Election season brings with it so many moments of déjà vu: pompous “I voted” stickers, irrelevant and confusing ads from candidates you’ve never heard of, and a flurry of false claims surrounding voting laws, machines, and all other topics apt for fear mongering. Unfortunately, TWS Fact Check can combat only the last of these nuisances.
An old myth that George Soros owns the voting machine company Smartmatic has begun to resurface on Facebook.
Like most “fake news” on the internet, the claim seems birthed from a bad game of telephone mixed with a heavy dose of BS, which piqued readers’ curiousity during the 2016 elections. The connection established between Smartmatic and Soros is that the chairman of the company, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, also sits on the global board of Soros’ Open Society Foundations. That’s it.
The rumor reached such great heights that Smartmatic released a fact sheet stating clearly that Soros “does not have and has never had any ownership stake in Smartmatic” and that the company “did not deploy our technology in any U.S. county during 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.” (Smartmatic tech has been used in some states across the U.S. and was more recently awarded a contract “to assist the Registrar-Recorder County Clerk in the development, manufacturing and implementation of the County’s new system by 2020.”)
Fact Checkers have debunked this myth time and time again, demonstrating a core principle of the internet as explained by the laggardly George R. R. Martin: “What is dead [online] may never die.”
If you have questions about this fact check, or would like to submit a request for another fact check, email Holmes Lybrand at [email protected] or the Weekly Standard at [email protected]. For details on TWS Fact Check, see our explainer here.
