Tag: Trump fake voter fraud crisis

Fox News ticker destroys Trump for ‘baselessly’ and ‘falsely’ claiming election was rigged

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Viewers of Fox & Friends were treated to a dose of the truth on Thursday when the show admitted that President Donald Trump has “baselessly” and “falsely” claimed that the 2020 election was rigged.

The message to Fox News viewers appeared on the network’s ticker graphic that is displayed at the bottom of the screen.

“President Trump phoned into a meeting organized by Republicans in Pennsylvania Wed., baseless claiming that the election was ‘rigged’ and falsely claiming that he won it ‘by a lot,'” the Fox News ticker reported. “Most of Trump’s legal efforts to challenge voting procedures in PA, MI and other states have been thrown out and his campaign has not produced sufficient evidence to back up claims of widespread voter fraud.” Continue reading.

As Biden administration ramps up, Trump legal effort drags on

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Electoral College meetings will convene next month in state capitals to formalize President elect-Joe Biden’s win. But the fast-approaching Dec. 14 date has done little to deter the Trump campaign from continuing a protracted election-related legal effort that an increasing number of Republicans have grown weary of.

With the transition to the incoming Biden administration now underway, a growing number of GOP members see President Trump’s legal challenges and unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud as a futile attempt to throw sand in the gears of the nation’s transfer of power.

The shifting attitude among some Republicans comes after judges have rebuffed numerous lawsuits brought by the campaign and its allies, at times using blistering language to dismiss the litigation. Continue reading.

Fact-checking Trump’s cellphone rant of election falsehoods

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On Thanksgiving eve, President Trump called into a news conference held by his allies in a Gettysburg, Pa., hotel, yet again falsely claiming that Joe Biden stole the presidential election. The presidential rant lasted less than 10 minutes, but Trump still managed to squeeze in at least 15 false or misleading statements. Here’s a rundown of his falsehoods.

“This was an election that we won easily. … This election was rigged, and we can’t let that happen. We can’t let it happen for our country. … This election was lost by the Democrats. They cheated. It was a fraudulent election.”

Trump lost decisively, with Biden earning 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. That’s the same margin that Trump had when he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, in what he repeatedly called a “landslide.” Many key swing states have already certified the results, with Biden’s margin of victory in some key states significantly higher than Trump’s margin four years ago. For instance, Biden won Michigan by more than 150,000 votes, compared with Trump’s margin of about 11,000 in 2016. Continue reading.

Trump tweets string of falsehoods about Wisconsin absentee voters

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“ ‘In Wisconsin, somebody has to be indefinitely confined in order to vote absentee. In the past there were 20,000 people. This past election there were 120,000…and Republicans were locked out of the vote counting process.’ @VicToensing @newsmax”

— President Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 24, 2020

Every part of this is false, proving once again why none of Trump’s claims about election fraud should be given any credence.

As we’ve documented in recent fact checks, the statements from Trump and his lawyers are all absurd and easily debunked. Last week, it was Sidney Powell alleging with no evidencethat an algorithm from Venezuela had changed millions of Trump votes to votes for President-elect Joe Biden. This week, Rudolph W. Giuliani is mixing up Michigan and Minnesota to peddle a false claim about “phantom voters.”

Here, we have Victoria Toensing mangling pretty much everything about Wisconsin in a Newsmax interview and Trump repeating the disinformation to more than 88 million Twitter followers. (Twitter quickly flagged the tweet as misleading.) Continue reading.

Trump Stress-Tested the Election System, and the Cracks Showed

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Even in the absence of a questionable outcome or any evidence of fraud, President Trump managed to freeze the passage of power for most of a month.

As President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election have steadily disintegrated, the country appears to have escaped a doomsday scenario in the campaign’s epilogue: Since Nov. 3, there have been no tanks in the streets or widespread civil unrest, no brazen intervention by the judiciary or a partisan state legislature. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s obvious victory has withstood Mr. Trump’s peddling of conspiracy theories and his campaign of groundless lawsuits.

In the end — and the postelection standoff instigated by Mr. Trump and his party is truly nearing its end — the president’s attack on the election wheezed to an anticlimax. It was marked not by dangerous new political convulsions but by a letter from an obscure Trump-appointed bureaucrat, Emily W. Murphy of the General Services Administration, authorizing the process of formally handing over the government to Mr. Biden.

For now, the country appears to have avoided a ruinous breakdown of its electoral system. Continue reading.

Minnesota panel signs off on election results, says voting system clean

Simon finds “no credible allegations” of fraud in vote. 

Minnesota’s top election officials signed off on the results of this year’s vote on Tuesday, giving the state’s process a clean bill of health even as a group of Republicans filed a last-minute legal challenge.

“Our voting equipment is incredibly accurate and the postelection review in front of you proves that,” David Maeda, the state’s director of elections, told members of the five-person state canvassing board led by Secretary of State Steve Simon, which met to make official the outcome of the Nov. 3 vote.

Despite unprecedented challenges presented by the pandemic, Maeda reported that a random audit of precincts in all 87 counties failed to show a level of irregularities that would have, by law, triggered a full-county recount anywhere.

That’s never happened since the state began that form of post-election testing in 2006, Maeda added. Continue reading.

Detroit had more vote errors in 2016 when Trump won Michigan by a narrow margin. He didn’t object then.

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DETROIT — Republican Party leaders who urged Michigan’s state canvassing board to hold off certifying the Nov. 3 election results before it met Monday cited what they described as “significant problems and irregularities” in Wayne County, home of Detroit.

The GOP officials pointed to the number of “unbalanced” precincts, where there were small discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters logged by election workers in the poll books. Party officials unsuccessfully called on the board to conduct an audit before it certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state with a 3-to-1 vote.

“To simply gloss over those irregularities now without a thorough audit would only foster feelings of distrust among Michigan’s electorate,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and state GOP Chair Laura Cox wrote in a letter Saturday. Continue reading.

Congressman seeks to have Rudolph Giuliani disbarred over attempts to overturn election

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In the three weeks since Election Day, Rudolph W. Giuliani has waged a prodigiously unsuccessful legal fight on behalf of President Trump’s campaign to overturn the election results. Giuliani’s bizarre news conferences and literal meltdown became fodder for late-night talk show hosts, while his even more bizarre legal arguments have prompted federal judges to unleash withering rebukes.

Giuliani and the rest of the efforts of the Trump campaign’s legal team won’t shift the election results in the president’s favor, but legal ethicists such as Scott Cummings of the UCLA School of Law do not view the former New York mayor as harmless.

“People are emailing me saying this is comical, and I’d say it would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous,” Cummings told The Washington Post on Monday in reference to Giuliani’s actions on Trump’s behalf. “We’re living through this moment where actions that should have consequences don’t seem to — at least not in a way we would have predicted in the past — and that erodes trust in the system.” Continue reading.

Wisconsin recount confirms Biden’s win over Trump, cementing the president’s failure to change the election results

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The recount of presidential ballots in Wisconsin’s two largest counties finished Sunday, reconfirming that President-elect Joe Biden defeated President Trump in the key swing state by more than 20,000 votes.

After Milwaukee County completed its tally Friday and Dane County concluded its count Sunday, there was little change in the final breakdown of the more than 800,000 ballots that had been cast in the two jurisdictions. As a result of the recount, Biden’s lead over Trump in Wisconsin grew by 87 votes.

Under Wisconsin law, Trump was required to foot the bill for the partial recount — meaning his campaign paid $3 million only to see Biden’s lead expand. Continue reading.

Supreme Court declines to take action on Trump’s Pennsylvania appeal prior to certification of Biden win

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The Supreme Court of the United States on Monday took no action to overturn a lower court decision that allowed the counting of late-arriving mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.

President Donald Trump’s campaign had sought to exclude mail-in ballots that arrived after election day.

In 4-4 decision in October, the high court upheld the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling that said ballots postmarked by election day can arrive up to three days after the election. Continue reading.