President Donald Trump — who might not be president for long — is continuing to push deceptive conspiracy theories about the election. He claims that there’s some kind of conspiracy to steal the election from him, a claim which is just totally disconnected from reality. Much of his so-called evidence that he’s using for the claim of some kind of nefarious conspiracy against him is transparently substance-less. Fundamentally, he just keeps lying. (UPDATE: Networks have now called the presidential race for Biden.)
Early on Saturday morning, Trump deceptively claimed that “Tens of thousands of votes were illegally received after 8 P.M. on Tuesday, Election Day, totally and easily changing the results in Pennsylvania and certain other razor thin states,” but in a slew of states, receiving and counting mail-in ballots after Election Day that had been submitted before Election Day ended is not illegal! It’s a long-standing democratic process which helps people like overseas voters make sure that their absentee ballots are counted.
Trump, however, was not done ranting. He claimed that “hundreds of thousands of Votes were illegally not allowed to be OBSERVED” (which is false), adding that “everyone thought” that Pennsylvania was “easily won on Election Night, only to see a massive lead disappear, without anyone being allowed to OBSERVE, for long intervals of time, what [had] happened,” which, again, is false. “Everyone” did not think that Pennsylvania had been “easily won” on Election Night, because all of the votes had not yet been counted. Many votes wouldn’t even start getting counted until the following morning! Vote tallies have been changing because votes have been getting counted, just like after every election in the United States. Republicans were allowed to observe! There is no conspiracy here.
Trump claimed that “BAD THINGS HAPPENED INSIDE” of ballot-counting places and “BIG CHANGES TOOK PLACE!” which is just totally deranged. He has no meaningful evidence. One development that he cited — the temporary placement of cardboard on windows to block angry Republicans from seeing in — was meant to protect the private information of voters from people who were filming on site. Republicans have consistently and repeatedly been allowed to observe the ballot-counting process just like their Democratic counterparts — but they have faced pushback from local officials after engaging in punitive disruption like sending obnoxious amounts of people to “observe” the process. This pushback seemingly helped spark the false conspiracy theories of getting totally blocked from observing.
Read the president’s tweets below:
