Trump Oval Office Election Fraud Misinformation

Factcheck.org

Election Fraud Misinformation from Trump’s Oval Office Speech, 12-2-20

This speech includes much of the misinformation spread by his sons and his extended legal team (Giuliani, Powell, Wood, etc.). Public statements such as in this speech and Giuliani’s press conferences/hearings do not require facts or accuracy. Lawsuits do;  Trump’s extended legal team has lost 46 lawsuits (Washington Post, 12-4-20), and there has been no lawsuit victory involving evidence of voter fraud. Trump’s Oval Office speech is summarized below, and full details are in the fact check article.

1. Overwhelming evidence of fraud. False. Of the nearly 50 lawsuits in court, none dealing with voter fraud prevailed, and judges have issued harsh statements in their rulings denouncing the lack of evidence. For example, the Pennsylvania ruling stated “...this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”
2. There were no safeguards for mail-in ballots. False. All states using mail-in ballots have safeguards. For example. most states use bar codes on mail-in ballots matched to a specific person in the voter files; ballot envelopes require personal information, such as date of birth or driver’s license numbers; and signatures are required and matched against ones on file.
3. Dominion Voting Systems switched votes. False. Based on HHS input, DOJ stated “we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”
4. Votes are counted in foreign countries. False. All votes in the U.S. are counted in the U.S.
5. Computer voting systems were used to switch thousands of votes from Trump to Biden in Michigan. False. Antrim County information was incorrectly reported; this was quickly corrected. This was human error (not a software glitch) that “did not in any way, shape or form affect the official election results of Antrim County,”
6. Republican poll observers were not allowed to view the counts. False. Observers from both parties were allowed across the country. In the Pennsylvania example, Trump’s lawyer admitted in court that observers were there.
7. There were more votes than voters in Detroit. False. Half of the registered voters voted. There were out-of-balance precincts (i.e., differences between counted votes and number of people who voted), but the total for Detroit was 357. Such discrepancies, which aren’t unique to this election, regularly occur.
8. Detroit poll workers counted ballots multiple times and duplicated ballots. False. The Wayne County legal ruling was the allegations were “not credible” and represented a misunderstanding of the ballot tabulation process.
9. Georgia improperly checked signatures and also left signature checks out of the recount. False. Georgia election officials check signatures twice: once when a voter requests a mail-in ballot, and then again when the ballot is returned. Signature checks were not part of the hand recount, but this is not fraudulent. Once a signature is verified on the ballot’s outer envelope, the ballot itself is separated for counting to protect voter privacy.
10. The number of rejected ballots in Georgia was substantially lower than the past. False. Trump is conflating the ballots rejected just for signature issues in this election with ballots rejected in past elections for all reasons — usually for arriving too late. The percentage of mail-in ballots rejected in Georgia due to signature issues this year was about the same as in the 2016 and 2018 general elections.
    
11. Democrats in Pennsylvania were allowed to cure ballots but Republicans were not. False. All counties got the same guidance allowing voters to cast a provisional ballot on Election Day. Some counties notified voters, and some didn’t. But that inconsistency didn’t fall along partisan county lines according to the legal ruling: “... counties vary in implementing that guidance, but that is normal. Reasonable county-to-county variation is not discrimination.”
12. Large vote dumps occurred in Michigan. False. A large uptick of about 140,000 votes for Biden was the result of a typo in unofficial results reported by Michigan’s Shiawassee County. The mistake was quickly corrected.
13. A massive dump of votes late at night in Wisconsin caused Biden’s lead. False. Trump was ahead in Wisconsin at the end of the day on Nov. 3, but that was before many of the mail-in ballots were counted. State law prevented election officials from counting absentee ballots before polls opened on Election Day.
14. Thousands of ballots found after election were for mostly from Trump voters. False. Almost 6,000 uncounted or unreported votes were discovered by officials during the hand recount. But those votes for Trump and Biden have since been included in the overall tallies and didn’t change the outcome (it reduced Biden’s lead).
15. Issues with Pennsylvania mail-in ballots were evidence of fraud. False. These were just issues that were addressed and do not fare present fraud (one was cited by Trump’s legal team in a lawsuit, which was dismissed by a federal judge and upheld by the unanimous 3rd Circuit).
16. In-person voters in Arizona had errors resulting in their votes not being counted. False. No witnesses for the Trump campaign could confirm that their votes had not been recorded, and the judge dismissed the campaign’s claims as moot and with prejudice, meaning the decision cannot be retried.
17. Voter rolls are filled with illegal voters. False. Voter roll errors are not evidence of fraud unless someone actually votes illegally. Voting experts say that while the instances of voter fraud via mail-in ballot are more common than in-person voting fraud, the number of known cases is relatively small.
18. A Wisconsin voter roll dispute involves 100,000 illegal voters. False. All those voters did was fail to respond within 30 days to a mailing saying it appeared they had moved and giving them the opportunity to continue their registration if they had not. There’s no evidence they voted illegally.
19. It is statistically impossible for Trump to lose when down-ballot Republicans won. False. While Republicans fared better than polls suggested they would, it is not unusual in recent elections for House GOP candidates to fare better against their Democratic opponents than how the Republican presidential candidate performed. Election experts also attribute some of the disparity to “ballot roll-off,” which is when voters skip certain races.

Source: FactCheck.org