ATLANTA – In an extraordinary phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State, President Donald Trump put forward a dizzying series of fuzzy accounting and utterly false allegations to reverse his election defeat and draw up a series of votes that according to him in his favor.
In the hour-long conversation with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump suggested that the Republican “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 does not publish the full audio in accordance with its policy of not reinforcing information and unproven allegations. The AP will post the full audio as it records a transcript with material for fact checking.
A look at Trump’s claims on the call and how it compares to reality:
TRUMP: “If we can overlook some of 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.
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TRUMP: “We mysteriously dropped between 250 (one thousand) and 300,000 votes, many of which have to do with Fulton County, which has not been verified.”
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.
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TRUMP: “We think … if there is a real 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.
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TRUMP, referring to 18,000 “suspicious” voices: “The band shown around the world … they said very clearly there was a big water pipe. Everyone fled the area and then they came back … there were no Republican voters … and there was no law enforcement … It was crammed with votes, they were not in an official constituency, but in suitcases or suitcases. were 18,000 ballots, all 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.