During a Monday morning interview on Fox Radio, the newly re-elected Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went essentially all in on his support for President Donald Trump’s hostility towards the election results. Trump has claimed that catastrophic fraud has been underway across the nation and that local election authorities have been conspiring to steal the election from him — but there’s no evidence for these claims. Graham, however, has insisted that Trump should not concede, and on Monday, Graham reiterated his anti-democratic perspective that “this election is by no means over.”
As CNN’s Manu Raju summarizes, Graham said that “we’ve got to prove system failure in Pennsylvania,” and he admitted that he doesn’t know if this investigation will “flip the election,” but he insisted that the situation “deserves to be looked at.” Graham also said that he would encourage Donald Trump to run again in 2024, and he revealed that he’d encourage the creation of a Senate committee to look at mail-in voting in 2020.
In reality, mail-in voting has been used across the U.S. for ages, and a handful of states even did universal mail-in voting before the pandemic. More broadly — Graham’s claims of potential election-altering widespread fraud are false. As one example of attempted evidence for the alleged fraud, Trump himself has claimed that some ballots included in final tallies were “illegally” received in Pennsylvania after Election Day had ended, which is false. State law specifically allows for the validity of ballots received after Election Day if voters originally sent those ballots before Election Day ended. Trump can’t just throw out state law via angry tweets.
The people have spoken, and there’s no evidence of any kind of conspiracy to steal the election from Trump. Ballot-counting procedures have literally been livestreamed in some areas, and the president’s claims that Republican observers have gotten systematically excluded from watching the ballot-counting process are false. Nevertheless — Graham is continuing to peddle conspiratorial nonsense, claiming that there’s reason to be concerned about structural election integrity. There is no such conclusive evidence for concern.
During a Sunday appearance on Fox News, Graham claimed that ballots had definitely been cast in the names of deceased Pennsylvanians — but this claim is false. Republicans have found listings in computer databases that they’ve presented as evidence for their “dead people voting” claim, but they just don’t know what they’re talking about. One prominent example — a Michigan ballot attributed to a long-dead man named William Bradley — was the result of a clerical error when processing the ballot from Bradley’s son, who’s also named William Bradley. In other cases, listings with long-ago birthdays may merely have placeholder birthdays until the voter’s actual info can be plugged in.
Top Trump ally Rudy Giuliani has been one of the most prominent faces of the Trump campaign’s attempt to discredit the election results. During his own Sunday appearance on Fox, he claimed that hundreds of thousands of votes are “completely invalid,” which is a laughably nonsensical claim. Giuliani didn’t stop there, however — he also suggested that an “order” could have come from the top for Democratic leaders in certain states to fabricate Biden votes. This conspiracy theory is totally cuckoo.
