Protecting Truth From False Claims: A Case For The Voting System Companies
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It has been a month since the elections. Yet, claims of fraud in the voting system have made the elections seem unending. What is the truth, and how can you protect it from false claims? In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how Donald Trump’s claims about the voting system, with the help of his surrogates, have stretched on and created big issues among other companies. They talk about Smartmatic and Dominion’s fight against defamation. They also talk about society’s penchant for villains and how doubt and skepticism about authenticity complicate truth.
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Bill, there’s some very interesting thing that happened. It’s a great subject for us to talk about. I think everybody in America is aware that since Election Day or shortly after Election Day, there have been a lot of discussions, especially from the Republican campaign, the Republican National Convention, and all Donald Trump’s surrogates about how there was fraud in the voting system. They make all sorts of claims and even claims against companies that made the voting machines and the voting systems. I think the name we’ve heard the most is Dominion, but there’s another one called Smartmatic. Smartmatic is a US company and Dominion is a Canadian company, which makes sense why Smartmatic would take the lead here in the US.
An article came out that they have issued letters to Fox News, One America Network, and Newsmax who are the three very conservative-leaning media organizations saying that they’ve defamed them. They are asking each of these media outlets to issue retractions. I read some of their language, “Retractions to the same level,” meaning the same number of occurrences. It is wishful thinking that they would amplify the message of a retraction to the same level that they allowed everything to be amplified in the first place. This company’s good name and the products that they create, the service they provide to our democracy of voting systems were smeared for sure. They’re alleging defamation and wanting retraction. I certainly understand them wanting that and asking for that. It’s pretty gutsy of them to try and make some big news and do that.
If you start fighting for the need for respect and truth, and if you have enough muscle, persistence and support in order to do that, and if you get the legal system to support you also, you can get a little bit of help. Those systems can help when something is not moral or not ethical. There’s not as much help as there is if something is criminal. Is there a criminal piece to the action that a person did versus this thing that’s moral and ethical, which is a little bit some things that we choose not to police or prosecute? This is why white-collar crimes don’t get as much focus or there’s not an intention put to it, whereas petty crimes get way more proportional attention. You could get more punishment in the last ten years for having marijuana, rather than stealing $100,000 or $500,000 from a business that you crashed on Wall Street.
In Los Angeles on a daily basis, our local news covers the latest high-speed chase of somebody in a car trying to get away from the police. That’s the prettiest of crimes there too.
It’s important to meet the need for safety by making sure that no person is hurting anybody on the road. The police have got to be safe at the same time, whether they’re pursuing the person that is not meeting other people’s need for safety. They’ve gotten better at doing that so that there are not as many car chases now because it’s not a spectacle as much. As our society keeps grappling with its identity, there’s a leaning towards creating a villain or something that’s wrong, something we don’t want, or something that is a target that gets traction. It’s unsettling that Mister Rogers has to go in front of a group of senators in years past and start advocating for a children’s show on PBS because some Congress said, “No, we don’t want that show or we don’t want public broadcasting to get federal money.”
They were a villain for a long time until gradually they move into a place where get most of their donations from private sources. Not as much public money, not as much anger from a voter, or can’t be stirred up by the voter. We can’t target them in the same way. There was the planned parenthood that has been taking a pounding for years because of abortion, and only 3% or 5% of the things that they do are having to do with abortion. It’s about women’s health like, “Let’s limit those clinics or put a strain on that name. We’re going to not respect them. We’re going to blame, judge, or criticize them instead of being compassionate, empathic, or even being truthful for what are they doing. Health services for women. We’re going to create some doubt and skepticism about the authenticity.” Now, when we come back to these voting machines, to put the ball on the tee for you here, it’s like, “We’re going to take a run at how can we create doubt and skepticism towards these things so that we feel better about taking on a villain.” The hard part of our discussion in this episode is that the false claims are sticking the mud on the company’s identity or the person’s identity.
They did. The chief marketer and brander had been casting doubt and skepticism on mail-in voting for more than a year before we had the election. When the mail-in vote proved to be what many of us thought it would be, which is people voting and people choosing to vote from home and be safe during this pandemic, it’s interesting to see the states that counted the mail-in vote prior to election day like Florida had all their votes, not in doubt or questioned at all. The Republicans didn’t attack Florida because it went for Donald Trump, but Florida is a model for other states who didn’t count the vote until the beginning of election day. There were so many votes. It took many days to count that vote. That fed into this doubt and skepticism, “Where are these votes coming from? President Donald Trump was leading on election night in these states and out swung the other way.”
As soon as somebody like Rudy Giuliani or any of the other surrogates of President Donald Trump start saying, “How do these votes magically flip from one side to the other? There are reports of these voting machines and these voting systems that are magically flipping votes,” are cast out on these companies. I have a lot of sympathy in some ways, empathy for these companies, Smartmatic and Dominion, whose good name is getting dragged in the mud. Now that I even say that, I’m remembering the story of where the phrase “getting dragged in the mud” came from. It was a person named Mud. That’s not mud-like dirt, but his name became associated with mud and mudslinging and the whole thing.
There’s a whole backstory about why that would stick.
The reality is these companies have been defamed. Their reputations have been damaged and what’s terribly unfortunate is there’s very little that can be done about it. I respect the companies issuing these letters to these news organizations and letting it be known to the world that they’ve been harmed. As you and I have often talked about on this show, often the facts don’t matter and the damage is already done. This genie is out of the bottle. Their names have been associated with unfair voting, unfair tabulation, fraud, and all sorts of things, even though they haven’t done it.
As a small business owner, this has an impact on me because I know the damage that an irrational person can do in the form of a customer. I’ve seen it happen to businesses where the person making the allegations is not even a customer, but somebody who knows a customer and was told maybe a partial truth by somebody. They then go and make a statement out on social media that some company did something and should be viewed in a certain way and held accountably. That can do all kinds of damage to a good reputable company. It is hard to prove a negative and change people’s perceptions. As they say, “When the horse has left the barn, it is hard to get the horseback in the barn.”
Also, to clean up the brand name that you’ve worked hard on. There was an organization called ACORN a few years back. One of the things that they did as a part of their social service was to help voters register. They went around and they helped. They didn’t care what the vote was. They were just helping people register. Because they were in communities that were communities of color or communities that had ethnic minorities. It’s like, “You’re registering the wrong people.” The answer is, “No, they happened to be Americans that we’re registering.” We are spending time. Literally, their funding got cut from being a non-profit or non-profit status. I’m not sure what the status is now of that organization. They struggle because they became the latest villain, the target or talking point. When a company becomes a talking point in the media, there is some real brand damage that takes place. How do you clean that brand damage up when you target something like voting? The brand damage is to America. It’s not to the voting company or this company that they’re looking to take a swat at. It’s like democracy, we vote and we pick. These are the people that are in charge of making decisions for us. The loudest megaphone gets the attention.
The hardest part about the mudslinging is that the facts don’t matter. We’re interested in creating doubt and skepticism about the topic that we’re talking about. If I create doubt and skepticism, I could take down the truth and trust. Compassion and empathy is that the need for truth causes a feeling of doubt. Think about the relationship between the word truth and the feeling of doubt. The feeling of skepticism is being caused by the need for trust not being met. There is a language representation, but more importantly inside the body, there is a physiological change when somebody feels doubt because their need for truth is not met, but then they won’t buy something because “I don’t have any truth around this product or brand name anymore.” There are companies that rebrand and then have to start all over to rebuild respect, truth and trust. We rebranded because we needed to get rid of X, Y, Z executive, and he was representing that name we used to have. Now that he’s gone, we call ourselves this new thing because we’re now this new thing.
That’s all to get around that brand damage that’s done, and some companies feel they have no choice but to do that after certain brand damage has happened. You have to feel for all the people that work for this company. Not only that, all the civil servants that have been responsible for helping carry out our election, which Americans should have confidence in. Remember a while back, we talked about the 60 minutes interview with the gentleman who was in charge of cybersecurity in the United States for our elections and all this thing that Donald Trump fired the day after he said, “This was the most secure election in American history.” I’m forgetting his name, but it was only a few episodes ago.
He proved and he said, “I know the election was secure because we have these things called facts, this verifiable material we can count called paper ballots.” Even though there are machines that count the votes, there are tabulation machines, there are things that do it in rapid fashion, which in Georgia, they recounted by hand. They then recounted a second time. Three times the total count it and came up with the same results. In fact, a few more votes went Joe Biden’s way after the recount. These voting systems, these machines, Smartmatic and Dominion, we can trust what they do and what they did. Unfortunately, the Republican party and all Donald Trump’s surrogates have done such brand damage to these that I bet you anything. The secretaries of state around the country and individual states, especially the red states who might have fed into a little bit of that talking point and have confirmation bias in alignment with what Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and other surrogates have said, those companies are not going to get the contracts going forward.
In those certain states, regrettably, there will be some distance created between them. Regrettably, their population will have to suffer a bit because they’ll be reducing to what they call as safe. Meanwhile, they’re losing things like efficiency and trust, “We now only trust these paper things.” It’s like, “You can’t use your computer anymore. You need to use a pen and paper now and send a letter. You have to write a hundred letters to your things because you can’t use your computer anymore.” It’s like going backward in technology. That’s what the need for truth and trust not being met. What’s interesting communication-wise is how a person’s language and a leader’s language affect the physiology of the listener. In this show, the physiology of the customer, the constituent, and the people listening to people on media. If you say something and you start the path of a belief that’s a falsehood, that’s where the damage takes place and it’s not criminal, but it’s most certainly not ethical.
It’s definitely not ethical. The interesting thing is even if Fox News, OAN or One American News, and Newsmax each all issued any retractions, it’s not going to get near the oxygen that the original messaging got. It’s not going to repair the brand damage. While I’m sure each of these networks and I know there have been some statements already that said, “As a network, we didn’t make any defamatory statements. Perhaps the people we were interviewing made defamatory statements on our network being interviewed.” That’s how they try to separate themselves from that. I find it interesting and I’m interested to see going forward, especially Fox News. Just because they’re more established media outlets than OAN and Newsmax, which are emerging in late 2020, they may be much bigger media outlets in the future. Fox News, as many opinions show with personalities like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs, and all these people.
If any of those people piled on and made assertions that, “We know Dominion flipped the votes. That’s not in dispute. That’s a fact.” If any of them made statements like that on Fox News that are employees of the network, then it’s past possible that Smartmatic, if they wanted to pursue legal action might get some traction and illuminate to America the recklessness of making sweeping statements like this and piling on. It’s going to be one of those situations where these companies like Smartmatic and Dominion, even if they win some small victory in that, they’re going to still lose in the bigger picture. They’re not going to gain what they need.
The most unsettling thing that I’m finding that is tough is we all have a need of being heard. We all have a need for being seen, the need for respect, mutual respect, fairness, truth and trust. It’s a little bit Superman-ish, truth, trust in the American way. Once a person is not in the place of either speaking or doing things in a moral or ethical way, the damage comes to the freedom of speech. The first amendment takes the damage because what happens is that you say something, and you get enough people suing on the freedom of speech. You get people to clam up quickly because even if the person is in a space of moral and ethical, they’re not going to stand up for what’s moral and ethical.
Here is where the Republicans are in a bind now. It’s interesting we’re in this place called sticking the landing here. This is huge because the Republicans are not able to speak up because they will personally receive brand damage to their name. They won’t be elected again because there are 73 or 74 million people that are going to remember that you spoke up against the president. He was our guy and you said things that were not in agreement with what he said. Yes, you spoke the truth, but you speak in the truth. You don’t get credit for that. You only get credit for loyalty. Notice that this is neither moral nor ethical to stay and put truth under the bus by supporting loyalty and identity over truth, trust, ethics, and morality over the country. That’s what you’re picking?
This is why this topic is also difficult to talk about because protecting false claims or defeating false claims does take a lot of empathy and compassion for the person that is spitting untruths. When Rudy Giuliani is going down his list that says, George Soros, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Venezuela. All these people are the cause of why your votes weren’t counted. It’s not moral and ethical to be able to try to promote that all in one message just to see what piece of spaghetti is going to sit on the wall. How much mud can I get on the wall, on America’s face, or the face of democracy? I am doing what I’ve been hired to do, which is counter-message the voting system because my client is doing this.
I don’t know if this is a label or if this is a fact, but the only Republicans with the moral courage to stay on the right side of this ethical and moral issue or debate are the people that have no fear of either Donald Trump or Donald Trump’s space or are retiring. I’m thinking of people like Mitt Romney in Utah whose re-election cycle was going to be so far after Donald Trump’s presidency, that he has no fear of being primaried by Donald Trump. I think you think Utah’s a little different anyway.
They love Mitt Romney in Utah.
They do, but then also there was news that Representative Paul Mitchell, a Republican from Michigan, he told Jake Tapper on the lead that he is switching his party affiliation. He is no longer a Republican. He is renouncing being a Republican and became an independent, but when you read and learn more about him, he’s a retiring Congressman. He’s not going to run again. He doesn’t have this fear of being primaried or being attacked further from the right, which is what happens so often. It’s a shame that it takes people that are on their way out the door to speak the truth.
Jeff Flake is another character. He’s like, “I’m out of this mess. I’m not getting in this. I’m going to make it a little more peaceful by voting for Brett Kavanaugh, even though I am the person that is morally abhorrent of what is happening in front of me.”
That’s a whole other issue. Don’t get me started, Bill.
The hard part about this is when you’ve got conservative judges in, they will fight for the freedom of speech, which at this stage of the game of our young nation could be problematic because there are no guard rails around things that are moral and ethical in the internet space. There are very few things that are holding it. The internet doesn’t do a great job of protecting things that are moral or ethical for being broadcast across their streams.
The internet does not and until now, OAN and Newsmax have been an internet-only media outlet that seems to be changing. They’re getting onto more cable TV systems, which are regulated by the FCC, but certainly, Fox News is a conventional media outlet that is subject to FCC and other regulations. They’re not shielded by Section 230, which is the clause that built the internet. We’ve talked about that in the past. It’ll be interesting to see how much money are these voting machine companies going to put behind this? How far are they going to go? It might be interesting on principle to wage that fight to make a bigger point, a moral and ethical point that I think needs to be amplified, but can they afford to do that?
We’ve got a little bit of work to do as a nation to be able to sit with the person that’s opposite of us and have compassion and empathy for the things that they stand for, and the things that we stand for, and have a moral and ethical discussion about that thing in a safe, collaborative way, rather than going, like, “I’m spitting this out. I’m just looking for my followers.” Things will tend to go better. I think that all of our conversations are looking to restore truth and trust and get into the process of this. As we keep looking at some of the soft spots in our communication strategies, there’s not a week that goes by that we don’t have ten topics to talk about. Which one of the topics are we going to pick and how truth took a whipping? That’s hard.
I liked this topic. Thanks for talking about it with me because it’s important because it’s not just purely Democrats against Republicans. This was not that pure ideological political battle. I’m sure there are things we can find that the Democrats have done in the past, they have done similar things. The damage that can happen to truly an innocent company, the damage that can cause is disheartening and disappointing.
It’s a big thing. As readers, as people that consume media, we need to ask the question, “What is this person talking about best for the nation? Is it the best choice?” It might not be a great choice. It might even offend us or we think it’s horrific. When we think about the alternative of this topic, it doesn’t mean that we don’t stop fighting for the thing that we would. We’ve got to do a better job of making it safe and not to shout at each other. Make it safe to discuss with each other complex issues because a simple yes or no, right or wrong, good and evil narrative is not healthy for America.
We’ll leave it there. That was great. Thank you for having that discussion with me. I appreciate it.
More to come, Tom. Thank you, everybody.
Important Links:
- ACORN
- https://www.CNN.com/2020/12/14/politics/paul-mitchell-quits-gop/index.html
- https://www.CNN.com/2020/12/14/media/smartmatic-fox-news-newsmax-oan/index.html
- https://www.TheVerge.com/2020/12/14/22174682/smartmatic-voting-fraud-disinformation-retraction-fox-news-oann-newsmax
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