Voting machine company Smartmatic settled a defamation lawsuit against One America News Network out of court, according to a filing on Tuesday.
Details of the settlement were not disclosed in the filing, but OANN parent company Herring Networks and Smartmatic each agreed to pay their own attorneys’ fees and costs, according to the court filing. In an email, Smartmatic attorney Eric Connolly confirmed the “confidential settlement.”
Smartmatic, the voting machine company used exclusively by Los Angeles County in the 2020 election, filed a series of lawsuits in 2021 alleging defamation by conservative media networks, personalities and allies of former President Donald Trump.
Herring Networks is also facing a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, the popular voting machine company that made headlines for promoting mass voting. Fox News paid $787.5 million last year in a defamation suit. Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News has brought a wealth of evidence and testimony into the public sphere, revealing that Trump’s media allies do not believe the deeply dubious evidence behind the president’s claims of a stolen election.
At least eight other defamation cases from voting machine companies are going through the court system this year.
Smartmatic’s lawsuit against Newsmax is scheduled to go to trial in September, while the voting machine company’s trial against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, which could have started earlier this month, was recently postponed until January. The company’s lawsuit against Fox News in New York is still being explored, as the network is also filing a counterclaim against Smartmatic.
Dominion’s lawsuit against Newsmax has been delayed by discovery battles and is not expected to go to trial until next year. The voting machine company’s lawsuits against prominent election deniers Lindell, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, along with the OANN lawsuit, are continuing discovery in federal court in Washington.