Mother Jones: “On Thursday, Donald Trump posted a tweet falsely claiming a computerized voting system vendor had switched or deleted millions of his votes. The unfounded allegation appears to have originally been concocted by an anonymous poster on a pro-Trump forum, illustrating a common chain of right-wing disinformation: an baseless conspiracy theory is posted anonymously, a right-wing blogger cites it, a conservative news outlet picks it up, and, next, the president of the United States spreads it as supposed fact. In this instance, Trump sourced his information to a ‘report’ from One America News Network, a right-wing cable network with a penchant for pumping out right-wing propaganda and completely made-up conspiracy theories.”

“The segment featured an OAN anchor saying an ‘unaudited analysis of data obtained from Edison Research’ showed that ‘states using Dominion voting systems may have switched as many 435,000 votes from President Trump to Joe Biden’ and that “the author also finds another 2.7 million votes for Trump were deleted by Dominion, including almost 1 million in Pennsylvania alone.” OAN added that ‘analysts say the theft and threat and destruction of votes are attributed to so-called glitches in Dominion software.’ The terms OAN used—’unaudited analysis,’ ‘analyst,’ and ‘author’—may have been selected to make the claim seem legitimate. They also obscure exactly who made it. But the numbers, supposed findings, and rhetoric are nearly identical to a Tuesday post on Gateway Pundit, a right-wing site that regularly publishes falsehoods and hoaxes. Unlike OAN, the Gateway Pundit decided to cite the ‘analyst’ and link to their ‘research.’ As it turns out, its an anonymous poster on TheDonald, a pro-Trump web forum. The Gateway Pundit admitted that they didn’t verify the poster’s work, calling the analysis ‘unaudited’—for them, a term of art indicating they found the information from a random person on the internet.”