Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who’s mostly stuck right by President Donald Trump throughout his corruption-filled time in the White House, peddled utter nonsense at a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee covering election-related security matters. He claimed, falsely, that the “election in many ways was stolen,” which is just utterly untrue. Not a single credible authority anywhere in the country has attested to any legitimate evidence of systematic election outcome-altering fraud. “Stealing the election” would likely require the cooperation of thousands of people around the country in just about all levels of government. The notion is simply ludicrous.
Nevertheless, Paul said as follows:
‘The fraud happened. The election in many ways was stolen, and the only way it’ll be fixed is by, in the future, reinforcing the laws… [Ex-DHS official Chris Krebs] never has voiced an opinion — he’s welcome to today — on whether or not dead people voted. I don’t think he examined that. Did he examine non-citizens voting? So to say it was the safest election — sure, I agree with your statement, if you’re referring to foreign intervention, but if you’re saying it’s the safest election based on no dead people voted, no non-citizens voted, no people broke the absentee rules — I think that’s false, and I think that’s what’s upset a lot of people on our side, is that they’re taking [Krebs’s] statement to mean, oh, well there was no problem in the elections.’
Check out Paul’s deceptive comments below:
"The election in many ways was stolen," Rand Paul lies, citing no evidence pic.twitter.com/G4m7mU7qRV
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2020
Paul is unequivocally misrepresenting the reality of the situation. There’s simply no legitimate evidence that “dead people voted” as part of some systematic fraud scheme or that non-citizens cast illegal ballots. Republicans have slung plenty of claims to the contrary in the aftermath of Election Day, but these claims don’t hold up. In cases in which Republicans claimed to find records of ballots cast in the names of deceased individuals, easy explanations have emerged: for instance, a Michigan ballot was originally credited to a man named William Bradley who was born in 1902 as a result of a clerical error — Bradley’s son has the same name and cast the ballot. In other cases, Michigan authorities use placeholder info like birthdays in 1900 and 1901 until voters’ actual information is available.
As for Paul’s insinuation that Krebs didn’t even examine domestically-oriented security issues during his time at the Department of Homeland Security, he’s again simply incorrect. A statement that emerged from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency while Krebs was at the helm unequivocally stated that there’s “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” That same statement cites state and federal certifications of the security of election equipment against any threats, not merely foreign interference.
