(TheRedWire.com) – On Monday, July 22, 2019, Georgia officials awarded Dominion a massive $107 million contract to purchase 30,000 new voting machines. The decades-long, reliably red state decided to switch companies after longtime vendor Election Systems & Software machines malfunctioned. Election officials claimed the machines provided unreliable numbers following the November 2018 midterm election.
Little did anyone know at the time that Dominion would be mired in election controversy just a year later. It certainly didn’t help that a Dominion lobbyist who helped secure the deal was a former top elections staffer for Gov. Brian Kemp while he was Secretary of State.
REVOLVING DOOR: GA Gov. Brian Kemp's former chief of staff — Jared S. Thomas –left secretary of state's office and became paid lobbyist for Dominion Voting Systems, helping it land $107 million contract to run Georgia's elections despite concerns over the security of the system
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) January 5, 2021
Immediately following the 2020 general election in November, stories began surfacing in Michigan that the software potentially changed votes on Dominion machines. In Georgia, the Trump campaign alleged that the machines left out thousands of Trump votes as a part of a voter fraud campaign that cost the president the state. Trump lost the state by 11,779 votes. His attorneys argued that Dominion is a company with ties to Venezuela and has experience rigging elections.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the state investigated all allegations of voter fraud and determined there wasn’t enough to change the election’s outcome. On November 20, the state-certified Joe Biden as the winner despite the allegations and ongoing litigation at the time.
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