WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Lawyers for an electronic voting company targeted by allies of former President Donald Trump over allegations it rigged the 2020 presidential election asked a Delaware judge Thursday to rule in their favor in a defamation lawsuit against a conservative news outlet.
Florida-based Smartmatic filed a lawsuit against Newsmax in 2021, alleging that the cable network’s hosts and guests made false and defamatory statements in the weeks following the election, suggesting that Smartmatic had helped to rig the results and that the network’s software had been used to skew votes.
“Smartmatic did not participate in the manipulation of the 2020 election and its software was not used to change a single vote,” Smartmatic attorney J. Erik Connolly told Superior Court Judge Eric Davis during a hearing.
Lawyers for Newsmax, which is also based in Florida, are asking Davis to rule in their favor ahead of a trial scheduled to begin Sept. 30 and last up to four weeks. The company argues that it only reported on serious and newsworthy allegations made by Trump and his supporters about potential voter fraud.
The judge said Florida’s defamation law applies to the case. Newsmax attorney Misha Tseytlin urged Davis to rule that, under Florida law, a “fair reporting” or “neutral reporting” privilege should protect Newsmax from liability.
“There is no evidence that we did any harm to them,” Tseytlin said.
Davis did not rule on the competing motions for summary judgment and advised attorneys to prepare for trial as he discussed the arguments.
The Delaware lawsuit is one of several lawsuits stemming from reporting on conservative news outlets in the wake of the 2020 election. Smartmatic is also suing Fox News for defamation in New York and recently settled a lawsuit in the District of Columbia against One America News Network, another conservative outlet.
Dominion Voting Systems has similarly filed multiple defamation lawsuits against those who spread conspiracy theories blaming its election equipment for Trump’s loss. Last year, Fox News settled with Dominion for $787 million in a case chaired by Davis.
To win its defamation case against Newsmax, Smartmatic must prove that Newsmax officials acted with “actual malice” or “reckless disregard for the truth” in spreading false claims about election fraud.
Connolly, the Smartmatic attorney, rejected the idea that Newsmax should avoid liability by arguing that the network provided fair or neutral reporting.
“These were not balanced, not neutral, not impartial,” he said of the Newsmax reports.
Connolly argued that during a five-week period in which 24 allegedly defamatory messages aired, no one at Newsmax had any evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud by its hosts and guests. He also noted that during the 2020 election, the company’s machines were only used in Los Angeles County, where Democrat Joe Biden won 71% of the vote.
“It makes it inherently unlikely that we manipulated the national election,” Connolly said.
Tseytlin, the Newsmax attorney, told Davis that there is no evidence that the network’s anchors or executives knew that claims about voter fraud by people like former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani and conservative attorney Sidney Powell were false.
Instead, Tseytlin said, Newsmax employees tried to follow a directive from CEO Chris Ruddy that they should report honestly on an issue of public interest and emphasize that allegations of voter fraud had not been substantiated.
“What we have here is an editorial decision by Chris Ruddy that Newsmax was going to report serious allegations from serious people,” he said.
In court documents, Newsmax described Smartmatic as “a struggling election technology company with a checkered history” that is using a legally baseless and unconstitutional theory of liability to try to gain a huge windfall.
Thursday’s hearing came two weeks after a federal grand jury in Florida indicted three current and former Smartmatic executives in connection with a scheme to pay more than $1 million in bribes to install voting machines in the Philippines.
Prosecutors allege that Smartmatic’s Venezuelan-born co-founder, Roger Piñate, conspired with others to funnel bribes to the chairman of the Philippine Elections Commission through a slush fund created by overcharging for each voting machine the company delivered to authorities.
