The Extremist at Dominion Voting Methods

Regardless of whether or not the company’s machines had been misused, it poses structural dangers, and suppressing criticism will make Trump supporters even far more doubtful

It is unlikely that lots of of the 73 million men and women who forged ballots for Donald Trump in 2020 will at any time take the legitimacy of his reduction. Who could persuade them? If the media resources demanding Trump’s concession held any sway with Trump’s voters, they would not have been his voters. They do not know for sure that the election was stolen, but they do know with apodictic certainty that the media would lie to them if it was. So if Donald Trump says the election was stolen, that is very good plenty of for the Deplorables.

Nonetheless even the President’s most faithful ought to have flinched at his latest tweet accusing a major producer of voting devices of committing election fraud on a mass scale.

“REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. Data Investigation FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES Working with DOMINION VOTING Devices SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN.” @ChanelRion@OANN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2020

It is tricky to overstate the irresponsibility of broadcasting these a critical accusation with out evidence. It stunned me, and my startle reaction has grow to be pretty desensitized about the last 4 yrs. Confident, it turned out Trump was right when he accused the Obama administration of spying on his 2016 marketing campaign, but this is distinct. Dominion Voting Systems is not staffed with Obama appointees, immediately after all. I determined to poke around a little bit to see what, if anything, could possibly be driving Trump’s wild accusation.

A Twitter user named Joe Oltmann had tweeted a number of screenshots of a Fb user putting up Antifa manifestos and tunes about killing police. The Fb account belonged to Eric Coomer, and Oltmann claimed it was the very same Eric Coomer who is the Director of Products System and Security for Dominion Voting Programs. In hrs of Oltmann publishing the information, nonetheless, the Facebook page of Eric Coomer was taken down, so I was not able to validate that Antifa Coomer and Dominion Coomer had been the very same individual. By the close of the working day, Joe Oltmann’s Twitter account was suspended as well. I experienced followed his feed all over the day. I can say with certainty that he posted practically nothing remotely offensive or provocative. I have no question in anyway that Twitter suspended him for putting up the screenshots of Coomer’s Facebook site. Appealing.

Seeking close to some far more, I observed that Dominion Coomer is an avid climber who employed to put up usually on climbing concept boards less than his very own identify. He verified it himself in a write-up in which he described finding his nuclear physics Ph.D from Berkeley in 1997. Dominion’s Eric Coomer received his nuclear physics Ph.D from Berkeley in 1997. In a further article on the same concept board, Coomer gave out his email tackle. It was his outdated campus deal with from the Berkeley nuclear physics department. I plugged that e-mail deal with into the Google equipment, and matters bought odd.

I discovered Eric Coomer had a extensive heritage of posting on internet websites for skinheads. He was a large consumer of a Google Team for skinheads, and looks to have possibly been a information moderator for papaskin.com. Only these are not the neo-Nazis our mothers warned us about. These skinheads phone by themselves SHARPs, or Skinheads Versus Racial Prejudice. Feel of them as a sort of punk rock Antifa. In 2012, approximately 18 SHARPs attacked a smaller sized group of suspected racists in a Chicago cafe with bats and batons. That same yr, three neo-Nazis had been charged for the 1998 double murder of two SHARPs in Nevada.

Specified that Dominion’s Director of Safety and System, Eric Coomer, was an fanatic of a avenue combating anti-racist skinhead tradition going back at the very least into the 1990s, it looks extremely probably that Joe Oltmann was accurate in figuring out him as the Facebook user lately endorsing Antifa and submitting anti-law enforcement rhetoric. I shared this data on a number of message boards to enable other people today run with it. Within hrs, Papa Skin, a skinhead website which experienced been up for above 20 several years, was taken offline. (Whoever took it down missed the FAQ page, you can find it below http://www.papaskin.com/faq/faqs.html).

Of system none of this proves any fraud took put, but we are entitled to some responses. A single need only imagine if it was Joe Biden contesting the election success, and the Director for System & Security at a key voting equipment service provider turned out to be a Very pleased Boy with decades of involvement in extremist, even violent, right wing political teams. Democrats would rightly level out that this individual endorses participating in illegal conduct to achieve political goals. They would question how such a individual ended up in these an significant posture of general public trust, and what it may well say about the treatments in put to assure Dominion’s duties are dealt with in good faith.

Yet another reality of the Dominion fiasco, no matter if or not there was any fraud working with its machines, is the structural possibility made by having the same corporation run equipment in much more than two dozen states. If there ended up glitchy equipment causing a dispute in 1 state, like Democrats’ claims about Diebold machines in Ohio in 2004, and even if that dispute led to competing slates of electors, that is a little something the American political program has viewed and withstood in advance of. Obtaining likely tens of tens of millions of men and women doubting success in a 50 percent-dozen distinct states thanks to the same company working machines in all of them is an unprecedentedly significant trouble, whether or not or not their doubts are very well-established.

Moreover, platforms like Twitter and WordPress would do properly to take into consideration that censorship of individuals discussing Dominion and its personnel is probable to have the reverse influence that they consider it will: Twitter bans, web page removals, and wiping of bios from internet sites are only likely to make Trump’s hardcore supporters consider Dominion has some thing to hide. You just cannot make disagreements go absent by banning just one facet and pretending there is unanimity.

Darryl Cooper is the host of the MartyrMade podcast.