Pennsylvania County Ordered to Pay $1 Million in Dominion Voting Machines Case
A state judge on Friday ordered Fulton County, Pennsylvania and its attorney to pay over $1 million in sanctions after improperly investigating Dominion Voting Systems machines after the 2020 election and violating an order from the state’s highest court.
In December 2020, Fulton County officials brought in a Pennsylvania-based IT company to investigate Dominion voting equipment used in the 2020 election, which collected files, images and logs from the machines as part of its audit.
In July 2021, after learning that the county brought in a company to investigate the voting machines, the Democratic secretary of the commonwealth issued a directive decertifying that voting equipment.
There are over a dozen voting and election lawsuits in courts across Pennsylvania.
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The secretary determined that a third party accessing election equipment “undermines chain of custody requirements and strict access limitations necessary to prevent both intentional and inadvertent tampering” and “jeopardizes the security and integrity of those systems.”
In August 2021, Fulton County, the county’s Board of Elections and two Republican county commissioners challenged the directive in court.
After months of litigation, the secretary learned that Fulton County planned to allow another IT company to inspect the voting equipment and immediately pursued legal action. In January 2022, the state Supreme Court issued a temporary order to “prevent the inspection and to preserve the status quo” while litigation is ongoing in the case.
Months later, in violation of the court order, Fulton County allowed a forensic auditing company to inspect the equipment and electronic evidence relevant to the case.
Then, the secretary asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to impose sanctions against the county.
The state’s highest court then ordered that the machines be impounded and that sanctions be imposed against both the county and its attorney Thomas Carroll because they violated a court order and they “have engaged in a sustained, deliberate pattern of dilatory, obdurate, and vexatious conduct and have acted in bad faith throughout these sanction proceedings.”
In their opinion, the court’s justices described attorney Carroll’s “relentless efforts to delay the proceedings” and his conduct that “derailed” multiple court hearings.
Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer, who was appointed as the special master in the case, determined the amount that the parties must pay in sanctions.
On Friday, she stated that they must pay more than $1 million to the secretary of the commonwealth and Dominion Voting Systems in legal fees and costs of litigation throughout the case.
While all of this was going on, Fulton County also filed a lawsuit against Dominion Voting Systems in 2022, alleging that Dominion breached a contract with the county by failing to provide an accurate voting system and in turn, violated the constitutional rights of voters.
A federal judge rejected the case for the second time last month, holding that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case and failed to demonstrate how they were harmed by Dominion’s voting system.
Earlier this year, the 9th Circuit rejected a different challenge to Dominion voting systems filed by election deniers Kari Lake and Mark Finchem in Arizona.
In April 2023, Dominion entered a $787 million settlement with Fox News following a defamation lawsuit against the network and some of its broadcasters who peddled conspiracy theories and erroneous claims surrounding the company’s voting equipment.
These cases are just a few examples of the numerous Republican challenges to the legitimacy of Dominion voting machines. These claims about Dominion continue to be disproven and fit into the larger movement to overturn the 2020 election results as well as cast doubt on future elections as well — like the one in November.