On the 12th day of the election, the Trump team gave to me
Lies about everything!
The Trump campaign, base, and conservatives/republicans generally have been spreading dozens of viral lies about the 2020 election faster than they’re spreading lies about coronavirus being harmless. Much like other Trump-land communications (climate change is a Chinese hoax, the economy is doing ‘well’, Trump’s infrastructure bill was rebuilt America, etc.) these claims are decidedly untrustworthy, and seemingly universally false. Furthermore, many of the false claims of voter fraud, illegal votes, and election stealing were ideas that were literally planted BY THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN in the weeks and months leading up to the election. Trump and friends claimed that mail-in ballots led to voter fraud, that democrats were trying to ‘steal’ the election, and that ‘late’ (post-marked on time, but arriving late because Trump and Postmaster General Louie Dejoy [a fitting last name] sabotaged the post-office) ballots would be illegally counted, despite supreme court rulings to the contrary.
If you, like me, have witnessed conservative friends and family back unverified and borderline unhinged conspiracy theories about voter fraud, but found yourself lacking the time or energy to do the digging to refute their evidence free claims, this article is for you. While I don’t claim to present a comprehensive debunking of every wacko conspiracy theory, fraud claim, and evidence-free court case, here you’ll find debunks to some of the most common (and decidedly implausible) conspiracy theories. For the record, this was not a hard exercise, as most claims were debunk-able with the top result from a single google search. Please enjoy this debunking in the style of 12 days of Christmas.
138,000 votes appearing
One of the more popular lies on social media is that Michigan magically added hundreds of thousands of votes that were 100% for Joe Biden. In two variations of this story, democrats either blatantly added 100,000 votes to Biden’s tally in a brazen attempt to steal Michigan, or used malfunctioning software that glitched and added the votes to Biden’s tally. Conservatives and Trumpers aggressively wondered how a 100,000 votes could’ve all been added to Biden’s vote tally for the state. In reality, these hucksters were pouncing on a mistake in which a county accidentally “added an extra zero”, a mistake that was corrected “in roughly half an hour”. The unofficial vote counts for Shiawassee County were 15,371, but the county accidentally reported 153,710 at first. Correcting the mistake did not stop a torrent of misinformation and outrage from ear-steaming republicans claiming votes magically appeared. The false story was shared over 100,000 times on social media, the first of many examples of the rapid, virus-like spread of misinformation among deeply connected republican networks (that, much like liberal networks, are increasingly cut-off from the other side of the centrist aisle).
2) 110,000 more votes than voters
In another crazy viral election lie, Trump-backers asserted that Wisconsin had 110,000 more votes counted than voters. In another instance of “Republicans don’t know how to fact-check obviously outrageous claims”, the viral tweet originating the claim erroneously compared 2018 voter registration numbers to the number of votes cast in 2020. As you’ve likely heard, there were a record number of votes cast across the nation this year behind massive ‘get out the vote’ campaigns around the country. When previous American elections had ~50% of the populace declining to vote, it’s really not surprising to find more voters in 2020 than in previous years, especially after Trump’s coronavirus response and the associated economic collapse killed >230,000 people and saw >50,000,000 file for unemployment. It’s unfortunate that the original tweet making this dubious claim was retweeted over 9,000 times, and presumably shared on other social media as well. Like the claim of votes magically appearing, this too is false.
3) 21,000 dead people voting
Halloween was a bit of a dud this year, but that’s no reason to overcompensate in the following days with nonsensical claims of 21,000 zombie votes in Pennsylvania, per an article published by Breitbart News. It is, unsurprisingly, 100% false. The claim originates from a court case against Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, claiming that the State somehow tallied votes from 21,000 dead Pennsylvanians. However, a spokesperson for PA’s courts notes that, “The court found no deficiency in how Pennsylvania maintains its voter rolls. There is currently no proof provided that any deceased person has voted in the 2020 election.” In other words… the organization suing PA’s Secretary of state, Public Interest Legal Foundation, had literally ZERO evidence backing up their assertion.
Perhaps the real instance of braindead behavior were the >74,000 people who retweeted this absurd claim after Rudy Giuliani shared a post about it. Like a highly contagious zombie virus, this claim “reached up to 11.3 million people” per an analysis from the New York Times. Help me counter this misinformation by making this story go viral.
4) Dead Michiganders voting
Interestingly, outraged assertions of dead people voting also spread to Michigan. The outrage was largely unwarranted given the claim — a few dead people had their vote counted — in comparison to the magnitude by which Trump lost the state: by over 100,000 votes. All the same, conservative pundits like Candace Owens insisted that Michigan was counting the votes of dead people, tweeting to her millions of followers. The problem? Like all too much of right-wing media covering the election this year, it’s entirely false.
Occam’s razor is the problem solving principle that the simplest solution is the most likely one. So when trying to ‘solve’ the problem of how a 120 year old Michigander born in 1900 voted in 2020, what might a simpler ‘solution’ be? If, instead of turning to outrage over ‘illegal’ or ‘invalid’ votes, we do a quick google search… we find that the ‘solution’ is “run of the mill clerical errors”. In one instance of ‘dead man voting’ A Hamlin Township woman asked for an absentee ballot for the first time in ages on account of Covid-19, and her birthdate was no longer on file. The system then defaulted to assigning her a birthdate of 01/01/01… or January 1st 1901. She’s actually 74, and most definitely alive. The original poster of the dead Michigan voter claim has yet to provide evidence regarding his other instances of supposed dead people voting. My money’s on clerical errors.
5) Non-Zero observers observing
In one of the dozens of court cases by the Trump Campaign and conservative groups alleging some sort of voter fraud or illegal vote counting, Republicans in Pennsylvania sued to stop vote counting of absentee ballots, on the grounds that there were no Republican observers in the room. Donald Trump tweeted at least twice about “refused admittance to counting rooms” The problem? Continuing the theme, their claims were simply untrue.
In a memorably awful argument, the plaintiffs initially claimed they had been barred from observing the counting room. In response, US district Judge Paul S. Diamond asked how many observers Republicans had in the court room, to which the Republicans responded they had, “a nonzero number of people in the room”. Judge Diamond appropriately asked, ““I’m sorry, then what’s your problem?” before denying the request to halt the count. In this instance, President Trump tweeted a lie to his millions of followers that Republican observers weren’t allowed in the counting rooms. His tweets, the viral spread of the claims, and conservative media parroting, all contribute to the veritable brainwashing of conservative Americans, who often trust the claims emanating from authority figures like President Trump. As with the other examples, the President and his followers lied. In this case, it was to try and stop counting votes of American citizens, a decidedly anti-democratic maneuver. One might even argue they were “trying to steal the election”.
6) Sharpies sabotaging
In yet another viral claim about election interference, Trump supporters and one of Trump’s sons tweeted the rumor that ballots marked with sharpies in Arizona were being invalidated. The claim asserted that Arizona polling place staff had disproportionately given sharpies to Trump supporters, and that their votes were being invalidated. Continuing the streak of Trump/Republican allegations about election treachery being false, this rumor also proved to be a lie.
As Arizona official repeatedly confirmed, the ballot counting machines were perfectly capable of counting ballots marked by sharpies. Furthermore, there isn’t any credible evidence that sharpies were distributed to Republicans as a prelude to invalidating their votes. Pima County officials affirmed, “No ballots will be discarded because of the method used to color in the ovals”. Of course, the available evidence didn’t stop Trumpers from crying wolf, and #sharpiegate joined a growing list of lies the Trump campaign and it’s supporters touted to imply that Trump had actually won the election.
Narrator: He hadn’t.
7) Flint, Russia ballot stuffing
Another viral Trump-camp claim is that a video caught ballot counters in Flint Michigan stuffing ballots into a receptacle. Flint Michigan is a predominantly democratic city in Michigan, the implication seems to be that election officials were illegally adding ballots from (dead people? fake people? immigrants? never clear).
The problem? The video that was shared was originally posted on Washington Post, and is from — wait for it — Russia. The Russian coat of arms is seen throughout the polling room. In other words, we have yet another demonstrably false lie about election fraud or interference emanating from Republicans. The lie and the video were shared widely on Facebook, furthering the misconception that democrats are trying to steal the election.
8) A red wagon smuggling
Further claims of illegitimate voting were spread with viral videos and photos of someone supposedly smuggling ballots into a polling place in Detroit. The viral video was followed a few days later by Trump’s speech claiming that Detroit was one of the most corrupt cities in America. The viral claim asserted that some random person was smuggling ballots into the polling place at 8PM after the deadline for votes to arrive.
Like all of the other claims, this evidence free (Important: notice there were no ballots in the video… DUH) was a complete lie. As truth would have it, the man with the wagon was a cameraman brining equipment in for the news crew. Unfortunately, this viral video contributed to the perception of many Trump supporters that the election was rigged and being stolen. Share this article to help counter the epidemic of election misinformation.
9) Detroit observer preventing
In another court case, Sarah Stoddard and the Election Integrity Fund claimed GOP election observers were prevented from witnessing the curing of ballots. If you didn’t know, “curing” is a routine procedure for ballots (regardless of which party was voted for on the ballot) that have a stray mark or coffee stain, making them unreadable for ballot-reading machines. In these cases, election officials can create a duplicate ballot for the machine to read, i.e. curing. Republicans claimed that they were prevented from viewing this process.
As was the case in the other court case, Republicans lied about being prevented from observing this key election process, claiming it had been done “repeatedly without a Republican official there to observe it”. This was decidedly false, as all such stations had representatives of both major parties in the room. More specifically, Judge Timothy Kenny ruled that “The City of Detroit should not be harmed when there is no evidence to support accusations of voter fraud,”. Another day, another baseless claim of election fraud.
10) Two States a’ Glitching
As mentioned earlier, a viral claim asserted that Michigan’s voting machine’s glitched giving 100,000 plus votes to Biden. This was demonstrably false, as the “glitch” was in fact user error, and was corrected in a half hour. However, this didn’t stop Donald Trump from tweeting that Georgia was experiencing the same (non-existent) glitch in it’s vote tallying system. Hopefully it’s abundantly clear that it’s impossible for user error in Michigan to cause ‘the same glitch’ in Georgia…
Tweets like these from the Donald and others contribute to the polarization of the country. This particular tweet was retweeted 300,000 times. Trump and others misled Americans into thinking that democrats are trying to steal the election, when there’s literally zero evidence to back that claim. He lied, plain and simple.
11) Extra ballot adding
In #9, a court case argued that Detroit election officials were illegally ‘curing’ ballots to favor democrats, and falsely claimed republican observers weren’t able to witness the curing. A similarly dubious claim emerged in Pennsylvania, after a video emerged showing a Pennsylvania official filling in an empty ballot to be counted. The problem? The official was merely curing an unreadable ballot so it could be read by a voting machine.
One version of this false claim had over a million views on facebook on Friday. There were no extra ballots added by Pennsylvania election officials. Someone disingenuously took a video of a ballot being cured (remember, making a copy of an unreadable ballot from a coffee stain or stray mark) and misrepresented it as election officials filling out blank ballots to add to Biden’s total. Like all the other claims on this list, this one is complete malarkey.
12) Poll-workers sticky-noting
Is a sticky note penned by an anonymous author claiming to be a poll worker a credible claim of poll-worker fraud? That was the assertion of a recent court case in Michigan. President Trump’s campaign filed the lawsuit alleging that “photo of a sticky note submitted as evidence which read ‘entered receive date as 11/2/20 on 11/4/20.’” was evidence of election fraud in Michigan. Furthermore, the Trump campaign claimed that their election observers were, in a familiar tune, prevented from viewing the processing of absentee ballots.
If you could smell articles, this one would reek of bullshit. The judge dismissed the case “The note — which is vague and equivocal — is likewise hearsay,”. Judge Stephens also called bs regarding the plaintiff being prevented from observing the processing of absentee ballots, noting “The complaint does not specify when, where, or by whom plaintiff was excluded. Nor does the complaint provide any details about why the alleged exclusion occurred”. Yet again, we find the Trump campaign engaged in a disingenuous and virtually evidence-free effort to stop actual votes from ballots being counted in Michigan, to sow the seeds of doubt about absentee ballots. Trump’s months of whining about mail-in ballots being fraudulent were effectively a pre-lude to this and other court cases. He and his camp claimed mail-in (absentee) voting was fraudulent, and then brought forth flimsy evidence to insist that they had been right all the time. Yet another example of undemocratic behavior designed to take away votes from democrats, and, in the case of Detroit minorities. Who’s trying to steal the election again?
13) Absentee Georgia ballots counting
Not to be outdone (by themselves), the Trump campaign filed yet another election related lawsuit in Georgia. This time, they alleged that late-arriving ballots had been mixed with ballots that arrived on time. In what could really only be interpreted as dishonesty, the case was dismissed hours after arrival, with Judge James Bass finding “no evidence” that the ballots had in fact arrived after the deadline. At the time, Trump was ahead of Biden by about 15,000 votes, but Biden now leads Trump by over 11,000 votes. It’s unlikely that had the Trump campaign evidence, and had they won the court case, that it would’ve flipped Georgia back in Trump’s favor anyway. Of course, that didn’t stop them from lying to try and take votes away from American voters.
Fiveeee States that SWINNNNGGGGGG
I don’t know, I just really felt like that line needed to be sung for some reason. While it hasn’t been said anywhere explicitly, the evidence here of election fraud claims are all in regards to the five states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia) that swung from republican in 2016 to democrat in 2020. Which, if nothing else, is pretty remarkable that the vast majority of false claims regarding election fraud, stealing, and illegal voting are from the 5 states that Trump did worse in this year.
14) Democrats a’ stealing (four called States)
File this one under “baseless assertion”. In a recent tweet, Trump quoted Newt Gingrich as saying, “it was clearly a stolen election”. As the previous points enumerate… there’s not really any evidence that suggests that the election was stolen. Thankfully, twitter marked this tweet about election fraud as disputed. Which is a polite way of saying completely false. On the contrary, it seems like the Trump campaign is trying to steal the election by presenting flimsy evidence and even lies “a non-zero number of observers” to prevent democratic votes from being counted.
15) Illegal vote Receiving (three extra days)
Trump’s recent tirade of tweets includes this one claiming that tens of thousands of votes were illegally received in Pennsylvania after election day (coincidentally, how many Trump would need to overturn to win Pennsylvania). Like the hundreds, if not thousands, of other lies Trump has stated throughout his presidency, this tweet is also deceit.
The supreme court of the United States ruled that both Pennsylvania and Georgia could count absentee ballots received up to 3 days after election day. In other words… Trump’s tweet is a bald-faced lie. Given that mail-in ballots were overwhelmingly democratic (on account of democrats being more concerned about in person voting because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Trump literally telling his supporters to vote in person to give the impression that he would have a big lead on election day… i.e. laying the groundwork for the tweet cited above), Trump’s lie amounts to efforts to disenfranchise likely democratic ballots, and necessarily his political opponents. He’s lying about election fraud in court to boost his own chances of re-election and inhibit democracy.
16) Incumbent Reelecting (Two terms or bust)
Trump claims in a recent tweet (in all-caps so it must be true) that he “WON THE ELECTION” with 71,000,000 legal votes. Like the rest of the claims in this article, it’s a lie. He hasn’t won the election, and all the major media outlets have called it for Biden. While it might be theoretically possible that all of the remaining votes to be counted could be for Trump in the states with close margins, the probability of this happening is so vanishingly small that it’s nigh a statistical certainty that Biden has won the election and Trump is a loser, this year. At the very least, it is indeed a lie for Trump to claim victory without having the necessary electoral votes (270) to win the presidency. Not much reason to take anything this guy says seriously.
17) And a speech near a dildo factory
I too, can make claims with fake or misleading evidence. Here, it’s the necessity of finding a catchy ending to the 12 days of the election. In Trump’s case, he lied about hosting a press conference at the 4 seasons hotel in Philadelphia to make it seem like his campaign was ritzy or glamorous or official. In reality, it was hosted at “Four Seasons Landscaping” in between a crematorium and a sex store selling dildos, among other things.
I suppose in this case Trump actually deleted the original lying tweet, and issued a correct one that his presser was at “Four Seasons Landscaping”, but the original tweet was still a lie. It’s only fitting that the Trump campaign alleging ‘fake’ voters held a presser at a ‘fake’ four seasons next to a fake penis (dildos, everybody) store, and that all the major news networks called the election for Biden while Giuliani spoke at the presser at Four Seasons Landscaping next to a crematorium. Trump’s re-election campaign got smoked, while it’s court cases went up in flames with it’s pants-on-fire lies. Hopefully the spread of Trump’s viral election misinformation goes up in smoke as well.
For Trump’s next big press release full of lies and deceit, may I recommend Four seasons heating and cooling:
