President Donald Trump abruptly took to spreading lies about the election in the aftermath of Election Day 2020. As post-Election Day changes to vote tallies have come in while more valid votes have gotten counted, Trump has spread conspiracy theories about the race and claimed that Democrats are fraudulently trying to steal the election. Counting additional valid votes is not a plot to steal the election. Twitter placed notices on a handful of Trump’s tweets after the election; the notices informed users that “[some] or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” Twitter also restricted the reach of the posts in question.
In a tweet posted shortly after midnight on the East Coast, Trump insisted that his campaign was “up BIG” but Democrats “are trying to STEAL the Election.” Again — counting additional votes is not stealing an election. Due to the partisan split in vote method preference — Democrats tend to favor mail-in voting, while Republicans have tended to favor Election Day votes — it’s long been clear that counting one or the other batch of votes first could skew the results. As more votes are counted, the results begin to reflect a more accurate portrait of the electorate — which Trump doesn’t like, apparently.
In a Wednesday morning tweet, Trump insisted that his Election Night leads in key states “started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted,” which he called “VERY STRANGE.” In reality, the updates in vote tallies that he’s referring to were the results of counting valid ballots. This concept isn’t complicated. Every presidential election, states take awhile to work through all of their votes. Nothing nefarious is automatically happening.
Trump’s claim to the contrary got marked by Twitter as potentially misleading — as did another post, which was a retweet of a post in which a conservative commentator insisted that “no honest person can look at” the latest Michigan vote tallies and conclude that there’s not anything nefarious going on. In reality: the tallies cited in the tweet are already outdated. The tallies — which showed a temporary Biden boost without any corresponding increase in Trump votes — may have simply represented a reporting lag. The Trump votes could’ve gotten posted moments later. This concept isn’t complicated. (UPDATE: Indeed — there was no conspiracy here. The person who originally posted the Michigan tallies has acknowledged that the issues were based on a “typo” that apparently excluded Trump votes. Check it out at this link.)
When clicking “view” on the second tweet cited above, users see the following (and the post from Matt Walsh can be found at this link — UPDATE: the original post that Walsh and the president were replying to has been deleted and the original poster acknowledged that the issues highlighted by their post were a “typo.”):
