The Sunday Read: ‘He Was the “Perfect Villain” for Voting Conspiracists’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2021

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over the past decade, Eric Coomer has helped make Dominion Voting Systems one of the largest providers of voting machines and software in the United States. He was accustomed to working long days during the postelection certification process, but November 2020 was different. President Trump was demanding recounts. His allies had spent months stoking fears of election fraud. And then, on Nov. 8, Sidney Powell, a lawyer representing the Trump campaign, appeared on Fox News and claimed, without evidence, that Dominion had an algorithm that switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden. This is the story of how the 2020 election upended Mr. Coomer’s life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My original assignment was simply to look into how conspiracies about the presidential election
0:11.9	were hurting the lives of individuals.
0:16.4	You know, there's this conspiracy that claims that man never landed on the moon.
0:20.5	I think you could make the argument maybe because there was no social media or no googling
0:25.6	that there isn't that one name or single person who we say was central to staging a fake
0:30.9	moon landing, same with a flatter theory.
0:34.3	So far as I know there isn't the villain or the victim.
0:40.2	My name is Susan Dominus and I'm a staff writer for The New York Times magazine.
0:46.1	I wrote a story about Eric Humer, who was a senior figure in charge of security and
0:51.7	strategy at Dominion voting systems.
0:55.5	Dominion is one of the biggest election technology suppliers in the country.
1:00.7	Eric was the target of serious and prolonged threats because many subscribers to right-wing
1:06.8	media and social media believed he was the central villain who created the technology to allow
1:13.9	Biden supporters to rig the election.
1:18.8	It all started just days after the election.
1:22.2	A host of a conservative podcast said that he'd heard Eric on an antifa conference call
1:28.4	saying to others not to worry because he had made sure that Trump was not going to win.
1:33.8	Trump attorney Sidney Powell had already mentioned Dominion on Fox News.
1:38.4	Threats were pouring into dozens of employees at Dominion.
1:42.9	Eric has denied ever being on any such call, but his name began appearing in very graphic
1:48.9	online posts in association with things like execution and suicide.
1:54.4	He was trending on Twitter.
	...

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