Stick to the notions of widespread voices that his own attorney general disputed, President Donald Trump reiterated a number of unfounded allegations Wednesday of political corruption, machine tampering and mysterious voices that emerged from nowhere that allowed Joe Biden to steal the election.
“This election is about big voter fraud, fraud that has never been seen before,” Trump said in a 46-minute speech on social media.
‘It’s about poll viewers who are not allowed to watch. So illegal. It’s about ballot papers that flooded in and no one but a few knew where it came from. … It’s about machinery that was defective, machinery that was stopped. ‘
None of these allegations are true.
A look at the claims and the reality:
VOTING FRAUD
TRUMP: “You can not allow another person to steal your election.”
THE FACTS: To be clear, no election was stolen from Trump.
One month after the November 3 election, and as states begin to validate their votes, Trump is holding on to false notions of voter fraud. But others in his government have said the election is safe. Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department saw no evidence of widespread fraud to stop Biden’s victory.
Biden earned 306 voting votes on Trump’s 232, the same margin that Trump had when he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, which he repeatedly described as a ‘landslide’. (Trump eventually won 304 votes because two voters ran over.) Biden won by ruling key states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.
Trump’s allegations of massive vote fraud are refuted by a variety of judges, state election officials and an arm of his own government’s Department of Homeland Security. Many of his lawsuits across the country have been thrown out of court. And his administration has already agreed to initiate the formal transition from power to Biden.
Barr told The Associated Press on Tuesday that no evidence of widespread voter fraud had been discovered. “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have had a different outcome in the election,” he said.
No case determined irregularities on the scale that would change the outcome. Lawsuits that remain do not contain evidence that would have caused the outcome.
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BALLOT ‘DUMPING’
TRUMP: “I will not win much, but I will not lose a solid race. This is corrupt. ”
TRUMP: “It’s about big lead on election night, tremendous progress, lead where I was congratulated for a decisive, easy victory, and all of a sudden until the morning or a few days later, the clues quickly evaporated.”
THE FACTS: No mass corruption has taken place. Trump is actually describing a legitimate counting process, not a sudden surge of misunderstanding that no one has seen before.
Indeed, news organizations and officials warned in the days and weeks before the election that the results were likely to come just as they were: votes that are usually counted faster are likely to elect the president, who for months warned his supporters not to post by post. not to vote and to vote in person early or on election day.
And the vote for the entry, which takes longer to count as it needs to be removed from envelopes and verified before being counted, will benefit Biden. This pattern was exacerbated by the fact that many states banned the early counting of entries that arrived before election day.
In addition, large cities are often slower to report their numbers, and votes tend to skew the Democratic government. Similarly, many states tend to count ballots at the end of the process.
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TRUMP: ‘In Wisconsin, where we passed on election night, we miraculously lost by 20,000 votes. And I can show you here that Wisconsin leads us a lot, and then it was 3:42 in the morning. It was a large amount of votes. Mostly Biden. ”
THE FACTS: No, there was not a “massive shower of voices” in the middle of the night. Milwaukee election officials finished counting the city’s approximately 169,000 absentee votes at about 3 p.m.
Under Wisconsin law, the results of absentee ballots must be reported simultaneously. The count of the absentee ballots was broadcast live on YouTube for all to see. When it was finished, Milwaukee police escorted the city’s election director from a central counting station to the district’s courthouse to deliver thumbs up with the ballot box.
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PASTOR
TRUMP on Dominion Voting Systems election software used in many states: ‘If you look at who runs the company, who is the principal, who owns it – what we do not know – where the votes are counted – in which we think foreign countries, not in the United States – Dominion is a disaster. ”
THE FACTS: Servers with Dominion software are in local polling stations, not abroad. Allegations that the company has foreign servers or ties with Germany or Venezuela are false.
It’s true that the company is privately owned and does not disclose its money, but New York-based private equity firm Staple Street Capital has owned a majority stake in Dominion since 2018. Fictional allegations that Dianne Feinstein, the Clinton family, Nancy Pelosi and Hugo Chavez are owners of Dominion have been unraveled.
“There is no evidence that any voting system removed or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way endangered” in the 2020 election, according to a joint statement issued by the Federal Agency for Security and Infrastructure Security .
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TRUMP: “In one Michigan province, for example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes were mistakenly switched from Trump to Biden. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This is what we caught. How many did we not catch? ”
THE FACTS: This is a misrepresentation.
It is true that some problems in the 2020 election involved several thousand votes in Antrim County, Michigan. But it was the result of human error.
When Republican Leaning County initially reported a big win for Biden, social media users became suspicious of the Dominion election management system used to tabulate the data.
According to the Michigan Department of State, Dominion was not found guilty. “There was no malice, no fraud here, just a human error,” Sheryl Guy, a graphist, told the AP. The table error has been corrected.
Eddie Perez, an expert voice technology at the OSET Institute, a nonprofit election technology research and development organization, agrees that the case in Michigan was the result of human error in voice technology, not the software itself.
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‘DEAD’ VOTERS
TRUMP: “Dead people – and we have many examples – filled out ballot papers, applied and then voted.”
THE FACTS: He repeats a false claim that dead people vote, especially in Pennsylvania and Michigan. But there is no evidence that this has happened, and officials in both states say the claims are unfounded.
The false claim that deceased voters’ ballots’ come every election ‘, says Jason Roberts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Experts told the AP that it is common for state voters to include voters with birth dates that make them look impossibly old, but this is usually explained by human error, software peculiarities, or voter confidentiality issues.
“A similar complaint has been brought before a PA court – and it was rightly rejected,” the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said in a statement. “The court has found no shortage of the way PA maintains its electoral role, and there is currently no evidence provided any survivors voted in the 2020 election.”
Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for Michigan’s Secretary of State, told the AP that a ballot paper received from a voter can in rare cases be recorded as if the person is too old to live. This can occur if an incorrect year of birth is entered on the voter list.
Some of the allegations about dead voters appear to stem from a federal lawsuit alleging that Pennsylvania did not maintain “accurate and current voter rolls,” which includes 21,000 apparently deceased registrants. But it is not the same as voices of dead people being brought out and counted. The Public Foundation Legal Foundation, a conservative group in Indiana, changed the case on Nov. 5 against Pennsylvania State Secretary Kathy Boockvar.
The group has taken legal action in a handful of places to try to force voter turnout. In December 2019, the group filed a lawsuit against Detroit’s election officials, claiming that the city had more than 2,500 people on the electoral roll – including one born in 1823. The case was rejected in June 2020 after voters updated the voter list.
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POLL WATCHERS
TRUMP: “In Pennsylvania, large quantities of incoming and outgoing ballots in the provinces of Philadelphia and Allegheny were processed illegally and in secret without our observers being there. They may not be present. … They were thrown out of the building. ‘
THE FACTS: He’s wrong.
Trump fully represents a court case in the state and what happened at polling stations. No one has tried to ban the ballot box representing each party in the election. Democrats did not try to stop Republican representatives from observing the process.
The main issue in the case was how close observers representing the parties could get to election workers who processed the ballot papers in Philadelphia. Trump’s representatives have sued to allow the observers to get closer than the guidelines allowed. A court ruled in favor of the request.
The score in Philadelphia is being streamed live, and Trump’s lawyers have admitted in court that their campaign had observers in the room – a “non-zero” number, as they put it. Polling viewers play no role in counting votes.
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Associated Press authors Arijeta Lajka, Michael Balsamo and Colleen Long contributed to this report.
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NOTE FROM THE EDITOR – A Look At The Truth Of Claims By Political Figures.
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