Fox Business host Lou Dobbs issued what was effectively a fact check of his own claims about election security on his show on Friday.
The segment, which Dobbs did not conduct himself, was an interview with Eddie Perez, the global director of technology development and open standards for the Open Source Election Technology Institute, who answered questions about Smartmatic, an elections technology firm that has been subject to claims of election meddling by Dobbs and others.
Smartmatic threatened Fox News, along with Newsmax and OANN, with legal action this week for what it claims was a “disinformation campaign” that has cost the company “hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars.”
“There are lots of opinions about the integrity of the election, the irregularities of mail-in voting, of election voting machines, and voting software,” Dobbs said to introduce the segment. “One of the companies is Smartmatic, and we reached out to one of the leading authorities on open source software for elections, Eddie Perez, for his insight and views.”
An unseen interviewer asked Perez a number of questions.
“Have you seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to flip votes anywhere in the U.S. in this election?” the person asked.
“I have not seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to delete, change, alter, anything related to vote tabulation,” Perez responded.
Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for the president, claimed on Dobbs’s show that Dominion Voting Systems, another voting technology firm, is owned by Smartmatic, and Dobbs has claimed Dominion has “connections” to the company.
Smartmatic says that is false. The company also says Los Angeles County, California, is the only location in the United States where its software was used in the 2020 election.
Sidney Powell, a lawyer who has worked to support the president’s legal fight to challenge the results of the election, has repeated the claims on Dobbs’s show. “I can hardly wait to put forth all the evidence we have on Dominion,” said, adding, “starting with the fact that it was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez and then shipped internationally to manipulate votes for purchase in other countries, including this one.”
“Both Dominion and Smartmatic have individually and respectively put out very clear statements from their corporate headquarters, each of them indicating they are independent companies,” Perez said. “They are not related to each other. It is my understanding that neither one of them has an ownership stake in the other or anything like that.”
He added that he is “not aware of any direct connection between George Soros and Smartmatic. It is my understanding that an executive at Smartmatic has some sort of relationship with one of Soros’s foundations. That’s the extent of my knowledge.”
The interview with Perez was not followed by commentary from Dobbs. Instead, the network went straight to commercial.
