During a pre-Election Day appearance on ABC’s This Week, top Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller went after the validity of potentially huge numbers of votes from all across the country. States have long taken significant periods of time after Election Day to finalize their results, but Miller insisted that Democrats are “gonna try to steal” the election after Election Day itself unfolds. Adding additional valid votes onto initial vote tallies is not stealing the election, in any respect whatsoever! There is no nationwide conspiracy to fabricate votes or enact any corruption along those lines. Miller is peddling anti-democratic nonsense.
Miller said the following on Sunday:
”If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe that President Trump will be ahead on Election Night, probably getting 280 electoral [votes], somewhere in that range, and then they’re gonna try to steal it back after the election. We believe that we will be over 290 electoral votes on Election Night, so no matter what they try to do — what kind of hijinks, or lawsuits, or whatever kind of nonsense they try to pull off, we’re still gonna have enough electoral votes to get President Trump re-elected.’
Watch Miller below:
Trump official Jason Miller says the quiet part loud: "If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe that Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral [votes], somewhere in that range, and then they're gonna try to steal it back after the election" pic.twitter.com/xSAQV6AQ64
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 1, 2020
Miller’s comments are conspiratorial nonsense. There is no Democratic plot to steal the election from Trump. Democrats just want to make sure that valid votes are counted!
The problem is that Jason Miller isn’t just a guy with a blog ranting in the shadowy corners of the internet. Miller is speaking on behalf of the re-election campaign for the president of the United States, and he is threatening untold numbers of ballots from across the country that may happen to get added on to initial results only after Election Day has passed. The totally baseless theory that delayed adjustments to vote tallies automatically suggest potential fraud could be used as an excuse for Trump campaign lawsuits challenging the results of the election. What happens if these potential election-deciding lawsuits get heard by conservative judges, like the many who Donald Trump has appointed to the federal judiciary?
Donald Trump himself has pushed the same kind of nonsense as Miller. Trump has insisted that the election “should end on November 3rd,” but the idea that an arbitrary deadline must take precedent over counting all the votes is nonsense. Trump has repeatedly threatened to reject the election results if he doesn’t like what he sees, but nobody has appointed Donald Trump to be the arbiter of democracy!
This particular conspiracy that late-added votes are automatically suspicious is the latest in a long line of totally reality-disconnected conspiracy theories from the president and his allies about the election. For awhile, Trump wrongly claimed that “universal mail-in” ballots would automatically open the door to widespread election fraud. All the way back after the 2016 election, Trump claimed that millions of illegal votes had been cast — which is, unequivocally, total nonsense. It didn’t maybe happen — it did not tangibly happen, period. Why is basic reality so difficult for the president and his allies?
