In an extraordinary call to Georgia’s Secretary of State, President Donald Trump put forward a dizzying series of fuzzy accounting and outright false allegations and tried to reverse his defeat in the election, producing a series of votes that he said should count in his favor. word.
In the hourly conversation Saturday with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump suggested that the Republican should “find” enough votes to give Trump the victory.
The Associated Press got the full audio of Trump’s conversation with officials in Georgia from a person on the call. The AP has a policy not to reinforce information and unproven allegations. The AP intends to post the full audio as it records a transcript with factual material.
A look at Trump’s claims on the call and how it compares to reality:
Trump: “If we can go from the numbers, I think it’s clear we won, we won very substantially in Georgia.”
The facts: No, Trump lost Georgia in an election that the state certified for Democrat Joe Biden. Republican election officials confirmed that the election was conducted and counted fairly.
With the ballots counted three times, including once by hand, Georgia’s certified totals show that Trump lost to Biden by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million votes. Raffensperger confirmed the total with officials saying they found no evidence that Trump won.
No credible claims of fraud or systemic errors were made. Judges have rejected legal challenges to the outcome, although at least one is still pending in the state court.
Trump: “People need to be happy to have an accurate score … We have other states that I believe will bring us back soon.”
The facts: No result of the election result is in prospect, in Georgia or other states.
Biden defeated Trump by about 7 million popular votes nationwide and by a score of 306-232 in Electoral College, gaining a victory in other key states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, has found no evidence of widespread election fraud. Trump’s allegations of massive vote-rigging were rejected by a succession of judges and refuted by state election officials and an arm of his own government’s Department of Homeland Security.
A group of Senate Republicans, led by Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, say they plan to object to the outcome of the election when Congress convenes Wednesday to compare Biden’s victory over Electoral College over Trump.
The objections will force votes in the House as well as in the Senate, but are not expected to prevail.
Trump: “The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted. And I think the number is in the – almost 5,000 people. And they went to death notices. They went to all sorts of ways to come up with an accurate number. And a minimum is about 5,000 voters. ‘
The facts: Not true. Georgia officials dismissed previous Trump campaign allegations in November that three specific people had voted illegally and found that other people had similar names. At the time, a local district attorney announced an investigation into whether a vote in the name of a Northwest Georgian man died illegally in 2015.
Raffensperger said on Saturday that two illegal votes on behalf of dead people had been confirmed, not thousands as Trump claimed. “The actual number was two. Two. Two people who were dead voted. And so it’s wrong,” Raffensperger said.
Trump: ‘We have from 250 [thousand] up to 300,000 ballots were mysteriously cast in the rolls, many of them related to Fulton County, which was not checked. ‘
The facts: There is nothing mysterious or suspicious about it. He describes a legitimate process of counting votes, not a sudden surge of misunderstanding.
It appears that Trump is referring to a large number of votes that were put on the table on Wednesday morning after election day and later. The arrival of the votes was not mysterious, but expected, because many of Georgia’s 159 provinces had large stacks of ballots that had to be counted after the closing of the ballot boxes and the personal votes.
Indeed, in the days before the election, news organizations and officials warned that the results were likely to come just as they were: votes counted faster in person were likely to benefit the president, who spent. months that warned his supporters to vote by email and to vote in person early or on election day.
And ballots, which take longer to count as they have to be removed from envelopes and verified before being counted, will benefit Biden. States tend to count ballots at the end of the process.
Trump: “We think … if there is a true signature in Fulton County, you will find at least a few hundred thousand forged signatures.”
The facts: It has no basis in reality.
It would be impossible for anyone to falsify hundreds of thousands of signatures on ballot papers in Fulton County, as there were only about 147,000 ballot papers in Georgia’s most populous province, of which about 116,000 would go to Biden.
Trumpand claims that thousands of voters moved out of Georgia, registered in another state, and then voted improperly in Georgia: “They came back, and they voted. That was a large number.”
The facts: Not so. Trump supporters work according to a list of questionable accuracy, according to Ryan Germany, the chief executive for Raffensperger’s office. He told Trump during the call that the demands had been investigated and that in many cases voters “withdrew years ago. It’s not as if it happened just before the election. not.”
Trump: “It does not pass the odor test because we hear that they shred thousands and thousands of ballot papers and what they are now saying is, ‘Oh, we’re just cleaning the office.’
The facts: The fragmentation took place in suburban Cobb County, not in Fulton County as Trump claimed. Cobb County election officials said Nov. 24 that none of the items shredded by a contractor were “relevant to the election or the recurrence,” but rather things like old postal labels, other papers with voter information, old emails and duplicates of absent voice applications.
Trumpand alleges that a Fulton County election worker ran through a machine three times instead of just once, saying his campaign would provide a video proving it: ‘It cannot be disputed. We have a version you have not yet seen, but it has been enlarged. It is enlarged and you can see everything. For some reason, they put it three times in each vote. And I do not know why, I do not know why three times and not five times, right? “
The facts: There was no double or triple vote of ballots. Raffensperger noted that votes were counted in Georgia and then reproduced twice for accuracy, including once by hand, and that there was no discrepancy in the ballot papers in Fulton County, as would happen if someone repeatedly misused the votes. counted. “We did an audit on it,” Raffensperger told Trump. “It has certainly been proven that they were not scanned three times.”
Trump, to attack a legal settlement Georgia has signed with the state Democratic Party on how to verify signatures on absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots. “You can not check signatures, you can not do it … You may reap in this agreement. The agreement is a disaster for this country.”
The facts: There is nothing in the March 6 consent decision that prevents Georgia’s election offices from investigating signatures. The legal solution addresses accusations about the lack of standards for assessing signatures on absent ballot papers. Raffensperger said that not only is it entirely possible to fit signatures, but that the state requires it.
Harvesting the ballot paper, the practice of collecting the number of absentee ballots and returning them to the election officials, remains illegal in Georgia.
Trump, referring to investigations into his unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud: “You have your American attorney who is never the Trumper.”
The facts: The U.S. Attorney in Atlanta is actually a Trump appointment. Byung J. ‘BJay’ Pak is a longtime Republican who also served in the House of Representatives from Georgia from 2011 to 2017. He was nominated by Trump to become the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia in 2017. The White House said Pak and five other U.S. law firm nominees share the president’s vision for “Making America Safe Again.” “Pak also previously worked as an assistant U.S. attorney.
Trump, referring to 18,000 “suspicious” votes: ‘The band that was shown around the world … they said very clearly there was a big water outage. Everyone fled the area and then they came back … there were no Republican viewers … and there was no law enforcement … It was packed with votes. They were not in an official voter box, but in a suitcase or suitcases. The minimum number it could be … was 18,000 votes for Biden. ‘
The facts: It is a gross distortion of what really happened.
State and Fulton County election officials say the surveillance video that Trump is referring to does not show improper behavior, but normal voice processing that does not use suitcases, but ballot boxes on wheels. Officials said the entire video showed the same workers had earlier packed the ballot boxes with valid, uncounted ballot papers.
Republicans argued that their observers were told to leave the Fulton County polling station, but election officials said they actually left after confusion that arose because election workers thought they were ready for the night.
According to state and provincial officials, an independent monitor and an investigator actually oversaw the number of votes. Trump also refers to a false confession attributed to a woman who was allegedly involved in the incident that was posted on social media.
Trump: “In other states we think we’ve found huge corruption with Dominion machines, but we’ll have to see it.”
The facts: No “huge corruption” was found.
There is ‘no evidence that any voting system removed or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way endangered’, the federal agency, which oversees election security, said in a statement added by officials of the state and electoral industry.
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