In a phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State, President Donald Trump put forward a series of vague accounting and false claims to reverse his election defeat.
In the hour-long conversation with 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.
A look at Trump’s claims on the call and how it compares to the facts:
TRUMP: “If we can go from the numbers, I think it’s clear we won, we won very substantially in Georgia.”
THE FACTS: 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 should be happy to have an accurate score. … We have other conditions that I believe will turn to us soon.”
THE FACTS: No reversal of the election result is in sight in any states.
Biden defeated Trump by about 7 million popular votes nationwide and with a score of 306-232 in Electoral College, including winning 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 election results when Congress meets on Wednesday to compare Biden’s victory over the 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: “We mysteriously dropped between 250 (thousand) and 300,000 votes, many of which have to do with Fulton County, which has not been checked.”
THE FACTS: 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 expected because many of Georgia’s 159 provinces had large stacks of ballot papers that had to be counted after the closing of the ballot boxes and the personal votes.
News organizations and officials warned in the days before the election that the results were likely to come just as they were: votes that are usually counted faster are likely to benefit the president.
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 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 said thousands of voters had 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. There is something to the fact that it is just not accurate. 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 is taking place in suburban Cobb County, not in Fulton County as Trump said. 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 ballot applications.
TRUMP, on a legal settlement Georgia has signed with the state Democratic Party on how signatures on absentee ballot and absentee ballot applications are verified: ‘You can not check signatures, you can not do it … You may harvest , I think in that 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 officials 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, citing investigations into his baseless allegations of voter fraud: “You have your American attorney who is never accidental.”
THE FACTS: The U.S. Attorney in Atlanta is 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 major water outage. 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 voter box, but in suitcases or suitcases. 000 votes, all for Biden. ”
THE FACTS: State and Fulton County election officials say the surveillance video Trump is referring to shows no inappropriate behavior, but that normal voice processing is not used with suitcases, but with 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 said their observers were told to leave the Fulton County polling station, but election officials said they left after confusion that arose because election workers thought they were ready for the night.
According to state and county officials, an independent monitor and an investigator oversaw the vote count. 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 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.