Despite repeated denials of any violation by federal and state officials, there is evidence that Trump’s attack has an effect. A recent Pew poll found that only 35% of Trump voters are “very confident” that their vote was counted accurately, much lower than the 82% of Biden voters.
On Sunday, Trump gave his first one-on-one interview since losing his bid for re-election, and posted a 46-minute video statement on Facebook on Tuesday. Both were riddled with misinformation about the election.
Here’s a look at the general theories that make up Trump’s case for widespread election fraud and corruption.
Leave ballots
Votes reported after midnight on election day were one of the earliest narratives that Trump and his campaign cited as evidence of election fraud. Initially, it was drafted as votes from the ballot papers “illegal‘received after election day, but eventually Trump and his allies began to characterize them as’ spills’ of votes that were suspicious because the results were counted and reported after the election.
One example Trump and his legal team have repeatedly mentioned is Michigan, where Trump assert a shower of about 150,000 votes came early in the morning after election day. Trump also implied that these ballots were fraudulent because they were primarily skewed for Biden.
Facts first: There is nothing inherently suspicious about voices counted and reported after election day. In fact, 22 states, plus the District of Columbia, count all ballot papers posted on or before November 3, even if they are received after election day. Especially this year, many states expected delays in issuing votes, given the large increase in ballot papers and different states. rules over the timeline for counting it.
Ballot papers, the majority of which favored Democrats, were often reported later on election day and beyond because they could not be counted ahead of time in many states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania. In addition, it is possible that Trump himself is partly to blame for the large number of voting votes that went to Biden, as he spent most of the year claiming that the practice was unsafe and ripe for fraud.
It is also misleading for Trump to cite the increase in votes in Michigan as an example of voter fraud. While such a rise has been reported, state election officials clarified weeks before Trump tweeted that it was the result of a clerical error that was corrected shortly after it was identified.
Voice Viewers
Since election day, Trump has repeatedly claimed that Republican polls were viewers ban to count places or otherwise prevent them from observing the count and denying the access they legally deserve. Trump and his campaign specifically said that observers in several cities are too far away to see anything, indicating that there is something going on that Democrats in these cities do not want Republicans to see.
Many of these attacks were focused on swing states like Pennsylvania, where Giuliani even argued that the treatment of voice guards made the count illegal.
Facts first: Nowhere in the US are there reports of systematic irregularities with bearings. There is no evidence to support the president’s allegations that the IDP polls closed viewers outside the process.
In Pennsylvania in particular, a Trump campaign attorney in court admitted that a “non-zero number” of campaign observers were in the counting room. And in response to Trump complaints about the campaign that viewers are not allowed close enough to observe the score, a Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that the Philadelphia County Electoral Council has complied with the law on how it grants observers access to the recruiting process .
You can read more here about what happened to the voters in other states.
Rule and mistakes
The president and his allies have ruthlessly attacked election technology company Dominion Voting Systems, which supplies software to many local governments.
Among the many lies is the fact that software removed or “switched” ‘errors’ for Trump’s votes to count as votes for Biden, about which Trump began tweeting shortly after the major networks voted for Biden.
Later in the month, members of the Trump legal team suggested that Dominion had foreign ties and that implied foreign powers could affect the results of the company’s software, a theory that Trump used in his first one-on-one interview since the election and in the video statement posted on social media.
Facts first: None of this is true. There was no credible reports that any issues with Dominion’s rule affect the votes, and the company has deny allegations of foreign interference.
A statement issued the week after the election by a joint group of election officials, including federal employees working in the Trump administration and for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, stated: “There is no evidence that any voting system removes votes. or lost, changed votes, or was endangered in any way. “
While one Georgia province has experienced delays in reporting its results due to apparent problems with the company’s systems, other isolated issues allegedly linked to Dominion were actually caused by human error.
Christopher Krebs, formerly the director of CISA and the country’s top cyber security officer who fired Trump shortly after election day, also refuted allegations of a corrupt election and said in an interview with ’60 Minutes’ that allegations of machines manipulating the voices was “nonsense.” He added: “There is no foreign power that makes voices turn.”
Even Attorney General William Barr, who reiterated Trump’s allegations before the election that the vote was not safe, said the Justice Department saw no evidence of fraud on a scale that could have been the result of the election. does not change. Referring to allegations against Dominion and other voting programs used during this election, Barr told the Associated Press: “There was one allegation that would be systematic fraud, and that would be the allegation that machines were essentially programmed to produce the election results. “And the DHS and DOJ looked at it, and so far we have not seen anything to substantiate it.”
Dead voters
Trump and his ally also claimed thousands and thousands of dead people were on the electoral roll of the country across the country and that their identities had been fraudulently used to submit ballot papers in a handful of floating states.
It started in Michigan, barely two days after the election, when lies about dead people voting in the state began to spread via videos posted on social media, some of which were written by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
The following week, the Trump campaign claimed that the identities of four deceased people were being used to vote in Georgia. This theory began after Fox News host Tucker Carlson repeated it on his program.
The president also made similar efforts regarding Pennsylvania, assert tens of thousands of dead were on the Commonwealth voter list.
Facts first: State election officials have repeatedly downplayed these demands. In some cases, the voters who died according to the campaign were not, and in others, the voters’ names were the same as or similar to a deceased person.
In Michigan, one of the alleged pieces of evidence was a list spread on Twitter, which allegedly contained names, dates of birth and zip codes for registered voters in Michigan. A CNN analysis of 50 names on the list found that 37 did die and did not vote, according to Michigan’s voter information database. Five people out of 50 have voted – and they are all still alive, according to public records visiting CNN. The remaining eight also live but do not vote. The sample that CNN checked is not representative, but the trend was clear – none of the names examined were a dead person who voted.
In Georgia, provincial officials told CNN that votes for two of the said individuals were not cast in 2020. In one of the cases, a provincial election official explained that the widow of the deceased cast her vote with the name of her husband with ‘Mrs. . “as the prefix that led Carlson to apologize on the air for spreading the false claim on his program. The third person answered the door when a CNN reporter showed up; she shared a name with the deceased. , but was born on a different day in the same month and year.
And in Pennsylvania, Laura Humphrey, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Secretary of State, told CNN: “There is no factual basis” for the campaign’s allegations, noting that “[a]allegations of fraud and illegal activities have been repeatedly dismissed by the courts and dismissed. ‘
Signature verification
Trump also singled out Georgia, a state he won in 2016 and lost by 12,670 votes in 2020, according to CNN’s score.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the election results in Georgia were untrue. However, when the state began a recap, Trump dismissed it as false because it did not contain signature verification, which led to him and his allies being asked for a specific signature audit of the absent voting envelopes in Georgia.
Facts first: It is misleading for Trump to suggest that voters’ signatures on ballot papers have not been verified in Georgia and that a signature audit could somehow detect the kind of fraud that Trump is claiming.
While it is true that the state’s reprocess does not involve matching signatures, voters’ signatures were verified twice before the ballots were included in the count in the first place – such as Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. A Republican, explained.
And even if a signature were marked on an envelope during an audit, it would be impossible to locate it after a specific vote to remove their vote accordingly. Trump and the company will have to rely on the hope that a judge will throw out ALL the absentee ballots in a given province with a high percentage of signatures, which according to government officials is unlikely.
More voices than people
After the presidential election results in Wayne County, Michigan’s largest county and home of Detroit, were certified despite attempts by Republicans to block them, the president did so on Twitter. Confirming Doubtful Irregular Allegations in Detroit, Trump tweeted that there were “more voices than people.
Facts first: Trump’s claims are misleading at best.
Trump’s insistence that there are “more votes than people” probably refers to the areas that are out of balance, which means that the number of voters recorded does not match the number of votes cast in certain places. However, former and current government officials told CNN that these imbalances are often clerical errors that are addressed as part of the recruitment process and not an indication of widespread fraud.
When viewed on the face of it, it is also not true that there were more voices than people in different parts of Michigan. In fact, 878,102 people voted for president in Wayne County with a population of more than 1.7 million. And in Detroit, 250,138 votes were cast in this election and as of 2019, there were 670,031 people in the city, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
CNN’s Holmes Lybrand, Casey Tolan, Kelly Mena, Amara Walker and Annie Grayer contributed to this article.