Posts shared on social media in the days following the 2020 U.S. election claim that the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi owns the software company whose product “glitched in favor of Biden”. This claim, implying widespread voter fraud in the election, is false.
One version of the claim, found here , states, “Hmmm Pelosi husband is owner of the soft ware (sic) that glitched in in (sic) favor of Biden, anyone else find this odd?” It has received more than 2,300 shares. Other iterations can be found here and here .
According to the Detroit Free Press, “Political observers had expressed shock” early in the morning after Election Day “when the county transferred numbers to the state showing Biden beating Trump by about 3,000 votes” in Antrim County, Michigan ( here ). The Detroit Free Press describes Antrim as “a Republican stronghold where local GOP officials have mostly run unopposed in recent elections.”
As reported here by Snopes, a temporary miscount that briefly marked thousands of Republican votes as Democrat votes in Antrim was a result of human error. The county used Dominion Voting Systems equipment ( here ), also referred to in some of the posts. The software itself, however, was not responsible for the tabulation error that was quickly caught and fixed.
In response to Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s claims of deliberate election fraud, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson put out a statement ( here ) on Nov. 6. explaining that “the erroneous reporting of unofficial results from Antrim county was a result of accidental error on the part of the Antrim County Clerk.”
With 95% of expected votes counted, 56.4% of Antrim County votes went to President Donald Trump while 42.0% went to now President-elect Joe Biden ( here ). An official “Statement of Votes Cast” for Antrim County as of Nov. 3 is available here .
Paul Pelosi, who has been married to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi since 1963 (here) does not own Dominion Voting Systems. As mentioned by Politifact ( here ) he is the owner of Financial Leasing Services, a San Francisco Real estate venture capitalist firm.
A spokesperson for Dominion told Reuters via email that the company has “no ties to Mr. Pelosi.”
Dominion cannot be found on the speaker’s most recent financial disclosure form, available here , neither under the “Earned Income” section listing the sources of her husband’s income nor elsewhere.
On the last page of the form, Pelosi answered “No” to questions about whether she had excluded from the report details of a trust benefiting herself, her spouse, or a dependent child as well as whether she had excluded “any other assets, ‘unearned’ income, transactions, or liabilities of a spouse or dependent child because they meet all three tests for exemption.”
VERDICT
False. A temporary miscount of votes in Antrim County, Michigan was a result of human error, not a “software glitch” in the voting equipment. Nancy Pelosi’s husband does not own Dominion Voting Systems.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here .
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.