The $787.5 million settlement by Fox News to avoid a defamation trial over election misinformation refutes claims about the voting machines used in Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Wednesday.
“It’s absolutely vindication. I want every Georgian to understand that they have fair and honest elections,” Raffensperger told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Dominion Voting Systems are fair, accurate machines. They record the votes. The people’s will was expressed in 2020.”
Fox agreed to settle the lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems rather than move forward with a trial about how the network’s on-air hosts and executives allowed Donald Trump’s supporters to lie about the outcome of the election.
After Trump lost his bid for reelection in the 2020 presidential race by less than 12,000 votes in Georgia, his supporters claimed on Fox that Dominion voting machines were rigged to flip votes, spreading a theory that they used software created in Venezuela to help Hugo Chavez when he was that country’s president. A judge overseeing the case wrote last month that the statements were untrue, and evidence showed Fox executives and on-air personalities knew that.
Three vote counts, including a hand count of all 5 million Georgia ballots, showed the same outcome of the election. Multiple investigations dispelled claims of counterfeit ballots, ballot stuffing, forged signatures on ballots and dead voters.
“Fox News knew what they were putting out there were falsehoods,” said Raffensperger, a Republican who supported Trump’s reelection. “It was really a major disinformation campaign when you had a candidate that lost and couldn’t accept it.”
Fox acknowledged in a statement that the court found “certain claims about Dominion to be false,” but the network didn’t apologize.
Raffensperger, who won reelection for a second term as Georgia’s top election official last year, said he hopes voters realize that allegations about the 2020 election have been rejected.
“Voters should know that next year, if we have some really close races, we can audit any of those races, and we can do a 100% recount like we did in 2020,” Raffensperger said. “I hope our country moves forward. It would be good for our society.”
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