On Tuesday, Rudy Giuliani joined a court case that the Trump campaign had brought challenging election procedures in Pennsylvania. Originally, this lawsuit had sought the invalidation of well over 600,000 mail-in ballots in the state on the basis of the lie that Republican observers were systematically blocked from watching the ballot-counting process. The Trump campaign has since dropped this request, but they’re still challenging issues like the decision of some local election authorities to allow some Pennsylvania voters the opportunity to fix issues with their ballots while other voters did not receive the same opportunity. During the Tuesday hearing in the case, Giuliani was an embarrassment.
First-off, law professor Jennifer Taub — who was listening to a live broadcast of the courtroom proceedings — reported that Giuliani complained about being asked to wear a mask while not speaking. The COVID-19 pandemic has spiraled well out-of-control in the United States, and one of the top allies of the president of the United States in a court battle over the election results in a key swing state wouldn’t even accept the overarching importance of wearing a mask. Fundamentally, many members of the Trump team just aren’t serious people. They’re conspiracy-mongers.
Once arguments actually got underway, Giuliani claimed that there is “widespread nationwide voter fraud.” As summarized in Taub’s report of the proceedings, Giuliani subsequently claimed that Democrats “used” the pandemic to “create a widescale mail-in ballot process which created fraud.” Getting more specific in his allegations, Giuliani subsequently claimed that, during the processing of ballots, there was a “wonderful opportunity to holdback and even produce votes” in order to sway the election to Biden. According to Taub, Giuliani claimed that during the ballot-tabulation process, Republican observers saw “zero” ballots, and he revealed that he wanted a whopping 1.5 million ballots invalidated.
Read Taub’s summary of some of Giuliani’s unhinged comments below:
The utter detachment from truth of Giuliani’s arguments seems difficult to overstate. On a fundamental level, the Department of Homeland Security has characterized the recent election as the “most secure in American history,” an assessment that doesn’t exactly leave room for argument. Giuliani’s claim that Democrats used the COVID-19 pandemic as a cover to concoct a fraud-filled mail-in voting system that would swing the election to Biden is conspiratorial conjecture. There’s no evidence that “any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” according to the Department of Homeland Security, and Giuliani’s claim that Republicans were systematically excluded from watching ballot-counting is a lie.
