Reposted from My Substack
This video is from Trump supporters at the Iowa Caucus — in 2024. This year.
Trumpers on why they'll stick by Trump even as his position changes from he won the election to he knew all along that he had lost the election.
Even if Trump changes his position and admits that he knew he lost in 2020 — they still believe he won.
These are some of the reasons why people continue to believe that the 2020 election was “Stolen” — but do any of these claims line up with the facts?
Nope.
For the 1000th time, the vote totals changed overnight because most states don't start counting the mail-in and absentee ballots until the polls close.
On Election Night, county elections officials must begin reporting results to the Secretary of State no more than two hours after they begin tallying votes after the polls close. County elections officials then continue to report results periodically throughout Election Night until all precinct vote totals have been reported.
The first election results are typically ballots received before Election Day, which include vote-by-mail ballots and early voting location ballots. County elections officials may begin opening and processing vote-by-mail ballot envelopes up to 29 days before Election Day, but those results cannot be accessed or shared with the public until all polls close on Election Day.
Those ballots have to have their signatures and identifying information checked before they're counted so it takes longer.
During the 30-day canvass period, county elections officials will process and count provisional ballots, ballots from voters who registered and voted conditionally (Same Day Voter Registration), and vote-by-mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within seven days of the election. This process includes a comparison of signatures on envelopes to the signatures on file. If a signature is missing or does not compare to the signature on file, state law requires county elections officials to reach out to voters to verify their signature to ensure that their ballot can be counted. By law, voters are allowed to verify their signature up to two days before the county certifies their results. These processes ensure that all valid votes cast by eligible voters can be counted.
Several states sent out ballots to every possible voter -- and that increased the vote total because people don’t have to go to a polling place.
When every registered voter gets sent a ballot in the mail — a system known as universal vote-by-mail — voting rates tend to rise, numerous studies have found.
Advocates for mail voting say these findings haven’t gotten the attention they deserve, and that they should lead more states that want to boost turnout to adopt UVM, as it’s called.
“To a remarkable degree, most of the nation’s leading journalists, democracy reform organizations, and elected officials continue to largely ignore, downplay — or even dismiss outright – the potentially profound implications of these noticeably high turnout rates,” said a research paper released last month by the National Vote at Home Institute, which advocates for increased use of mail voting.
Currently, eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington — use UVM.
This is why the results were for 77 Million and 84 Million votes for Trump and Biden.
More Democrats used mail-in ballots to avoid being potentially exposed to covid in a polling place, Republicans ignored the CDC because Trump told them it would "Just go away" - so they caught and died from covid 43% more often.
There is evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democratic-leaning counties and similar evidence of an association between political party affiliation and attitudes regarding COVID-19 vaccination; further data on these rates may be useful.
[…]
Between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2021, there were 538 159 individuals in Ohio and Florida who died at age 25 years or older in the study sample. The median age at death was 78 years (IQR, 71-89 years). Overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 2.8 percentage points, or 15%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters (95% prediction interval [PI], 1.6-3.7 percentage points). After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters.
Republicans *won* many seats for Congress and State Houses on the same ballots where Trump lost.
Republicans outperformed the polls up and down the ballot in the 2020 election, to the surprise even of many Republican political operatives and survey researchers.
To be clear, Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Trump; Democrats will still control the House and still have a chance of picking up the Senate.
But Republicans made gains in the House — so far netting five seats (with 22 races not yet called). Given their presumed strength in the suburbs, Democrats had been expected to expand their majority.
Many people who voted Republican, particularly in the suburbs, left a choice for President off their ballot because they were *Sick* of him. If the ballots were "swapped" why didn't they change *all* the votes for Dems?
Suburban counties across the country turned away from President Trump in this election. That includes suburbs in the Midwest and the Sun Belt, in inner-ring counties and those farther out, in predominantly white communities and more diverse ones.
Suburban counties that were already Democratic-leaning before 2020 tilted more so. And many that were deeply Republican nudged several points away from the president.
[…]
On average, Mr. Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s performance in suburban counties around the country by about 5 percentage points (that average weights each county by population). In Georgia, the shift has been more than eight points. In Michigan and Wisconsin, it was about three points.
Nationally, these suburban counties were the places where vote margins changed the most from 2016. Mr. Trump improved his margins in counties outside metropolitan areas, but by less than a point.
They didn't kick Republicans out of the counting rooms, there was a crowd of Republicans who were trying to disrupt the count in Detroit.
Among the wild claims on social media was that someone slipped ballots into the TCF counting center on a wagon, in the middle of the night. But the picture offered as proof turned out to be of a WXYZ-TV photographer, hauling his equipment.
As expected in a city known for grit, resilience, strife and persistence, the vote count at Detroit's TCF was a roller coaster ride, resulting in a record 167,000 absentee ballots counted by Wednesday evening to the soundtrack of crowds shouting "Stop the Count!"
And…
In the video, people in a crowd scream as they peer through partially obstructed glass at what appears to be Detroit's TCF Center. […] The Detroit Free Press reported that challengers from both sides were locked out because the limit on challengers had already been exceeded. Earlier in the day, 268 Democratic challengers, 227 Republican challengers and 75 nonpartisan challengers were on the floor. The Free Press reported roughly 400 challengers were “freely roaming the room.”
“We were well over the 134 maximum," said the city of Detroit’s lead attorney Lawrence Garcia. "In the haste of doing business, nobody noticed that until it was over 200 for each party, and at that point, we said, we better stop admitting people until some people leave, and we’re under the 134 number.”
Election officials were concerned about COVID-19 spreading, building security and increasing tension as challengers continued to arrive. The TCF Center did not have any metal detectors or pat-downs upon entry.
[…]
Chris Thomas, a former director of elections for Michigan's Secretary of State office, denied allegations that either party was treated unfairly and said he was "extremely confident" Detroit would "come through with a nice clean report."
He attributed the chaos and confusion to challengers' misunderstanding of the counting process. Thomas has worked under Democratic and Republican secretaries of state throughout his career.
Trump’s own Campaign hired two companies to find evidence of election fraud, and both of them failed.
The Trump campaign hired Simpatico Software Systems and its founder, Ken Block, to investigate fraud claims all over the country after the 2020 election.
“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at,” he told the Post. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”
Block said he recently met with special counsel Jack Smith, the federal investigator into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Campaign finance records show the campaign paid Block’s firm about $750,000, starting just days after the election.
A similar firm, Berkeley Research Group, was hired by the Trump campaign to investigate fraud claims. Like Simpatico, Berkeley did not find evidence of fraud or that the election was stolen.
The DOJ under Bill Barr and even after Barr resigned tried to investigate every allegation of fraud and also found none of them were valid.
About a week before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, there was an "escalation" of then-President Donald Trump's earlier demands about election fraud allegations, a former top official in the Justice Department testified Thursday, including an "arsenal of allegations that he [Trump] wanted to rely on."
In testimony before the House select committee investigating the insurrection, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard said he told Trump "based on actual investigations, actual witness interviews, actual reviews of documents that these allegations simply had no merit."
In a 90-minute conversation on Dec. 27, 2021, Donoghue said he went one by one through claims of fraud to debunk them for Trump.
Among those theories was a report about Dominion voting machines having a 68% error rate in a Michigan county — which turned out to be false — and that the report was transmitted to U.S. attorneys in Michigan on Dec. 14 for their awareness.
The next day, Trump pressed the DOJ that the report must be true and proved that he had won the election. He also said the Justice Department should use the report to tell the public the election was tainted.
"I did the quick calculation and came up with .0063% error rate, which is well within tolerance," Donoghue testified. He said he assured the president that the report citing the significantly higher error rate was not true.
The DOJ and CIA even investigated claims that votes were somehow “flipped” by an Italian satellite. They weren’t.
The breakdown of the relationship between Trump and his White House counsel — a lawyer-president arrangement that dates back to Franklin D. Roosevelt — began in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election. Cipollone and Philbin at the time were providing “candid” advice to Trump that there was no evidence of fraud that could change the results of the election.
Despite this advice, Trump began to parade outside advisers into the White House for a series of long, contentious and at times nasty meetings about steps he could take to challenge the election.
In a now infamous Dec. 18, 2020 session in the Oval Office, Trump allies including Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, proposed ordering the military to seize voting machines in crucial states Trump had lost.
Cipollone was blindsided by the meeting, having learned of it just as he was about to leave the White House for the night. He recalled in testimony to the Jan. 6 committee that Trump’s advisers “forcefully” verbally attacked him and other White House lawyers when they shot down the idea of seizing voting machines.
“It was being brought to the president by people who I don’t believe had his best interest in mind,” Cipollone told lawmakers in June 2022. “They were doing the country and the president, both in his capacity as president and his personal capacity, a disservice.”
Trump’s Homeland Security monitored the election for potential breaches and hacking and found that it was the most secure election ever.
Federal election infrastructure officials said in a joint statement on Thursday that the 2020 election was the "most secure in American history." Meanwhile, President-elect Biden picked up 11 more Electoral College votes as CBS News projected he had won Arizona, giving him a 73 vote margin over President Trump and putting him well over the 270 electoral vote threshold with a total of 290 projected votes.
Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani spearheaded 62 Court cases over election fraud which all - except one - totally flamed out.
The president and his allies filed 62 lawsuits in state and federal courts seeking to overturn election results in states the president lost, according to Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer who is tracking the outcomes.
Out of the 62 lawsuits filed challenging the presidential election, 61 have failed, according to Elias.
Some cases were dismissed for lack of standing and others based on the merits of the voter fraud allegations. The decisions have came from both Democratic-appointed and Republican-appointed judges – including federal judges appointed by Trump.
State Supreme Courts in Arizona, , Nevada and Arizona each rejected or declined to hear Trump’s appeals to overturn results in those states, while the Pennsylvania and Michigan supreme courts denied multiple lawsuits.
The 60th and 61st losses came in recent daysLast Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas dismissed a lawsuit from Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, that argued Vice President Mike Pence has the conditional power to decide which states' Electoral College votes to count.
The claims about Hunter Biden's laptop *really* are likely Russian propaganda because Burisma was hacked by the GRU.
With President Trump facing an impeachment trial over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, Russian-0 military hackers have been boring into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the affair, according to security experts.
The hacking attempts against Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served, began in early November, as talk of the Bidens, Ukraine and impeachment was dominating the news in the United States.
It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.
And his laptop contents had been copied by the FSB and Russian secret Police according to Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who has told this to James Comer.
Lev Parnas states here in a letter to James Comer that he and Giuliani were told a story by a Burisma businessman named Vitoli Prusch[sp?] who claimed that during a meeting between Hunter Biden and the Khazaksan minister of foreign affairs, he became extremely intoxicated [ed. with alcohol and drugs] and incapacitated. While he was out Russian FSB agents, Russian Secret Police and [Burisma CEO] Zlochevsky's team copied the contents of his Laptop which was then compromised and manipulated by Russian Intelligence.
Giuliani was told that the laptop had embarrassing photos, but there was no evidence of financial crimes on it. Parnas states that It was only later that the idea of "finding" proof of financial crimes was introduced. He doesn’t give the exact date that the copying took place although it seems to be early in 2019.
Election officials debunked the “bag of ballots” that was lit on fire - because they were actually sample ballots that didn’t have official markings on them. The video was a fake.
Ballots weren't "harvested" they were just normal ballots. 2000 Mules is bunk and it didn't even show the same person dropping off more than one set of ballots.
Praised by former President Donald Trump as exposing “great election fraud,” the movie, called “2000 Mules,” paints an ominous picture suggesting Democrat-aligned ballot “mules” were supposedly paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But that’s based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data, which is not precise enough to confirm that somebody deposited a ballot into a drop box, according to experts.
[…]
CLAIM: At least 2,000 “mules” were paid to illegally collect ballots and deliver them to drop boxes in key swing states ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
THE FACTS: True the Vote didn’t prove this. The finding is based on false assumptions about the precision of cellphone tracking data and the reasons that someone might drop off multiple ballots, according to experts.
“Ballot harvesting” is a pejorative term for dropping off completed ballots for people besides yourself. The practice is legal in several states but largely illegal in the states True the Vote focused on, with some exceptions for family, household members and people with disabilities.
[…]
If a cellphone went near a drop box more than 10 times and a nonprofit more than five times from Oct. 1 to Election Day, True the Vote assumed its owner was a “mule” — its name for someone engaged in an illegal ballot collection scheme in cahoots with a nonprofit. Plus, experts say cellphone location data, even at its most advanced, can only reliably track a smartphone within a few meters — not close enough to know whether someone actually dropped off a ballot or just walked or drove nearby.
[…] In some states, in an attempt to bolster its claims, True the Vote also highlighted drop box surveillance footage that showed voters depositing multiple ballots into the boxes. However, there was no way to tell whether those voters were the same people as the ones whose cellphones were anonymously tracked.
A video of a voter dropping off a stack of ballots at a drop box is not itself proof of any wrongdoing, since most states have legal exceptions that let people drop off ballots on behalf of family members and household members.
Dominion didn't "flip votes" that has been proven because those machines use paper ballots that were hand recounted.
Driven by deep doubts about Dominion voting machines, conservative election critics are seeking a rudimentary remedy in Georgia: counting ballots by hand.
[…]
“Conspiracy theories about our elections have become the basis for a bad-faith push to use a method of counting ballots that doesn’t make our elections more transparent or more secure,” said Hannah Fried, executive director for the advocacy group All Voting Is Local. “Hand-counting is a tedious and monotonous task, and human beings aren’t good at tedious and monotonous tasks.” Georgia’s results of the 2020 presidential election were counted twice by machine and once by hand during an audit of all 5 million ballots cast. All three counts showed Democrat Joe Biden defeated Republican Donald Trump by about 12,000 votes.
An investigation by the AP found that there were only 475 cases of election fraud — total — in the swing states won by Joe Biden.
An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.
Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.
The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.
The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.
The findings build on a mountain of other evidence that the election wasn’t rigged, including verification of the results by Republican governors.
The “Audit” of Ballots in Arizona still found that Biden had won the election.
After a six-month investigation, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, a Republican running for Senate in 2022, said in April 2022 that he found no proof of 2020 election fraud. His report said "serious vulnerabilities" had been identified, though findings by his investigators that contradicted that were omitted.
A group of Conservative election experts, including Ben Ginsberg who had been the attorney for George W. Bush in the case against Al Gore, have gone through each and every allegation made and found them all false.
We therefore have undertaken an examination of every claim of fraud and miscount put forward by former President Trump and his advocates, and now put the results of those investigations before the American people, and especially before fellow conservatives who may be uncertain about what and whom to believe. Our conclusion is unequivocal: Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states. Biden’s victory is easily explained by a political landscape that was much different in 2020 than it was when President Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016. President Trump waged his campaign for re-election during a devastating worldwide pandemic that caused a severe downturn in the global economy. This, coupled with an electorate that included a small but statistically significant number willing to vote for other Republican candidates on the ballot but not for President Trump, are the reasons his campaign fell short, not a fraudulent election.
Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. We do not claim that election administration is perfect. Election fraud is a real thing; there are prosecutions in almost every election year, and no doubt some election fraud goes undetected. Nor do we disparage attempts to reduce fraud. States should continue to do what they can do to eliminate opportunities for election fraud and to punish it when it occurs. But there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.
And Fox News had to pay $787.5 Million to Dominion for lying about the company.
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Fox News agreed Tuesday to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to avert a trial in the voting machine company’s lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election.
The stunning settlement emerged just as opening statements were supposed to begin, abruptly ending a case that had embarrassed Fox News over several months and raised the possibility that network founder Rupert Murdoch and stars such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity would have to testify publicly.'
[…]
Dominion set out to prove in the lawsuit that Fox acted with malice in airing allegations that it knew to be false, or with “reckless disregard” for the truth. It presented volumes of internal emails and text messages that showed Fox executives and personalities saying they knew the accusations were untrue, even as the falsehoods were aired on programs hosted by Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeannine Pirro.
Records released as part of the lawsuit showed that Fox aired the claims in part to win back viewers who were fleeing the network after it correctly called hotly contested Arizona for Democrat Joe Biden on election night. One Fox Corp. vice president called them “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS.”
During a deposition, Murdoch testified that he believed the 2020 election was fair and had not been stolen from Trump.
“Fox knew the truth,” Dominion argued in court papers. “It knew the allegations against Dominion were ‘outlandish’ and ‘crazy’ and ‘ludicrous’ and ‘nuts.’ Yet it used the power and influence of its platform to promote that false story.”
Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro have both been convicted for lying about the election and trying to use fake electors to change the results.
On Friday, lawyer Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty to a felony charge for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. In the plea deal, he agreed to testify against his co-conspirators in the racketeering case brought by Georgia prosecutors against former President Trump and others.
Chesebro’s guilty plea — and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s guilty plea to six misdemeanor counts in the same case on Thursday — are extremely valuable to Fulton County Dist. Atty. Fani Willis’ prosecution. Their agreement to provide evidence against other defendants is a significant blow to Trump and other top figures in the case, including Rudy Giuliani, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and California lawyer John Eastman.
Rudy Giuliani was found liable for defamation to the tune of $148 Million in his lawsuit wth Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss whom he wrongly accused of election fraud with the “suitcase under the table.” The ballots under the table were just in normal ballot boxes which had just been placed out of the way to be counted later, the “zip drives” they were supposedly passing back and forth were just Junior Mints.
A jury awarded $148 million in damages on Friday to two former Georgia election workers who sued Rudy Giuliani for defamation over lies he spread about them in 2020 that upended their lives with racist threats and harassment.
The damages verdict follows emotional testimony from Wandrea "Shaye" Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who tearfully described becoming the target of a false conspiracy theory pushed by Giuliani and other Republicans as they tried to keep then-President Donald Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election.
There was an audible gasp in the courtroom when the jury foreperson read aloud the $75 million award in punitive damages for the women. Moss and Freeman were each awarded another roughly $36 million in other damages.
Some states did change some of their rules at the last minute due - again - to covid, but they had the right and power to do so under the law.
Beginning in March, the coronavirus outbreak upended the presidential and statewide primary calendar, leading many states to not only change the date of their elections, but also change how they conducted those elections.
Some states consolidated the number of in-person polling locations on election day -- often due to the difficulty of recruiting poll workers, who tend to be older Americans more susceptible to the most dire consequences of the virus. Other states conducted primarily all-mail elections. There were some that proactively sent applications to vote by mail to registered voters. And some states loosened restrictions around who qualified to cast an absentee mail ballot and what voters needed to provide in order to do so.
[…] Voting advocates have touted mail-in voting as a safe and secure alternative to voting in person since the pandemic started. The statewide primaries that took place early in the pandemic served as trial runs for states from coast to coast.
For the general election, at least 30 states plus the District of Columbia have made at least some changes that will make it easier and more accessible for voters to cast their ballots from home. These changes include removing strict excuse requirements or allowing COVID-19 concerns to be a valid excuse to vote absentee, allowing ballot drop boxes, offering prepaid postage on election mail and proactively sending all active registered voters applications to request an absentee ballot -- with some even skipping that step and sending the actual ballots.
All of these are lies and delusions. Trump lost.
The sad part is that none of these people will listen to any of these points and documented facts. They will refuse to believe any of it. They think it’s all produced by “bribes” and media lies. They don’t know that Dominion Voting Machines have paper backups that have been hand-recounted. They don’t know that Fox News lost their Defamation suit against Dominion. They don’t know that Giuliani lost his Defamation suit from Moss and Freeman. They don’t know that Trump’s campaign, the entire DOJ and his own White House Counsel all found the allegations of widespread election fraud to be bogus.
They just keep placing their hope in a craven false idol, Trump.
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