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Dominion CEO addresses conspiracies, defamation suits in Georgia elections board meeting

ATLANTA — Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos debunked conspiracies and laid out defamation claims during a presentation to Georgia’s state elections board Wednesday.

Dominion has been the state’s elections software and touch-screen machine vendor since 2019. The company has been the center of “stolen election” conspiracies in the wake of former President Trump’s November loss, and the January runoff that ended with Georgia Republicans losing their two Senate seats.

Dominion is now filing a series of defamation claims against Trump supporters who filed or backed a string of dead-end election lawsuits and theories, including attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who is represented by Lin Wood.

This week, Dominion filed a $1.3 billion claim against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Collectively, the group pushed claims that the company ran foreign elections, flipped votes and other theories debunked by Georgia’s GOP-led elections officials.

“(One being) that somehow some national level database that sits in Frankfurt, Germany on Amazon web services servers controlled by a company called Sidel with source code from Smartmatic,” Poulos said, as an example. “This is 100% false and this is exactly the core of the disinformation and the root of it.”

“The fact that the State of Georgia has counted 5 million ballots three times, one of those times was done by hand … distributed across 159 counties, thousands of people involved in that process,” said Poulos. “You don’t need to go much further than that to understand that the ballots were counted properly.”

Poulos has taken to national media in recent weeks, indicating on Tuesday night that the company was not done filing defamation suits.

On Wednesday, elections board members posed questions of their own, with Matt Mashburn saying his questions came from inquiries he continues to receive.

“Is Dominion an American company or not?” Mashburn asked.

“We are, sir,” answered Poulos, who said he started the company in Canada before selling it in 2018.

Conspiracies have linked Dominion to Venezuela, with Poulos calling such purported business and ownership ties “100% false.”

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“Let me be very clear. Our owners are a private equity company with U.S. investors based in New York,” Poulos continued, adding that a head office is based in Denver and there are roughly 300 employees spread across the country. “The company is American, and American-owned,” Poulos continued.

There are regional offices in several states, including Georgia, Poulos said.

“With specific regards to allegations that we and other voting systems vendors in the United States uses software created by Smartmatic, that is not true,” he said. “Smartmatic is a different company. We are competitors … We are in no way using their source code or tied to their ownership or their board structure or any of that.”

Board member Anh Le asked Poulos whether the company was considering any changes moving forward, to which Poulos said they were working with different states to increase transparency in proposed “awareness campaigns.”

Another board member, David Worley, asked whether Dominion had been contacted by state lawmakers amid GOP-led proposals for sweeping elections law changes.

Those changes would drastically change and limit voting options and hours, giving the state more oversight in county-led elections.