Fact Check: Debunking the Hammer and Scorecard Conspiracy Theory

At least one member of the president’s legal team and other high-profile Trump supporters have alleged that Democrats are trying to “steal the election” using a super computer and accompanying software program to transfer votes to Joe Biden. Those claims have trickled down to social media posts and gone viral. One such post says that “democrat operatives used a classified supercomputer called ‘Hammer’ to steal the 2020 election.”

In an interview with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business News, Sidney Powell, who is on Trump’s legal team, called for an investigation into the “likelihood that 3 percent of the vote total was changed in the pre-election voting ballots that were collected digitally by using the Hammer program and the software program called Scorecard.”

According to Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, who spoke about Hammer and Scorecard on the Two Mikes podcast last week, Hammer is a “cyberwarfare tool” that was “conceived by the CIA to go against terrorists.” Scorecard, as explained by McInerney, is an application that “manipulates votes,” and, he claims, was used by Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the 2012 presidential election in order to win Florida. McInerny insists that Democrats are using this “cyberwarfare” in the current presidential election, targeting “key states” such as: Florida, Texas, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia.

Last week, McInerney also appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room, where he told Bannon that Hammer “was still up and running.” He claimed that the “DNC has been using this tool and it has not yet been taken down.” McInerney described Hammer as a “surveillance tool” which, he says, was modified with Scorecard, described as “a software package that changes the votes.”