Fox’s false claims about 2020 race were an audience strategy, Smartmatic says

Smartmatic accused Fox News in a court filing Wednesday of embracing false claims that the voting technology company had helped steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden only after the network endured an audience backlash for calling the race in Arizona for Biden.

Smartmatic, which makes voting machines and election management systems,has been engaged in a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp., since 2021.

The lawsuit stems from on-air comments that Fox News hosts and guests made around the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Smartmatic has alleged that Fox News “decimated” the company’s business and marred its reputation with its false claims of election interference.

Donald Trump and his supporters reacted furiously to his loss and unleashed a torrent of false claims and conspiracy theories that helped reshape the American political landscape, election law and conservative media.

Fox settled a high-profile case with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million in 2023, but the Smartmatic litigation, which follows many of the same themes, has dragged on.

Neither Smartmatic nor Fox has given any indication it is willing to settle this litigation outside of court, but Smartmatic has already settled similar cases with Newsmax and One America News.

The adversaries laid out their best arguments against each other on Wednesday, each asking a New York judge to grant a summary judgment victory in their long-running legal battle.

While mostly redacted, the Wednesday filings include introductions and overviews of Smartmatic and Fox’s central arguments in the case, filed in Justice David B. Cohen’s courtroom in New York Supreme Court in support of motions for summary judgment.

Smartmatic’s filing details a coordinated campaign — called “the pivot” — after which Fox executives decided to “embrace, endorse, and amplify baseless election fraud claims.”

Before the pivot, Smartmatic asserts, Rupert Murdoch and his family steered Fox toward “neutral ground” regarding the election, even allowing its Decision Desk to be the first to project that Biden had won the state of Arizona, flipping the Republican stronghold for the first time in decades.

Fox said that Smartmatic mischaracterized its pivot following the election. “Smartmatic’s ‘pivot’ narrative is pure fiction. The ‘pivot’ was an effort to transition away from covering election-related stories to covering other issues of interest to Fox viewers,” said a Fox News spokeswoman. “The evidence unequivocally proves this.”

Trump was livid when Fox News called Arizona for Biden, prompting a massive backlash from his supporters. Anchor Bret Baier called upon Decision Desk director Arnon Mishkin to explain the projection on air, explaining that “we’re getting a lot of incoming here.”

Trump did not complain directly to Murdoch, relying instead on his son-in-law Jared Kushner to make the call instead. Murdoch told The Post at the time that, “If he had, I would not have interfered or changed our call.” Smartmatic, however, now alleges this was a turning point for the conservative network.

In response to that backlash, Fox decided to “lean into election fraud claims they personally believed were baseless,” according to the filing.

Smartmatic alleges that Lou Dobbs, who died in 2024, along with Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro — all named defendants in the case — knew that the claims were false and published them anyway. Further, the company said, on-air claims of election fraud led Smartmatic employees to receive threats.

“You lot are in for a rude awakening,” read one such threat.

“You will be hunted,” read another.

And another: “The only way to resolve your interference with Western democracy is to shoot dead your company executives.”

The company also said that Fox’s accusations caused it to lay off 100 employees and suffer billions of dollars in damages.

While defamation experts say that Smartmatic, like Dominion, has a strong case against Fox, “the bar for imposing liability in defamation cases like this is very high,” said Timothy Zick, a constitutional law professor at William & Mary Law School. “Smartmatic must prove that Fox and the other defendants acted with ‘actual malice’ — that they published their stories about Smartmatic and voting manipulation despite knowing they were false or with reckless disregard for their truth.”

For its part, Fox sought to draw a distinction between Dominion’s claims against it and Smartmatic’s:

“Unlike Dominion, this lawsuit was manufactured to chill speech and generate headlines by a failing election company that was in financial free fall and saw allegations made by the President’s lawyers as a pathway to profitability,” Fox News wrote in a filing concurrently requesting summary judgment in its own favor.

Fox also asserted that Smartmatic’s business was failing and that the company resorted to a frivolous defamation suit to extract damages from the network.

“The evidence shows that Smartmatic’s business and reputation were badly suffering long before any claims by President Trump’s lawyers on Fox News and that Smartmatic grossly inflated its damage claims to generate headlines and chill free speech,” a Fox spokesperson said in a statement, echoing the company’s legal arguments.

Fox noted in its filing that Smartmatic was already “embroiled in claims of fraud in Venezuelan and Filipino elections well before any controversy arose” about the 2020 election. Lawyers for the network further pointed out that Smartmatic executives face federal bribery charges.

Fox argues that Smartmatic’s lawsuit, which is being partly funded by billionaire Reid Hoffman, is advancing Hoffman’s unapologetic “attempt to silence Fox News.”

In a statement to the Post, Smartmatic said that the Fox filing is trying to smear the company.

“Fox is right about one thing: Smartmatic is not Dominion,” the company said. “At the time of the defamation, Smartmatic was up to 10 times larger, meaning Fox has significantly greater financial exposure for its misconduct. Smartmatic is a global company with a decades-long track record in nearly 40 countries, supporting secure and transparent elections for billions of voters around the world.”