CNN's Jeffrey Lord Suggests Electronic Voting Machines Might Be Tampered With To Deny Trump Votes

Lord: “Just Because I Touch The Button That Says Donald Trump, It Doesn't Necessarily Mean That It Registers For Donald Trump” 

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

CNN commentator and Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord suggested that electronic voting machines may be tampered with in the presidential election, claiming, “just because I touch the button that says Donald Trump, it doesn't necessarily mean that it registers for Donald Trump.” Even CNN’s senior reporter for media & politics Dylan Byers was taken aback by Lord’s claim of widespread election fraud, calling it "baseless" and "as low as it gets." 

Lord is entitled to his opinion, but this is just an entirely baseless assertion about our voting process and he has no facts to back it up. https://t.co/P8uXJuyh4H

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) October 19, 2016

Trump and right-wing media have been pushing in tandem a "bogus" and "dangerous" narrative that the election will be rigged through various forms of election and voter fraud. From the October 19 edition of CNN's CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin: 

BROOKE BALDWIN (HOST): I don't doubt that there are certain instances [of voter fraud], but in terms of widespread voter fraud, that's just not true. 

JEFFREY LORD: Well, it certainly has been true in places in Pennsylvania. I mean, that's -- depending on the race and all of that kind of thing. And it is something that we have to be concerned about. Just off the top of my head, now that we're all doing -- or a lot of us are doing electronic voting, just because I touch the button that says Donald Trump, it doesn't necessarily mean that it registers for Donald Trump. And you can have all sorts of computer hanky-panky.

BALDWIN: Is this effective? 

ANGELA RYE: I think it's problematic for the Republican Party for a lot of reasons and one of them is voter fraud occurs .000031 times, percentages. And I think that we have to deal with the fact that there actually are voter suppression measures that were introduced in Republican-led state legislatures all over the country. 

LORD: This is called voter ID.

RYE: It's voter suppression though. Because it's also cutting back on early voting days, it's making it harder for people to vote who don't have the money so it actually has been equated to a modern day poll tax. That's something that should be discussed. 

LORD: No, no.

RYE: Yeah. You also have the gutting of Shelby v. Holder, which gutted section five of the Voting Rights Act. So we're talking about an election this year that actually is going to be more difficult for people to vote than ever and my question to the Trump campaign would be, OK, if the election is rigged, was it rigged before or after you won the primary?