Smedley_buzkill wrote:
Slat, it is a fact that in Georgia, Trump was winning until a bunch of mail in ballots magically appeared in one county in the middle of the night after the poll watchers had been sent home due to a bogus water main break. It is a fact that these votes, counted unsupervised, were allowed in the final tally, thanks to GA governor and Trump enemy Brian Kemp. It is a fact that GA Sec/State Brad Raffensperger purged about 100,000 ineligible voters off the GA registration lists AFTER the votes had been certified. It is also a fact that Biden carried Georgia by 11,700 votes out of more than five million cast, and most of these votes appeared, as I said, in the middle of the night in one county where they were counted with no poll watchers present.
It is also a fact that Brad Rathburger had allowed several thousand illegal ballots and was caught and forced to disallow them when he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
It is a fact that Biden actually "won" by 43,000 votes in five swing states, out of 160 million ballots cast. Maybe you believe that a candidate who spent most of the campaign in his basement and couldn't fill a phone booth at his rallies unless he was standing in it beat someone who drew tens of thousands to his rallies. Perhaps you believe that a mumbling, stumbling non entity like Biden somehow got more votes than Obama, who was an extremely popular president.
Slat, it is a fact that in Georgia, Trump was winn... (
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Sorry, my friend, but in spite of my high regard for you...I'm not buying into any of the above alternative 'facts'. I offer the following ...
Ample evidence fraud did not affect election outcome.
In the immediate aftermath of Biden's win, election officials insisted the results were legitimate.
"The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its partners said in a November 2020 statement. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised."
Trump's own attorney general, William Barr, said in early December 2020 that the Justice Department had "not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election." Biden won the presidency with 306 electoral votes, which Congress certified in January 2021 after the Capitol riot.
At the time, some Republican lawmakers also pushed back on claims of widespread fraud.
"Nothing before us proves illegality anywhere near the massive scale, the massive scale that would have tipped the entire election – nor can public doubt alone justify a radical break when the doubt itself was incited without any evidence," Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate's top Republican said in his address to the chamber before it was evacuated during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Since then, a mountain of evidence – including lawsuits, recounts, forensic audits and even partisan reviews – has affirmed those results.
Dozens of lawsuits by Trump and his allies aimed at overturning the election, some of which inspired misinformation about results in contested states like Nevada, failed. The Supreme Court refused to take up several cases challenging results in battleground states that played a key role in the outcome of the election.
In those battleground states, numerous audits and recounts have affirmed Biden's win:
In Arizona, a six-month audit of election results in Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, confirmed the state's election results. The audit was conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a firm hired by the Republican-dominated state Senate and whose founder had previously promoted unfounded claims of voter fraud. Multiple hand recounts, as well as a forensic audit of voting machines, have also confirmed Maricopa County's results.
In Georgia, three separate audits found no evidence of wrongdoing affecting the state's election outcome. Georgia's Republican secretary of state has repeatedly quashed claims of widespread voter fraud.
In Michigan, an audit of ballots, voting machines and election procedures affirmed Biden's win. The bipartisan effort was the most comprehensive post-election audit in the state's history.
In Pennsylvania, a statewide risk-limiting audit found "strong evidence of the accuracy of the count of votes cast in the November 2020 presidential election. " The audit examined ballots in 63 out of 67 counties.
In Wisconsin, a recount in the state's two largest counties found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. An audit of voting machines by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, commissioned by Republican lawmakers, and an investigation by a conservative law firm also upheld the election results.
Fact check: What's true about the 2020 election, vote counting, Electoral College
Many claims of fraud stemmed from a misunderstanding of how vote counting and reporting processes work in different states.
In Wisconsin, for example, some claimed late-night vote dumps for Biden were proof of fraud. That's wrong – the state can't count absentee ballots until Election Day, so tallies for the largest counties can take all day to complete, or even into the night. On election night, that resulted in a late addition of absentee votes, which trended heavily Democratic in 2020.
Similar narratives targeted other contested states.
In Michigan, an election-night typo resulted in the addition of more than 100,000 votes to Biden's tally. Although the clerical error was quickly corrected, some falsely claimed it was evidence of voter fraud. In Georgia, footage of poll workers placing ballots in their proper storage containers was also misconstrued as evidence of fraud.
Other pervasive election conspiracy theories haven't panned out, either.
Claims from conservative pundits that voting machines deleted Trump votes and changed them to Biden are false.
Companies like Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic have filed defamation lawsuits against Trump allies and conservative news outlets for promoting baseless claims about their voting technology.
Based on research, the claim that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged" is rated FALSE. Lawsuits, recounts, forensic audits and partisan reviews have all affirmed the election results. Officials from both parties have repeatedly debunked claims of widespread voter fraud. With 306 electoral votes, Biden beat Trump in the election.