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Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against several Trump allies for pushing election ‘radioactive falsehoods’ – could it triumph?


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Politicians and activists’ pleas fell on deaf ears. TV networks and newspapers fact-checked in vain. Social media giants proved impotent.

But now a little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for billions of dollars.

“Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.”

The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion Voting Systems, an election machine company named after Canada’s Dominion Elections Act of 1920. Its main offices are in Toronto and Denver and it describes itself as the leading supplier of US election technology. It says it serves more than 40% of American voters, with customers in 28 states.

But the 2020 election put a target on its back. As the White House slipped away and Trump desperately pushed groundless claims of voter fraud, his lawyers and cheerleaders falsely alleged Dominion had rigged the polls in favour of Joe Biden.

Among the more baroque conspiracy theories was that Dominion changed votes through algorithms in its voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chávez.

It was laughable but also potentially devastating to Dominion’s reputation and ruinous to its business. It also fed a cocktail of conspiracy theories that fuelled Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, as Congress moved to certify the election results. Five people died, including an officer of the Capitol police.

The company is fighting back. It filed $1.3bn defamation lawsuits against Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, for pushing the allegations without evidence.

Separately, Dominion’s security director, Eric Coomer, launched a suit against the Trump campaign, Giuliani, Powell and some conservative media figures and outlets, saying he had been forced into hiding by death threats.

Then came the big one. Last month Dominion filed a $1.6bn defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the bogus claims.

“The truth matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”

The suit argues that Fox hosts and guests “took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire” by broadcasting wild assertions that Dominion systems changed votes and ignoring repeated efforts by the company to set the record straight.

“Radioactive falsehoods” spread by Fox News will cost Dominion $600m over the next eight years, according to the lawsuit, and have resulted in Dominion employees being harassed and the company losing major contracts in Georgia and Louisiana.

Fox fiercely disputes the charge. It said in a statement: “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”


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Powell asked a judge to throw out the lawsuit against her, arguing that her assertions were protected by the right to free speech. But she also offered the unusual defence that she had been exaggerating to make a point and that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process”.