After the 2020 election, Fox News and other right wing media peddled the bizarre theory that there had been a vast conspiracy involving the Dominion voting machine company, the Smartmatic software company, the Democratic party, the deceased Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, and large numbers of election workers all over the country to switch votes from creepy Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Although preposterous on its face, this spread like wildfire and became an article of faith with creepy Trump, his cult followers, and among his campaign team.
Both Dominion and Smartmatic sued Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN. and also people close to creepy Trump like Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell who spread this nonsense. Fox settled with Dominion for a whopping $787.5 million dollars. Smartmatic’s case against Newsmax was settled on September 26, 2024 but the details have not yet been released. Four other cases are still pending.
(Just yesterday a different case, a defamation lawsuit brought by two Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss against the website The Gateway Pundit, was settled with the site’s owner Jim Hoft (sometimes referred to as the ‘dumbest man on the internet‘) was settled with Hoft admitting that the two women had not committed fraud. The monetary terms of the settlement were not disclosed.)
But where and how did this outlandish rumor begin? It turns out that it may have originated in the fertile mind of someone named Marlene Bourne who, in the immediate wake of the election, sent off an email outlining her theory to Sidney Powell and others. This was revealed in the depositions of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox but apart from a few reports in smaller news outlets in 2023, it has not received much publicity.
Bourne told MinnPost in an interview that the idea of voter fraud “was a spur of the moment thing” because she “wasn’t really paying attention to the election.” She said she had never heard of the voting systems company before, but heard the name “Dominion” somewhere that day and began to research the company, relying on her intuition and what she called a “sixth sense” that she says enables her to “connect the dots.”
“I am able to connect things that don’t seem to connect,” she said. “I have this unique vision. I see things that other people don’t.”
Bourne said she used her “highly attuned awareness” and ability to “find a common thread” to investigate Dominion Voting Systems.
One of her first discoveries, that Dominion was a Canadian company, energized her.
“Isn’t that, in itself, foreign interference?” Bourne asked. Dominion has a U.S. headquarters in Denver, Colo., as well as a headquarters in Toronto.
Bourne said it took her about an hour to piece together her information about Dominion and 10 minutes to write her lengthy email.
…Documents made public in the lawsuit show that less than an hour after receiving it, Powell forwarded Bourne’s email to Maria Bartiromo, and the Fox News host allowed Powell to air claims of a vote-switching Dominion “algorithm” in an interview the next day.
Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox asks: “What was the evidence for these far-fetched claims that Powell sent to Bartiromo the day before the broadcast? An email entitled Election Fraud Info Powell had received from a ‘source,’ which the author herself describes as ‘pretty wackadoodle.’ This email, also received by Dobbs, alleged Dominion was the one common thread in the voting irregularities in a number of states.”
Dominion’s lawsuit says Bartiromo and Dobbs never disclosed the existence of Bourne’s email.
A spokeswoman for Fox News told MinnPost in a statement neither Bartiromo, nor her producer, used Bourne’s email in their coverage. She said that during her deposition, “Bartiromo testified repeatedly that she did not know who the writer was and didn’t remember seeing the email beyond forwarding it to her producer to check out.”
…The Fox News spokeswoman conceded, however, that Bartiromo’s show gave Powell the opportunity to advance Bourne’s theories.
But wait, there’s more!.
But the strangest revelation so far from the Dominion Voting Systems case against the cable channel may be the alleged source of the voter-fraud claims that sparked the lawsuit: a single email from a previously unknown woman who was convinced, among other things, that late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered while being hunted for sport.
…But Bourne didn’t stop there. In a flurry of names and statistics, she laid out a scenario in the email where the world is controlled by a sinister cabal —one that fatally hunted Scalia for sport (in reality, Scalia died in his sleep in 2016).
“Justice Scalia wasn’t accidentally shot during a hunting trip,” her email read. “He was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp. A club for members of the Mega-Group, during a weeklong human hunting expedition. NEVER accept an invitation to be a guest at that camp. Ever.”
…In a discursive 40-minute interview with The Daily Beast, Bourne threw out a jumble of ideas that centered on ties between telepaths, the Bank of the Vatican, the NXIVM sex cult, and the 1970 film Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
And she explained where she got the conspiracy theories like the one that Fox somehow allowed to reach its airwaves, prompting the threat of a $1.6 billion judgment. Essentially, in Bourne’s telling, she conjures her theories out of nothing.
“It’s just really interesting where I’ll have the TV on, and I’ll hear a word or a person’s name, and for whatever reason, I can’t explain it, it’s going to compel me to look it up online, I’ll do a little digging,” she said. “Instead of saying I rely on my intuition, I say ‘the wind’ is talking to me. It’s just a fun way of living my life, don’t you think?”
Bourne gets her theories from song lyrics and glimpses of magazine covers. She’s working on a book styled after the Ancient Aliens television series that focuses on the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. She has an elaborate theory about the deep state and the media: in Bourne’s telling, the CIA controls the Washington Post, the FBI runs the New York Times, and the State Department runs Politico and CNN.
That these media outlets based their allegations on this kind of rubbish boggles the mind. Fox News tries to maintain a facade of journalistic credibility by asserting that there is a distinction between its ‘news’ programs and its ‘opinion’ programs. But even an opinion show would be obliged to do some minimal fact-checking before rushing to spread a manifestly wild theory that was sent to it by some unknown person. No wonder they wanted to settle the case against Dominion out of court, even if it was for a healthy sum. The blatant and reckless disregard for the truth that is on display in this episode probably made them fear hefty punitive damages if the case ended up before a jury.
Michael Kosta of The Daily Show recently interviewed Bourne.
Even though these revelations are more than a year old, this clip from a few days ago was where I first heard about this story. Initially I thought that Bourne was an actor and that this was a funny satirical piece about the kinds of people who imagine and propagate crazy ideas. But as I watched it, it dawned on me that she was not playing a part. So I looked into it and found these news reports from more than a year ago, but there was almost nothing in the major media outlets.
FTR: Antonin Scalia died at a hunting “camp” (luxury resort) in Texas.
The Bohemian Grove campground (luxury resort) is in northern California.
So what you’re saying is, “They” moved the body to hide the evidence. I see, I see, it’s all clear now.
Bourne told MinnPost in an interview that the idea of voter fraud “was a spur of the moment thing” because she “wasn’t really paying attention to the election.”
In other words, she didn’t know jaque merde about any of this, and made up a delusional conspiracy theory from what little (probably cherry-picked) facts she got (or that caught her interest).
Do you think that Fox and other right-wingers, having been spanked rather hard about last time, will still crank out voter-fraud theories this time?
Poor, poor Fox News. They were so desperate to find mud to throw at the Democrats that they had to seize on anything that came their way. How unfair that the only juicy thing out there was written by a nut! What were they expected to do? Jesus, are you listening? Why are you forsaking them?
Some people have a couple of screws loose upstairs. That is unfortunate, but not always something that can be helped.
Giving them a platform and help spread such obvious delusions should have consequences.
Ye gods, more additions to the avalanche of crap this case was.
I’d like to say something about how the flatout denial of reality is never a good idea, but now we gotta hear about people stating that the hurricanes in Florida were created by Democrats and/or metereologists.
Forget about reality denial, full-fat psychosis is in fashion now.
I’d compare this woman to Philomena Cunk, if it wasnt an insult to Diane Morgan.
Democracy doesn’t work because people like this can vote.
@8 sonofrojblake
Democracy doesn’t work because people not like this don’t vote.
@9, steve oberski
Indeed. I’ve seen comments on Bluesky from self-described lefty Americans who say they are going to withhold their vote from Harris on the basis of some detail of one of her policies they have a principled objection to. They seem perfectly comfortable with the idea that a spoiled ballot or abstention is not some admirable act of dissent, but an active aid to comfortably the second worst candidate ever to stand for election in the US.
But further to my comment: being able to drive a motor vehicle is a heavy responsibility. Because of this, you’re expected to demonstrate that you know how to do it before you’re allowed to do it unsupervised. You’re expected to pass a test. Just to drive a car.
Why, then, are you allowed to place your hands on the levers of government without passing even the most basic test of literacy? Arguably misusing your vote has greater potential to cause damage to your fellow citizens.
(I might equally ask of the US why you’re allowed to own a gun without passing a test, but nobody is expecting a logical answer to that one).
The obvious answer is that if we educated the electorate properly (if that were even possible -- my opinion on the educability of the general public is quite low as a result of having spent time working in a public-facing job decades ago), there’d likely be armed uprising. And if not that, then at least no right wing party would ever come close to power again, millionaires forming such a small proportion of the electorate. (It being my contention that a vote for the Right is perfectly fine and understandable if you don’t have to work for a living because you’re so rich, but for anyone else, which is to say the vast majority, a vote on the left is the only rational choice.)
@sonofrjblake:
The other issue, of course, is that in previous times when the U.S. did have intelligence tests for voting, the intelligence tests were very deliberately crafted to exclude certain groups. It comes down to which would you prefer: everybody being allowed to vote no matter how well their head was screwed on, or having an intelligence test designed and implemented by people who are in the pay of the Kochs and Murdochs? Because the right wing has already demonstrated they will use any excuse to knock people they disagree with off the rolls, whether it’s legal or not, and giving them a legal route is just asking for voter roll purges.