Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — who recently won re-election — is evidently sticking right by President Donald Trump in his fight against the results of the presidential election. Trump has alleged that there’s some kind of nationwide conspiracy to steal the election from him via including invalid votes in final tallies, and his top ally Rudy Giuliani even suggested during a weekend Fox News appearance that an “order” could have come from the top for Democratic officials to secretly fabricate Biden votes. These claims are laughable — but Graham is supporting the idea that Trump should not concede the election.
During a weekend appearance on the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures, Graham ranted against the media having called the election for Biden, as if the calls are some kind of conspiracy to override the will of the people. They’re not. The “calls” are based on simple math — and they’ve been made after many elections.
Graham belligerently told host Maria Bartiromo:
‘Number one, this is a contested election. The media doesn’t decide who becomes president. If they did, you would never have a Republican president — forever, so we’re discounting them. So what happened? The Trump team has canvassed all early voters and absentee/ mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, and they found over 100 people they think were dead but 15 people that we’ve verified to have been dead who voted — but here’s the one that gets me: 6 people registered after they died and voted. In Pennsylvania, I guess you’re never out of it. If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again. President Trump should not concede.’
Watch Graham’s deceptive ranting below:
Graham is deceptively representing the U.S. election system — plain and simple. There is no widespread election fraud, let alone widespread election fraud that has some kind of impact on the results — the evidence isn’t there. Laughably, during the same episode of Sunday Morning Futures on which Graham himself appeared, Rudy Giuliani insisted that hundreds of thousands of ballots across the country are “completely invalid” and should be thrown out. That notion is total nonsense.
Graham claimed that a number of dead people had definitely had ballots cast in their name in Pennsylvania, but there’s no conclusive evidence for this claim. Finding an awry entry in a computer database simply doesn’t equal confirmation that a ballot had actually been cast in a dead person’s name. As a fact-check from CNN explains, a number of possible explanations can answer for the perception of a vote cast in the name of someone who is deceased. For instance — in one example that Donald Trump Jr. retweeted, a ballot that seemed to have been cast and attributed to a deceased Michigan man named William Bradley was actually cast by his son, who’s also named William Bradley, and the incorrect attribution of the ballot to the elder Bradley in the computer system was a mere clerical error.
The dead people voting conspiracy isn’t the only Republican talking point that has been debunked. For instance: in a recent court hearing, Republicans’ legal team admitted that their side had actually not been totally excluded from observing ballot-counting in Philadelphia, as they had previously claimed.
