Viral social media posts claimed that officials in Ware County, Georgia, used “sequestered” or “seized” Dominion voting machines to “break the Dominion algorithm.” The claims suggest that when officials ran an equal number of Trump and Biden ballots through the machines, they switched 26 percent of them to Biden.

In a press conference on Monday, Georgia voting system implementation manager Gabriel Sterling denied that any machines had been seized, and he noted that the conspiracy originated with an activist who incorrectly reported what happened during the Ware County hand recount. When the county performed a hand count of the paper ballots, there was a discrepancy between what they counted and what the machines reported the first time, but not one of 26 percent—it was off by .26 percent. This error amounted to 37 votes, a number Georgia voting system Sterling said is well within the expected range of error for a hand count, saying: “Again, it was .26 percent, that's pretty close, especially when all the studies show you can expect a 1 to 2 percent differential in hand counted ballots.” It’s currently unclear what caused the discrepancy in the vote count, but Sterling also said there was no evidence of any machines switching votes and noted that “the most obvious fault point in any of the system is the human beings who are counting them.”

There remains no evidence that widespread voting fraud occurred. 

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