One week after Joe Biden was sworn in as President One America News (OAN) aired a segment featuring a man they introduced as an “expert mathematician” who claimed to have uncovered evidence of election rigging and that Donald Trump actually won re-election. That man, according to a lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems Tuesday against the far right wing media outlet, is not an expert mathematician, but a swing set installer and convicted drug dealer.
Back on January 27 OAN hosted Ed Solomon, “who claimed to have found evidence within precinct-level reporting that the election was rigged by an algorithm,” VICE reports. “The basis of Solomon’s claim is that he found several precincts throughout the country reporting exactly the same results at various times throughout the vote tabulation process.”
OAN host Christina Bobb asked Solomon what the statistical probability of such an occurrence might be.
“You can use the binomial probability formula, and the chance of that event happening is one over ten to an exponent so large there’s not enough stars in the universe—there’s not enough atoms in the universe to explain the number. It can’t happen naturally,” Solomon replied.
VICE adds that Dominion’s lawsuit against OAN includes “knowingly reporting defamatory claims against the company in the wake of Trump’s loss. In fact, according to the lawsuit, Solomon is a convicted drug dealer and ‘was working as an ‘installer’ at a swing set construction company in Long Island’ at the time of the interview.”
The same day that segment aired, Media Matters reported “OAN keeps pushing conspiracy theory that computer programs changed votes in the 2020 election.”
In February FactCheck.org published a report debunking the Solomon segment, calling it “baseless.”
Here’s the segment, via Media Matters:
Read the entire report at VICE.