During an unhinged Sunday appearance on the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures, top Trump ally Rudy Giuliani claimed that the president’s team had uncovered 800,000 or 900,000 votes that are “completely invalid.” This claim is laughably ridiculous, and Giuliani’s comments have close to no relationship to reality. The scenario hearkens back to Giuliani’s own frenzied efforts to find some kind of dirt on the Bidens before Election Day. During that ultimately doomed effort, Giuliani even met with someone — Andrii Derkach — who the U.S. federal government has since confirmed as a Russian agent. This time around, Giuliani is again sounding totally desperate.
Asked about any evidence of “ballot fraud,” Giuliani said as follows:
‘Well I mean first of all there’s a lot of evidence. Let me see if I can summarize it by state… in Philadelphia, we’re the furthest ahead, we have about 60 or 70 witnesses in Philadelphia and in Pittsburgh. In [Philadelphia], we have observers who were for 24 hours kept out of the room or kept away from the room where they were counting the mail-in ballots which of course are the highly suspicious ballots. During that period of time, at least 135,000 ballots were counted, none of which were observed by any Republican observer, as the law requires, and as is really necessary given the fact that these ballots came in late, they were being brought in by bundles. It looked very much like they were trying to make up the 700,000 difference that they had from Election Night.’
Giuliani subsequently suggested that hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots in the state of Pennsylvania “could all have been done by one person.” This claim is utterly bonkers. He claimed that “for three days they were laboring mightily to make up the 700,000 vote deficit they had.” This claim is nonsensical — although he eventually suggested that there “had to be an order from somewhere” for Democratic authorities to fabricate votes for Biden. This claim is laughable.
Nowhere in his rant did Giuliani cite any actual evidence of any actual fraud. He claimed that he had evidence that ballots returned to authorities after Election Day had been backdated to appear as if they’d been sent earlier — but this claim has been dealt with already. The far-right conspiracy organization Project Veritas trotted out a video with someone who claimed that postal workers had been ordered to give late Michigan ballots earlier postmarks. This claim is meaningless because the state of Michigan doesn’t even factor postmarks into whether or not they accept mail-in ballots as valid. (Other states do.)
Giuliani cited complaints about observation access during the ballot-counting process in Pennsylvania — but these complaints have already been largely debunked. As CNN notes, Republicans have claimed that “GOP poll observers hadn’t been allowed to watch ballot counting in Philadelphia or weren’t close enough to election workers in the room” — but at a recent court hearing, Trump’s own lawyers admitted under pressure that their allegations of being totally shut out were false.
Republicans did face pushback in Michigan after trying to swamp ballot-counting facilities with an obnoxious number of so-called observers — but that doesn’t translate into some kind of across-the-board rejection of GOP observers as a whole. It just doesn’t.
Trump has claimed that he won the election, which just isn’t true — but no matter what he says, he will no longer be president once Joe Biden is sworn in.
