a potentially embarrassing trial. An opinion article in the Daily Beast bemoaned that the voting technology company had “decided to step out of the ring with a bag of money instead of vanquishing one of the country’s most destructive and influential peddlers of hate and disinformation.”Mr. Poulos called the settlement “a big step forward for democracy” in an interview with ABC News broadcast on Wednesday.Legal experts noted that even if Dominion had prevailed in a jury verdict, it would have risked years of expensive battles over appeals from Fox.“The tort of defamation is not about saving democracy from liars,” said Enrique Armijo, a professor and First Amendment expert at Elon University School of Law. “It’s about saving the reputation of the people who have been lied about and making those liars compensate them for the harms to their reputations.”Fox still faces other legal challenges, including a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from another election technology company, Smartmatic. Fox said it planned to defend freedom of the press in the case and called Smartmatic’s damages claims “outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis.” Smartmatic said in a statement that, after the Dominion settlement, it “will expose the rest” of the “misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign.”Dominion, too, has more cases pending, including against the pro-Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and One America News Network. Although the lawsuits involve similar false claims of election fraud, the facts of each case vary, experts said.Attorneys for Mr. Lindell and Mr. Giuliani did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did Newsmax or OAN.For the individuals and smaller companies facing legal claims, for whom a substantial jury judgment could be an “existential” threat, settlement may seem more attractive after Tuesday, Mr. Armijo said.“They’re not going to be able to put up the same level of defense that Fox did; they just don’t have the resources to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to see the other defamation defendants in the remaining cases getting any further than Fox did, which, as we saw, is not very far.” More

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      Why Fox News Had to Settle With Dominion

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      WILMINGTON, Del. — It is deeply disappointing that Fox News settled the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems before Rupert Murdoch and his roster of celebrity propagandists had to testify. But it is not surprising. Fox News, after all, had no viable defense.On Tuesday, I arrived at Superior Court here at 7 a.m. to secure a seat for what I, like many others, hoped would be an epic trial about the falsehoods Fox aired after the 2020 election, when it accused Dominion and the voting technology company Smartmatic of perpetrating heinous voter fraud. Jury selection took all morning, and opening statements were scheduled for the afternoon.More than anything, I was curious about what Fox’s lawyers would say, because there seemed so little that they could say. Part of Fox’s sinister on-air brilliance is the way it encases its audience in a comprehensive alternative reality. But now, for once, the network would be forced to account for itself outside the right-wing bubble. How it would possibly do so was a matter of great suspense.Already, Eric Davis, the judge in the case, had ruled in Dominion’s favor on key issues. “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” he wrote in a March 31 pretrial decision, a rare judicial use of all-caps bold italics. Fox’s statements, he ruled, constituted “defamation per se.”Davis prohibited Fox from arguing that the network was merely reporting on allegations made by Donald Trump and his lawyers, which Fox contended were newsworthy whether or not they were true. So the case would turn not on whether Fox had aired defamatory falsehoods, which Davis determined it had, but on whether, in airing defamatory falsehoods, Fox had displayed “actual malice” — essentially, reckless disregard for the truth.The evidence for such reckless disregard brought to light by Dominion’s lawyers during the discovery phase of the case was already overwhelming, and the trial promised more to come. A filing that Fox’s lawyers made last week demonstrated their predicament. In it, the attorneys laid out some of the points they planned to make in their opening argument, asking for “guidance from the court to ensure that it can make its opening statement without undue interruption and delay.” Those points looked a lot like an attempt by Fox to use a legal backdoor to smuggle in arguments that the judge had already forbidden.“To defend this case, Fox witnesses must be able to testify about the reasons why Fox covered the allegations on the air,” said the filing. “Fox witnesses will all testify that they covered the Dominion-related allegations because the allegations were part of the most newsworthy story of the day.” This, even though Davis had specifically ruled that this argument was invalid because, among other things, “the evidence does not support” the contention that Fox “conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.”In order to defend Fox from a finding of actual malice, its lawyers seemed set on bringing Fox’s alternative reality into the courtroom, acting as if taking Trump and his attorneys at their word was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Testimony and documentary evidence, Fox’s lawyers said in the filing, “will show that the president and the lawyers bringing the election fraud lawsuits continuously told Fox that they had evidence to support their claims and that they would be presenting that evidence to courts.” That, in turn, explains why the Fox hosts “did not know that the president’s allegations were false or harbor serious doubts about the truth of the allegations.”In other words, they can’t be blamed for treating the president of the United States as a reliable source.Responding to the filing, Davis refused to give Fox the green light it sought. If the network’s lawyers wanted to make the arguments that they were telegraphing, they would have to take their chances in front of the jury, and risk getting shut down. On Tuesday morning, Davis reminded the parties that they would not be able to make arguments “about things that I’ve ruled inadmissible.” I was waiting to hear what Fox’s lawyers were going to argue instead.But after lunch, the jury didn’t return, and Davis came back to the courtroom only briefly before beckoning some of the lawyers out. The hours ticked by while the journalist-filled audience grew increasingly restless. Courtroom protocol against texting or using the internet gradually collapsed. News broke that the judge had ordered a special master to investigate whether Fox had “complied with their discovery obligations.” (The network had previously been sanctioned for withholding evidence.) Rumors about a settlement buzzed through the room.At 4 p.m., the jury filed back in, and the judge confirmed that the trial was over before it began.Fox is paying Dominion $787.5 million, which appears to be one of the largest defamation settlements in history and is one that constitutes a humiliating admission of fault by the network, even though, as The New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg reported, the deal doesn’t require Fox to apologize. But the public will be deprived of seeing Murdoch, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and several of their colleagues grilled on the stand, forced to reckon with the real world, unable to fall back on the dense lattice of misinformation that typically sustains Fox’s narratives.At least, the public will be deprived for now. Smartmatic is still suing Fox for $2.7 billion, though no trial date has been announced yet. “Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign,” Smartmatic lawyer J. Erik Connolly said in a statement on Tuesday. “Smartmatic will expose the rest.”I’m not sure I believe it — Fox has just shown the world what it’s willing to pay to avoid the unmasking. But reality isn’t done with Murdoch and the rest of them yet.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Fox Will Pay $787.5 Million to Settle Dominion Defamation Suit

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      The settlement with Dominion Voting Systems was the latest extraordinary twist in a case that exposed the inner workings of the most powerful voice in conservative news.Fox News abruptly agreed on Tuesday to pay $787.5 million to resolve a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of misinformation about the 2020 election, averting a lengthy and embarrassing trial just as a packed courtroom was seated in anticipation of hearing opening statements.The settlement, one of the largest ever in a defamation case, was the latest extraordinary twist in a case that has been full of remarkable disclosures that exposed the inner workings of the most powerful voice in conservative news.In addition to the huge financial price, Dominion exacted a difficult admission from Fox News, which acknowledged in a statement that “certain claims” it made about Dominion were false.“The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” Justin Nelson, a lawyer for Dominion, said outside Delaware Superior Court on Tuesday.“Lies have consequences,” a lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems said during a news conference.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesNews of the 11th-hour agreement stunned the full courtroom in Wilmington, where the case was being heard. Gasps filled the air when Judge Eric M. Davis told the jury shortly before 4 p.m. that the two parties had resolved the matter. Lawyers for both sides had been preparing to speak to the jury for the first time, microphones clipped to their jacket lapels.The settlement spares Fox a trial that would have gone on for weeks and put many of the company’s most prominent figures — from the media mogul Rupert Murdoch to hosts like Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo — on the stand.The case held the potential to make public a stream of damaging information about how the network told its audience a story of fraud and interference in the 2020 presidential election that many of its own executives and on-screen personalities did not believe. And the network was not forced to apologize — a concession that Dominion lawyers had sought, lawyers involved in the case said.Dominion sued two years ago, after Fox aired false stories claiming that Dominion’s voting machines were susceptible to hacking and had flipped votes from President Donald J. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr. On Tuesday, the company expressed a sense of exoneration about the large financial cost that Fox will have to pay. While Dominion’s suit asked for damages of $1.6 billion, almost double the settlement figure, the company will avoid many years of appeals that could have trimmed or eliminated any payout from a trial.“Over two years ago, a torrent of lies swept Dominion and election officials across America into an alternative universe of conspiracy theories causing grievous harm to Dominion and the country,” Mr. Nelson said. “Today’s settlement of $787.5 million represents vindication and accountability.”The case and the expected trial were significant because they raised the prospect for an elusive judgment in the post-Trump era: Very few allies of the former president’s have been held legally accountable for their roles in spreading the falsehoods that undermined confidence in the country’s democratic process and cast Mr. Biden’s victory as illegitimate. Polls show that large numbers of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was tainted.The size of the settlement, experts said, seems to have little precedent. RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, said she believed it was one of the largest settlements in a defamation case ever.“This was unquestionably the strongest defamation case we’ve ever seen against a major media company,” Ms. Andersen Jones said. The case was even more unusual, she added, because media companies typically seek to settle well before so much damaging information about their internal workings is released.A deal came together at the last possible minute, after months of almost no serious discussion between the two sides. As the case proceeded, Dominion divulged extraordinary details about the doubts that Fox employees expressed privately about voter fraud claims, even as they struck a different tone on the air.“Settlement before this trove of evidence became public would of course have been in Fox’s best interest,” Ms. Andersen Jones said. “Waiting until the eve of trial, when the whole nation had a chance to focus on what Fox said internally about Trump, its sources and its own viewers, gave Dominion the extra layer of accountability it was seeking.”It is uncommon for defamation suits to get to trial, in part because the bar for proving “actual malice” — the legal standard that requires plaintiffs to show that defendants knew what they were saying was a lie, or had a reckless disregard for the truth — is so high. It is rarer yet for one to feature the volume of evidence that Dominion had amassed against Fox.In the run-up to trial, Dominion publicly released reams of internal communications among Fox executives, hosts and producers that revealed how the country’s most-watched cable news network set in motion a strategy to win back viewers who had tuned out after Mr. Trump’s loss. The messages tell the story of a frantic scramble inside Fox as it started losing audience share to competitors, like Newsmax, that were more willing to report on and endorse false claims about a plot involving Dominion machines to steal the election from Mr. Trump.Producers referred to pro-Trump guests like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani as “gold” for ratings and acknowledged that the audience didn’t want to hear about subjects like the possibility of a peaceful transition from a Trump administration to a Biden administration.Those communications have shown how employees at Fox expressed serious doubts about and, at times, were scornful of Mr. Trump and his allies as they spread lies about voter fraud, questioning the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s election. Some at Fox mocked Mr. Trump and his lawyers as “crazy” and under the influence of drugs like L.S.D. and magic mushrooms.Some Fox hosts privately described their colleagues as “reckless” for endorsing Mr. Trump’s false claims, acknowledging that there was “no evidence” to back them up. Yet for weeks, Fox continued to give a platform to election deniers, despite doubts about their credibility. Dominion challenged statements made on multiple programs on multiple nights. Typically, defamation cases involve only a single disputed statement.The trial would have been a spectacle. Mr. Murdoch, whose family controls the Fox media empire, was slated to be one of Dominion’s first witnesses this week. Star anchors including Sean Hannity, Mr. Carlson and Ms. Bartiromo were likely to be called at other points.Even the most blockbuster media trials of the last generation — Ariel Sharon’s suit against Time and Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s against CBS, both in the 1980s — lacked the most explosive elements of this case, which raised weighty questions about the protections the First Amendment affords the media and whether one of the most influential forces in conservative politics would have to pay a price for amplifying misinformation.Both of those cases were settled out of court, too.In recent days, Fox raised questions about Dominion’s claims of damages. On Monday, it disputed Dominion’s worth, pointing to a recent legal filing in which the company lowered part of its request for compensation. Fox lawyers also raised doubts about the harm that Dominion had suffered, saying the company acknowledged that it had turned a profit in recent years.But the potential pitfalls for proceeding with a trial were real for Fox. Some of the revelations from the depositions that Dominion had conducted offered a preview of how damaging a trial could be. Mr. Murdoch acknowledged during his deposition that some Fox hosts had “endorsed” Mr. Trump’s lies, an admission that undercut Fox’s defense that it was merely reporting on — not amplifying — the former president’s claims.After the deposition concluded, the general counsel of Fox Corporation, Viet Dinh, tried to reassure Mr. Murdoch that he had done well.“I’m just going to say it. They didn’t lay a finger on you,” Mr. Dinh said.Mr. Murdoch disagreed, according to a person who witnessed the exchange. He pointed a finger at the lawyer who had questioned him for Dominion, Mr. Nelson, and said, “I think he would strongly disagree with that.”To which Mr. Nelson replied, “Indeed, I do.” More

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      Fox-Dominion Trial Delayed: What to Know About the Company Behind the Lawsuit

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      Dominion, which is owned by a New York private equity firm, has accused the news network of spreading false narratives about its election technology.If not for the 2020 election, most people would not have heard of Dominion Voting Systems, an elections technology company that John Poulos started out of his basement in Canada more than two decades ago.But in the days and weeks after the election, former President Donald J. Trump and many of his allies accused the company of perpetrating election fraud. Dominion then filed a slew of defamation lawsuits against public figures and news networks, accusing them of spreading the false narratives and exposing its employees to harassment. The company’s case against Fox News is scheduled to go to trial this week. Judge Eric M. Davis, who is presiding over the case, said in a statement late on Sunday that he was delaying the trial by a day, until Tuesday. He did not cite a reason but said he would make an announcement Monday at 9 a.m.Here is what we know about the company, from its private equity owner in New York to its powerful perch in the nation’s elections industry.Dominion’s Early DaysDominion became one of the largest providers of election technology in the United States by selling, licensing and maintaining products such as its Democracy Suite software and ImageCast voting and tabulation machines. During the 2020 election, the company served 28 states, including many swing states, as well as Puerto Rico. Mr. Poulos, who has degrees in electrical engineering and business, incorporated Dominion in Toronto in 2003 with some friends after a stint in Silicon Valley. His sister was his first investor, followed by his parents and his friends’ parents. (Dominion declined to comment for this article.)The company is named after Canada’s 1920 Dominion Elections Act, which removed barriers to voting that had excluded women and voters of certain racial, religious or economic groups. Mr. Poulos’s business idea was to help people with disabilities, such as paralysis or blindness, cast their ballots as independently as possible while still leaving an auditable paper trail. Dominion incorporated accessible technology like audio readouts and large screens into election machines.The company scored its first American contract in 2009, providing voting technology to dozens of counties in New York. The next year, it moved its headquarters to Denver, where it now has several hundred employees.Private Equity OwnersStaple Street Capital, a private equity firm in New York, is the majority owner of Dominion. Mr. Poulos, Dominion’s chief executive, retains a roughly 12 percent stake. PennantPark Investment, a financial firm based in Miami, is another investor.Fox said in a legal filing that Staple Street paid $38.3 million in 2018 to acquire 76.2 percent of Dominion. At the time, the private equity firm valued the technology vendor at $80 million, or one-twentieth of the $1.6 billion in damages that Dominion had sought from Fox, according to Fox’s filing.Staple Street’s owners, Stephen D. Owens and Hootan Yaghoobzadeh, first worked together in 1998 on buyouts for the Carlyle Group, a private equity giant. (Their résumés also feature stints at Lehman Brothers and Cerberus Capital Management.) The firm’s board of directors includes a former chief executive of Dunkin’ Brands as well as a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and ambassador to the European Union.Staple Street declined to comment.On its website, Staple Street says it has $900 million of assets under management — mostly midsize companies such as a flower bulb distributor in New Jersey, an accounting and payroll reporting service popular with restaurant chains, a support organization for dental clinics and, at one point, the theme park operator Six Flags.Fox said in its filing that Mr. Yaghoobzadeh had authorized Dominion’s lawsuit against the network. The lawsuit, Fox said, is meant to generate publicity, deter negative reporting and “unjustly enrich” Staple Street.Fox cited discovery documents that it said showed Dominion “in a solid financial position, maintaining substantial cash, carrying no debt and producing a steady return on investment” to Staple Street. In 2021, Dominion paid full bonuses to its employees and executives and projected $98 million in revenue for 2022, Fox said.Last year, when asked whether he believed that Dominion was a “toxic” company after the 2020 election, Mr. Owens answered, “That’s correct.”A Business in FluxIn its complaint, which it filed in 2021, Dominion accused Fox of broadcasting lies that “deeply damaged” its “once-thriving” business, “one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America” with a potential value of more than $1 billion.Shasta County, a rural area in Northern California that has become a hotbed for election denial, terminated its Dominion contract in January. Lawmakers in Montgomery County in Pennsylvania renewed a deal with Dominion for $518,052 in February, the same month that officials in Kern County, north of Los Angeles, narrowly approved a three-year, $672,948 contract after hours of heated debate.Dominion’s contracts with local and state governments typically last for several years and range from tens of thousands of dollars to more than $100 million, the company said in its complaint against Fox. The company estimated that misinformation about the company had cost it more than $600 million in profits.In an expert witness report submitted in the case late last year, Mark J. Hosfield, a managing director of the investment bank and advisory firm Stout, wrote that the false narratives had led Dominion to lose $88 million in profits from current and future opportunities. He also wrote that Fox’s coverage had caused the value of Dominion’s equity and debt to drop $920.8 million. Dominion’s renewal rate with clients had historically been 90 percent, he said.Fox has said the $1.6 billion that Dominion is seeking is “a staggering figure that has no factual support” and was “pulled out of thin air.” There has been no evidence of Dominion’s laying off employees, closing offices, defaulting on credit obligations or suffering canceled contracts as a result of Fox’s coverage, the network said.Fox said in other court filings last year that “Dominion’s calculations are riddled with mathematical overstatements” and losses misattributed to damaging news coverage, and that the company had beaten revenue forecasts that it set before the election.“Dominion’s lawsuit is a political crusade in search of a financial windfall, but the real cost would be cherished First Amendment rights,” Fox said in a statement.Dominion, in a statement said: “In the coming weeks, we will prove Fox spread lies causing enormous damage to Dominion. We look forward to trial.”An Important but Mysterious IndustryThe elections technology industry has few major players and offers little public information about its finances. Dominion is most likely the second-largest company of its kind operating in the United States, behind Election Systems & Software in Nebraska, according to Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit.Both companies, along with Hart InterCivic in Texas, have acquired smaller competitors over the past two decades. As of 2016, the three vendors served more than 90 percent of eligible voters in the country, according to a report from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.Wharton researchers at that point described the election technology business as having “all the aspects of an industry that new investors would want to avoid — a costly regulatory environment, constrained market size, cost-conscious customers, and concentrated and entrenched vendors.”The Brennan Center for Justice estimated last year that replacing outdated voting equipment over the next five years could cost more than $580 million. A group of Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, sent letters in 2019 to Staple Street and other private equity firms that had invested in election technology companies, voicing concern about industry consolidation and the maintenance of voting machines. In response, Staple Street wrote to Ms. Warren that it spent roughly 10 to 20 percent of its revenue on research and development.Susan C. Beachy More

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      Fox News Is on Trial, and So Are Falsehoods About 2020

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      A jury in Delaware will be asked to weigh the limits of the First Amendment. Another question in the case is whether the network will pay a financial penalty for disseminating election lies.WILMINGTON, Del. — On Monday, a judge in Delaware Superior Court is expected to swear in the jury in a defamation trial that has little precedent in American law. Fox News, one of the most powerful and profitable media companies, will defend itself against extensive evidence suggesting it told its audience a story of conspiracy and fraud in the 2020 election it knew wasn’t true.The jury will be asked to weigh lofty questions about the limits of the First Amendment and to consider imposing a huge financial penalty against Fox. Some of the most influential names in conservative media — Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson — are expected to be called to testify. But there is another fundamental question the case raises: Will there be a price to pay for profiting from the spread of misinformation?Few people have been held legally accountable for their roles in trying to delegitimize President Biden’s victory. Sidney Powell, a lawyer who was one of the biggest purveyors of conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems, the company suing Fox for $1.6 billion, avoided disbarment in Texas after a judge dismissed a complaint against her in February.Jenna Ellis, an attorney who worked with Ms. Powell and the Trump campaign, received a reprimand last month instead of losing her license with the Colorado bar. Donald J. Trump, whose false insistence that he was cheated of victory incited a violent mob on Jan. 6, 2021, is running for president a third time and remains the clear front-runner for the Republican nomination.Political misinformation has become so pervasive in part because, there is little the government can do to stop it.“Lying to American voters is not actually actionable,” said Andrew Weissmann, the former general counsel of the F.B.I. who was a senior member of the special counsel team under Robert S. Mueller that looked into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.It’s a quirk of American law that most lies — even ones that destabilize the nation, told by people with enormous power and reach — can’t be prosecuted. Charges can be brought only in limited circumstances, such as if a business executive lies to shareholders or an individual lies to the F.B.I. Politicians can be charged if they lie about a campaign contribution, which is the essence of the criminal case against Mr. Trump by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.In the Fox News case, the trial is going forward because the law allows companies like Dominion, and people, to seek damages if they can prove their reputations were harmed by lies.The legal bar that a company like Dominion must meet to prove defamation is known as actual malice. And it is extremely difficult to prove because of the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision in New York Times Company v. Sullivan, which held that public officials can claim defamation only if they can prove that the defendants either knew that they were making a false statement or were reckless in deciding to publish the defamatory statement.“There are all sorts of times you can lie with impunity, but here there’s an actual victim,” Mr. Weissmann added. “It’s only because of the serendipity that they actually attacked a company.”Usually, there is great deference among media lawyers and First Amendment scholars toward the defendants in a libel case. They argue that the law is supposed to provide the media with breathing room to make mistakes, even serious ones, as long as they are not intentional.But many legal scholars have said that they believed there was ample evidence to support Dominion’s case, in which they argue they were intentionally harmed by the lies broadcast by Fox, and that they would not only be surprised but disappointed if a jury didn’t find Fox liable for defamation.“If this case goes the wrong way,” said John Culhane, professor of law at Delaware Law School at Widener University, “it’s clear from my perspective that would be a terrible mistake because this is about as strong as a case you’re going to get on defamation.” Mr. Culhane added that a Fox victory would only make it harder to rein in the kind of misinformation that’s rampant in pro-Trump media.“I think it would embolden them even further,” he said.This case has proved to be extraordinary on many levels, not only for its potential to deliver the kind of judgment that has so far eluded prosecutors like Mr. Weissmann, who have spent years pursuing Mr. Trump and his supporters who they believe bent the American democratic system to a breaking point.“Even if this didn’t involve Donald Trump and Fox and the insurrection, this is a unique libel trial, full stop,” said David Logan, a professor of law at Roger Williams School of Law and an expert on defamation. “There’s never been one like this before.”It is extremely rare for defamation cases to reach a jury. Mr. Logan said his research shows a steady decline over the years, with an average of 27 per year in the 1980s but only three in 2017.Some experts like Mr. Logan believe the case’s significance could grow beyond its relevance to the current disinformation-plagued political climate. They see an opportunity for the Supreme Court to eventually take the case as a vehicle to revisit libel law and the “actual malice” standard. The justices have not done that since a 1989 case involving a losing candidate for municipal office in Ohio who successfully sued a newspaper after it published a false story about him a week before the election. The court said that a public figure cannot recover damages unless there was “clear and convincing proof” of actual malice..The actual malice standard has been vital for individual journalists and media outlets who make mistakes — as long as they are honest mistakes. But some scholars like Mr. Logan — as well as two conservative Supreme Court justices, Neil M. Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — have argued that “actual malice” should be reconsidered as too high a standard. Justice Thomas specifically cited as a reason “the proliferation of falsehoods.”“The nature of this privilege goes to the heart of our democracy, particularly in this case,” said Mr. Logan, whose paper arguing that the courts have made it too difficult for victims of libel to win relief was cited in a dissent by Justice Gorsuch in 2021.Fox lawyers are already preparing for an appeal — a sign they are under no illusion that beating Dominion’s case will be easy. At several recent hearings in front of Judge Eric M. Davis, Fox has been represented by Erin Murphy, an appellate lawyer with experience arguing cases before the Supreme Court.Dominion also apparently considers the possibility of an appeal quite realistic. It had an appellate attorney of its own, Rodney A. Smolla, arguing on its behalf when questions of Fox’s First Amendment defense arose last month — the kind of constitutional questions that federal appellate courts will entertain.The belief that the Supreme Court could eventually hear the Fox-Dominion case is shared by the general counsel of Fox Corporation, Viet Dinh. Mr. Dinh, who is likely to be called as a witness by Dominion during the trial, has told colleagues privately that he believes Fox’s odds at the Supreme Court would be good, — certainly better than in front of a Delaware jury, according to people who know his thinking. The evidence against Fox includes copious amounts of text messages and emails showing that producers, hosts and executives belittled the claims being made on air of hacked voting machines and conspiracy, details that Dominion has said prove the network defamed it.But Fox lawyers and its public relations department have been making the case that its broadcasts were protected under the First Amendment because they encompassed the kind of coverage and commentary that media outlets have a right to do on official events of intense public interest.“A free-flowing, robust American discourse depends on First Amendment protections for the press’ news gathering and reporting,” a network spokeswoman said in a written statement. The statement added that Fox viewers expected the kind of commentary that aired on the network after the election “just as they expect hyperbole, speculation and opinion from a newspaper’s op-ed section.”Judge Davis has overruled Fox on some of its First Amendment claims, limiting its ability to argue certain points at trial, such as its contention that it did not endorse any false statements by the president and his allies but merely repeated them as it would any newsworthy statement.A spokeswoman for Dominion expressed confidence, saying: “In the coming weeks, we will prove Fox spread lies causing enormous damage to Dominion. We look forward to trial.”Inside Fox, from the corporate offices in Los Angeles to the news channel’s Manhattan headquarters, there is little optimism about the case. Several current and former employees said privately that few people at the company would be surprised to see a jury return a judgment against Fox. Judge Davis has expressed considerable skepticism toward Fox in the courtroom. He issued a sanction against Fox last week when Dominion disclosed that the company had not revealed details about Mr. Murdoch’s involvement in Fox News’s affairs, ruling that Dominion had a right to conduct further depositions at Fox’s expense.But he does not have the final say. Twelve men and women from Delaware will ultimately decide the case. And defamation suits so rarely prevail, it’s also reasonable to consider the possibility that Fox does win — and what a 2024 election looks like with an emboldened pro-Trump media. More

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      Election Denial and Threats to Our Democracy Have Gone Local

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      American democracy didn’t crumble in one fell swoop under the administration of a president with disregard for rule of law or under the weight of a mob storming the Capitol or under a wave of candidates who claimed the 2020 election was rigged. Though some election deniers did win critical midterm races, the most prominent — Republicans like Kari Lake and Mark Finchem in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — lost their 2022 campaigns.As a result, some voters might have concluded that the movement died beyond Donald Trump’s continued claims. That would be a serious mistake, because though it has receded from the headlines, election denialism has not died. It has just gone down ballot.In some state and local offices across the country, election denialism is still recasting how elections are conducted, in ways big and small.With far less effort than it would take on a national level, Republican officials are gumming up the mechanics of local election administration, making it harder to cast a vote, harder to tally votes and harder to get results in a timely fashion. Officials are policing elections, establishing task forces and election police units that are supposedly there to root out fraud but could have the effect of intimidating voters from exercising their civic right.Every little bit of friction that’s added to the election process makes it that much harder for it to function. Through the typical channels of government bureaucracy and under the pretense of merely asking questions, these conspiracy-theory-influenced Republicans are often creating this friction for their own voters. Their actions might seem like inconsequential outliers, but it’s there at this grass-roots level that our voting system is most vulnerable. Which means these obscure election boards aren’t where denialism goes to die; it’s where it takes root and starts to grow.Just last month, North Carolina state election officials voted to remove two local election officials. In November the pair initially refused to certify election results (though one ultimately did), as well as in a redo election this year after a bizarre circumstance in which a poll worker was accused of telling voters at one precinct that a candidate had died. The officials questioned state election practices and a 2018 federal court decision striking down strict voter ID requirements North Carolina had in place at the time. “We feel that the election was held according to the law that we have but that the law is not right,” one said.The incident is just the latest in a string of examples of the ways that election deniers’ conspiratorial distrust of elections continues to affect state and local elections. These kinds of disputes and claims cropped up again and again in local jurisdictions last year. Whether it was initially refusing to certify elections, as officials in Cochise County, Ariz., threatened or hand-counting ballots, as they moved to do in Nye County, Nev., or voting to outright get rid of voting machines and sue the secretary of state, as happened in Otero County, N.M., the long tail of the Big Lie has created disorder in local election administration.Perhaps the widest-reaching example of structural interference in elections is the growing list of states that have pulled out of the bipartisan nonprofit data consortium known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC.ERIC was created to help states maintain accurate voter rolls through information sharing. It helps guard against fraud by allowing states to crosscheck for inaccurate or outdated voting records and helps identify potential new voters who haven’t yet registered. Since its founding in the 2010s, ERIC existed in relative obscurity. Over the past year, however, ERIC has become the subject of conspiracy theories and attacks, including by Mr. Trump, who has said it “pumps the rolls” for Democrats.Louisiana was the first state to announce it would pull out, in late 2022, followed by Alabama, whose incoming secretary of state did so on his first day in office this year. Since then, the Republican secretaries of state in Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio and West Virginia have announced their intention to leave.The latest wave of departures came after some Republican members tried but failed to make changes to ERIC’s leadership to guard against what they consider to be partisanship, as well as changes to the program, including a removal of the requirement that member states reach out to residents who are eligible to vote but unregistered. Some of these requested changes are debatable matters of policy, but those meetings also came after the flurry of conspiratorial attacks on ERIC over the past year.The irony, however, is that leaving ERIC could very well make their elections less secure. Just this past January, Florida’s new Office of Election Crimes and Security used ERIC data to identify more than 1,000 voters who appeared to have voted in more than one state. In February, the month before he decided to withdraw, the Iowa secretary of state told NPR that ERIC was a “godsend.” Without this crosschecking tool at their disposal in the future, it’s possible for these instances to slip through the cracks, but it’s difficult to know just what the full effect of a weakened ERIC will be.It’s also notable that the institutions being targeted by election denier conspiracy theories are often some of the most mundane — making it hard to predict what will be targeted next. After the 2020 elections, Republican legislators’ attacks on ballot drop boxes, early voting windows and other measures intended to make voting easier were somewhat to be expected. But the moves by election administrators to go after a bipartisan organization like ERIC only add to the chaos that has become election denialism’s calling card.The antidemocratic legacy that once denied the franchise to Black Americans and women is a part of the American story. Today, threats to democracy can be as varied as the states, counties and municipalities where they’re happening, thanks to the confusing patchwork of election laws and powers that change from state to state. But to the extent that they infringe on the voting rights of any part of the electorate, these moves matter to all of us, because they threaten the entire project of American democracy.Camille Squires is an editor at Bolts, a digital publication focused on voting rights and criminal justice in state and local governments.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More