Trump
has amplified voting falsehoods in over 300 tweets since election night.
Nov. 16, 2020, 3:44 p.m. ETNov. 16, 2020
Nov. 16, 2020
By Linda Qiu
President Trump has posted over 300
tweets attacking the integrity of the 2020 election since election night,
unleashing a cascade of false and misleading claims. Here’s a review.
Mischaracterizing the ballot counting process
Just hours after polls closed on Nov.
3, Mr. Trump began sowing mistrust in the vote counting process, as he tweeted
ominously about “surprise ballot dumps,” “finding Biden votes” and “miraculously”
disappearing leads.
What he was describing was simply vote
counting. Election officials warned for months that counting ballots
might take days or even weeks to complete, given the
prevalence of absentee ballots this year. Studies and experts predicted that Mr. Trump could lead on
election night in key states, but that lead could be slowly eroded as officials
continued to count mail-in ballots.
The president
has objected to
counting votes past Election Day, claiming at least twice that
late-arriving ballots are “illegal.” But 23 states and Washington, D.C., accept mail-in ballots after
Election Day if they are postmarked by a certain day.
False declarations of victory
Mr. Trump has repeatedly and falsely
claimed to have “won” the election or
predicted that he will win after recounts in Georgia and Arizona and lawsuit verdicts.
In reality, he has virtually no chance of winning, given the large margins held
by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. in those states. Mr. Biden leads
by 14,000 votes in Georgia and about 10,000 votes in Arizona — far more than even the
largest margin to be recently overturned, several hundred votes in a 2008
Senate election in Minnesota.
Conversely, Mr. Trump has objected to
news outlets and others declaring Mr. Biden the victor, asking, “Since when
does the Lamestream Media call who our next president will be?”
A media call is not the same thing as
certified results or the final Electoral College vote, but it’s worth noting
that The Associated Press has called presidential elections since 1848, by
combining reported vote tallies and “research including demographic data,
voting history and statistics about advance voting.”
Baseless allegations of fraud
and a stolen election
About two dozen of
Mr. Trump’s tweets included broad allegations of “widespread voter fraud,”
“illegal votes” and “a stolen election.” Election officials across the
country told The New York Times that there was no evidence
that irregularities affected the outcome of the election.
In a few instances, the president gave
specific examples of what he suggested amounted to fraud, but those claims
lacked context, were disputed or were flat-out wrong.
He claimed that military ballots in
Georgia were “missing.” They were
not, according to election officials in the
state.
He posted a video of
election officials gathering ballots and asked “is this what our Country has
come to?” But the footage simply showed officials abiding by the legal process: collecting
ballots from a drop box that had been locked by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
He has cited Richard
Hopkins, a Postal Service worker in Erie, Pa., who claimed that ballots were
backdated. But the postmaster of the facility denied that this happened, and
the Postal Service’s inspector general told Congress that Mr. Hopkins disavowed his claims.
This weekend, he tweeted, “10,000 dead
people voted in Michigan,” alleging a rigged election — though the claim had
been debunked by Michigan officials and news outlets
days earlier.
False claims about barred
observers and unverified signatures
In over a dozen tweets, Mr. Trump has
complained about poll observers being denied access to watch ballot counting.
But that’s not true, according to his own legal filings. A
lawyer for Mr. Trump admitted that there were “a nonzero number” of campaign
observers allowed in the counting room in Philadelphia.
At least four times, the president
has falsely claimed that Georgia was prohibited from verifying signatures by a
consent decree. Under a March settlement,
officials must notify voters whose signatures were rejected within three
business days and give them the chance to correct issues. It did not bar
officials from verifying signatures.
Georgia’s secretary of state, a
Republican, noted that the
state trained election officials on signature matching, required a confirmed
match and created a portal that checked and confirmed voters’ drivers licenses.
(Signatures are not verified again during the recount process, as ballots are
separated from the signed envelopes during the initial counting process.)
Baselessly accusing a software company of
malfeasance and having Chinese ties
Dominion Voting Systems has become a
particular target of presidential ire. False conspiracy theories that the “glitches” in
the company’s software changed vote tallies have flourished on social media.
But Mr. Trump has escalated those
inaccurate claims into baseless allegations that Dominion purposefully “rigged” the election
and is a “Radical Left” company.
He also tweeted a seven-second video in which
a Dominion executive, John Poulos, says, “Components in our products that come
from China.”
The company, on a website debunking
rumors, says that it “works with all political parties; our customer base and our
government outreach practices reflect this nonpartisan approach.” Dominion
operates in 28 states, including Republican strongholds such as
Utah, Kansas and Tennessee as well as battleground states that Mr. Trump won,
including Florida and Ohio.
The seven-second clip was taken
from a January congressional hearing about
election security. Mr. Poulos also said that “our tabulated products have
always been manufactured in the United States.”
Pressed on which
components come from China, he cited “LCD components, the actual glass screen
on the interface down to the chip component level of capacitors and resistors”
and noted that many of those products are not manufactured in the United States
— a point previously made by Mr.
Trump himself.
