Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily publishes a lot of falsehoods that it doesn't correct, so when it does issue a correction, that's meaningful -- and it indicates that it's a screw-up so bad that even the notoriously fact-averse WND can't let it stand. Bob Unruh -- one of WND's chief misinformers on election issues -- wrote in a May 12 article:
A lawyer fighting an election-fraud case in Antrim County, Michigan, has revealed that the voting machines there contained a software program that could have been used to manipulate vote totals.
In fact, lawyer Matthew DePerno said in a podcast interview that with the MySQL program installed on the machines, and them all being linked, someone with access could "do whatever you want."
DePerno, just a day earlier confirmed in a court hearing that there were 1,061 "phantom votes" in the county during the 2020 presidential election, because while a recount of ballots tallied 15,962, the Michigan secretary of state's database showed only 14,901 votes were cast.
His latest concerns were raised during an interview with JD Rucker at the NOQ Report.
Rucker said the bombshell that DePerno delivered was that all of the voting machines were connected to each other through an intranet, that itself was not connected to the internet. However, he said a laptop computer with access to the intranet and access to the internet was left on during the Election Night counting.
But this apparently isn't true. WND later added a correction, which it euphemistically called an "update[] with additional context":
UPDATED WITH ADDITIONAL CONTEXT, May 13, 2021, at 2:45 p.m. ET: A fact-check by LeadStories indicates some of the claims made by attorney Matthew DePerno in the story below are in dispute. At issue, according to LeadStories, are "the safeguards in place to protect against fraud, including hand counts and audits" and "explanations provided by election officials."
"Michigan uses paper ballots, which have been preserved, meaning the accuracy of voting machines can be verified. Since the 2020 election, the state completed more than 250 audits, including a hand-tally audit of all the votes cast for president in Antrim County. According to the Michigan secretary of state's office, 'every one of them confirmed the integrity and accuracy of the 2020 general election.'"
Publishing falsehoods that you have to correct -- and other falsehoods that are left uncorrected -- is not the way to instill trust in a "news" organization, WND.
