Sidney Powell, a lawyer on President Trump’s election legal team who represented the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, has been a major source and promoter of viral conspiracy theories about vote switching.
Since the election, Ms. Powell has advanced claims of voluminous voter fraud and a rigged election. She falsely claimed that a supercomputer called Hammer hacked votes, that Mr. Trump won the election by “millions of votes” and that voting software company Dominion Voting Systems altered the tallies.
Last week, she promised that coming evidence would overturn the election’s results and said she would “release the Kraken,” a reference to the 1981 movie “The Clash of the Titans,” reprising a catchphrase that began trending on Twitter.
On Monday, Ms. Powell posted some of her so-called evidence on Twitter. It consisted of three screenshots of an affidavit that she said was signed by a former military official from Venezuela about elections there. The screenshots were incomplete and did not include a name or signature, and Ms. Powell did not respond to requests to view the full document.
But according to her and excerpts from the affidavit, the elections software company Smartmatic helped the Venezuelan government rig its elections by switching votes and leaving no trail. The military official said in the excerpts that the U.S. election was “eerily reminiscent” of what happened in Venezuela’s 2013 presidential election, though no evidence was provided that votes had been switched in the United States.
Ms. Powell promoted the affidavit and its claims in interviews on conservative media that have amassed at least four million views on YouTube.
“This person saw, by his own experience, exactly what was happening there was happening here,” Ms. Powell explained to Fox News on Monday.
Smartmatic does not provide technology to the battleground states that sealed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. And electronic voting security experts said they were unimpressed with what Ms. Powell presented.
“The essence of the affidavit is that voting machines could have been hacked. This is not news,” said David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University and founder of the Verified Voting Foundation. “Every single vote that has been counted by computer in the U.S. in the last 50 years was counted by a computer that ‘could have been hacked.’ So far as I know, none of them actually were.”
Dan Wallach, a professor of computer science at Rice University and an expert on electronic voting system security, said: “If this class of attack was happening, the odds of it going undetected is quite low. So far, we have no evidence suggesting an abnormal number of spoiled ballots.”
Previous claims that Smartmatic’s voting machines were rigged in Venezuela have been disputed and are “unsubstantiated,” according to The Associated Press. It’s worth noting that Smartmatic accused the Venezuelan government of election fraud in 2017, pointing out that its machines were used when the opposition party won a majority in the country’s National Assembly in 2015.
The excerpts from Ms. Powell also included numerous inaccurate claims to imply a similarity between Venezuela’s elections and the U.S. election, chiefly drawing dubious parallels between Smartmatic and Dominion, which was used in several key states. Ms. Powell took the claims one step further, telling the right-wing media company Newsmax that Venezuela’s vote counting system was then “exported” to the United States.
The official she cited also said that Dominion’s system was “a descendant” of Smartmatic’s system, that they “did business together” and that Mr. Biden had overtaken Mr. Trump only when “vote counting was stopped.”
Smartmatic and Dominion have denied any exchange of technology and maintain that they are competitors. Dominion bought assets from a company three years after Smartmatic sold the company. And Mr. Biden overtook Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania and Georgia after days of consistent counting, while maintaining a lead in Arizona that narrowed as tallying continued.
The official also claimed to Ms. Powell that voting machines display and print out a paper ballot showing the results the voter intended, while the software itself “changes the information electronically.” But Dominion’s system does not work like that.
“The process that we see happening in Georgia and elsewhere that use similar ‘ballot marking device’ systems,” Mr. Wallach said, “is that the voter selects their choices with a computer of some sort, which then prints their ballot. The voter then typically carries that ballot to a ballot box, often with a scanner on top, and deposits the ballot.”
Any difference or attack on the tabulation system would be caught in postelection recounts, and “so far, none of them have caught anything other than human errors in the tabulation process, such as forgetting to load a memory card,” he said.
Mr. Dill said: “Courts demand strong evidence to overturn an election. From that perspective, this affidavit does not help make a case.”
