Fact-checking of false allegations about the Pennsylvania presidential election by Trump and his allies

In the days since President Donald Trump lost his bid for re-election, he has ruthlessly and falsely attacked the outcome in Pennsylvania and other battlefield states as the product of widespread fraud. His assaults culminated last week on a 46-minute cover floor full of demonstrable falsehoods.

Politicians exaggerate the facts often or misrepresent, but never have a US president refused, as Trump must accept the unequivocal result of a free and fair election.

Representatives of the Trump campaign have voiced fiery rhetoric about election fraud on a large scale. But in courts of law, where evidence is required and where there are fines for lying, they have not provided evidence or claimed that even one vote in Pennsylvania was intentionally cast illegally. On the contrary, their legal efforts are aimed at disqualifying votes which, according to all evidence, are lawful under rules with which they do not agree.

As Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump nominee at the U.S. Third Court of Appeals, said last month in rejecting one campaign challenge: ‘To call an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then evidence. We have not here. ”

Below we have collected and uncovered some of the most prominent false allegations about the Pennsylvania presidential election made by Trump and his allies in recent weeks.

On election night, it appears that Trump has a strong “lead” in Pennsylvania, and he expressed confidence that he would win the state. He even wrongly “claimed” in Pennsylvania’s Electoral College in a tweet before the race is decided. But in the coming days, as more postal votes were processed and counted, Joe Biden moved forward and eventually won the state by 81,000 votes, or about 1%.

The counting process took longer than in other states, because election officials were banned from starting their jobs before election day.

Most of the votes counted that day were cast in person, and two-thirds of them were for Trump. This is in part because for months, Trump falsely attacked the voting of posts as susceptible to widespread fraud, which discouraged his supporters from using the method. Biden and Democrats encouraged their supporters to vote by mail, and eventually Biden won more than three-quarters of the postal ballots in Pennsylvania.

Personal votes are counted faster than postal ballots. Trump’s early “lead” therefore meant nothing more than that most votes for him were counted earlier than votes for Biden. The change in voting margins as postal votes are counted is a phenomenon known as ‘the blue shift’.

One of Trump’s most frequent complaints is that Republicans are not allowed to watch Pennsylvania’s largest cities count votes. Trump said observers are being banned from even entering the facilities where votes have been counted.

That’s not true. And in every province where Republicans have filed objections, courts have found that officials have applied the rules of observation equally to both parties.

Trump directed much of his anger to Philadelphia, where his legal team at one point asked for an emergency order to stop the count. But under sharp interrogation by a federal judge, Trump’s lawyers conceded that a “non-zero number” of the president’s supporters were allowed to watch.

“I’m sorry, what’s your problem then?” Ask U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond and sound upset.

Trump’s team also complained that his observers were too far away. Initially, observers from both political parties were 30 meters away from the count. The city later allowed them to be about six meters away – the best he said it could offer, as the coronavirus requires precautions.

Finally, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that state law only requires partisan monitors to have access to the room where votes are counted. It does not give them the right to hold over the workers who do the counting.

A week ago, Trump tweeted that more than a million mail ballots were “created” in Pennsylvania and counted incorrectly.

The false conspiracy theory at the heart of the tweet involves data that Secretary of State Doug Mastriano (R., Franklin) said he found on the Pennsylvania Department of State website. Mastriano claims the data shows a gap of 1.1 million votes between the number of requested postal votes and the returned number.

But the figures are referenced in tweets by Trump and Mastriano fly together Pennsylvania’s June primary and general election. And contrary to Mastriano’s claim that the data was deleted, it is still available.

Trump and Mastriano compare the number of ballots cast in the June primary election to the number cast in the general election last month. The two figures have nothing to do with each other and are also not evidence of fraud.

One week after Election Day, one of Trump’s allies in Congress accused the Pennsylvania Democrats of doing so, while preventing Republicans from doing the same. But the criticism, leveled at Jim Jordan, Ohio, is unfounded.

All provinces may notify voters of such problems, but not all provinces have done so. It was a choice by provincial election officials, not by Democrats. Some who have given voters the chance to solve problems are indeed Democratic, but there is no evidence that the provinces treated voters differently on the basis of party affiliation.

A group of Republican candidates and voters have filed a lawsuit to invalidate the ballots that were cured, arguing that it is not fair for some voters to get a second chance if others do not. The lawsuit was eventually rejected by the Commonwealth Court, and other courts have repeatedly rejected the argument that Republicans are harmed by provinces’ unequal application of ballot recovery.

But some state legislators do not allow it.

In a letter to the state congressional delegation Friday, Republicans insisted on contesting the votes of the state’s Electoral College because they believe the ballot’s vote violates Pennsylvania’s early voting ban.

The majority of ballot requests, even in conservative provinces, come from Democrats, and that would unduly affect Democrats if not cured.

Among Trump’s supporters, the word Supremacy became synonymous with fraud.

It began when the president falsely claimed on Twitter that Dominion Voting Systems, one of the most widely used election technology companies in the country, had “scraped” votes for him and “switched” thousands of votes cast in Pennsylvania to Biden. .

There is no evidence of this – and Trump has won in 12 of the 14 provinces of Pennsylvania that use the company’s devices.

Hours after Trump sent his tweet, the federal cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, which oversees election security, issued a statement defending the Nov. 3 election as “the safest in U.S. history.” ‘

“There is no evidence that any voting system removed or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way endangered,” the agency said. (Trump later fired his director.)

Dominion issued a statement denying “allegations about voice switching or alleged software problems with our systems”, and Ellen Lyon, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said there was “no factual basis” for allegations that thousands of Pennsylvania votes were compromised.

Trump’s lawyers promised to present evidence of widespread voter fraud when they asked U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann last month to invalidate Pennsylvania’s election results – but they never did.

“One would expect a plaintiff to be tremendously armed with compelling legal arguments and factual evidence of rampant corruption if he were to seek such a surprising outcome,” Brann wrote. “Instead, a tense legal argument was presented without merit and speculative allegations that were not filed in the ruling charge and are not supported by evidence.”

Brann is a former official of the Republican Republic of Pennsylvania and a member of the Conservative Federalist Association appointed by President Barack Obama on behalf of Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican.

When the Trump campaign again presented its case before three judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the judge who wrote the ruling emphasized the same shortcoming.

To reverse the results of Pennsylvania’s presidential election, the Trump campaign would have to challenge and successfully invalidate enough ballot boxes to erase Biden’s 81,000-vote margin of victory.

The original lawsuit that the campaign filed in federal court to invalidate Pennsylvania’s results contained no evidence that even one vote was cast illegally.

Trump campaign attorney and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani admitted this during a November 17 hearing before Brann.

“This is not a fraud case,” Giuliani said when Brann asked if he had evidence to substantiate his claims.

The amended complaint of the campaign claims – without evidence – that statistical analysis will prove that approximately 70,000 ballot papers were improperly counted by Biden voters to clinch its victory. But the campaign filed the amended complaint too late, and Brann did not even want to consider it.

Separately, the Trump campaign has asked the courts to throw out nearly 12,000 mail votes with errors such as missing signatures or incomplete home addresses, as well as 10,000 mail votes that were mailed through election day but arrived up to three days later.

Even if the contested ballots were invalid, Biden’s victory would still remain.