By Nicholas Riccardi | Related Press
In his three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Donald Trump dug in on his false claims about voting, election fraud and his loss within the 2020 presidential election. Rogan helped encourage a few of these claims.
The interview, launched late Friday, got here on the identical day that the previous president, on his social media community, re-posted threats to prosecute attorneys, voters and election officers he deems to have “cheated” within the 2024 election.
Right here’s a take a look at a number of the claims by the Republican nominee for president and the reality.
Trump did lose the 2020 election
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “I won by like — they say I lost by like — I didn’t lose.”
THE FACTS: Trump did lose in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump’s claims that fraud value him the race have been investigated repeatedly.
Trump’s personal lawyer common mentioned there have been no indicators of serious fraud. The Republican-run state Senate in Michigan, one of many swing states the place Trump claimed fraud occurred, got here to the identical conclusion after a prolonged investigation. An investigation by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau in Wisconsin, ordered by the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature in one other state Trump claimed to have been defrauded from profitable, additionally discovered no substantial fraud.
Rogan chortled when Trump was arguing, appropriately, that his loss was shut. Trump misplaced the election narrowly in six swing states. If about 81,000 votes had flipped, Trump may have received Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin and gotten sufficient help within the Electoral Faculty to stay president.
Trump misstated that margin as 22,000 votes.
Judges dominated towards Trump on the deserves repeatedly
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “What happened is judges don’t want to touch it. They would say, ‘you don’t have standing.’ They didn’t rule on the merits.”
THE FACTS: That’s not true. Trump and his supporters misplaced greater than 50 lawsuits attempting to overturn the election.
A gaggle of Republican-affiliated election attorneys and authorized students reviewed all 64 of the Trump lawsuits difficult the 2020 election and located solely 20 of them have been dismissed by judges earlier than a listening to on the deserves. In 30 circumstances, the rulings towards Trump got here after hearings on the deserves.
Within the remaining 14 circumstances, the report for Stanford College’s Hoover Establishment discovered, Trump and his allies dropped their lawsuits earlier than they even obtained to the deserves part. “In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims,” the report states.
Nearly each state already makes use of paper ballots
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We should go to paper ballots.”
THE FACTS: Trump and Rogan each argued that voting machines are unreliable and that the US ought to depend on paper ballots. Trump even cited his billionaire tech mogul supporter Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for such a change.
Nearly the entire nation already made that swap, nevertheless.
In 2020, greater than 90% of the election jurisdictions within the U.S. used paper ballots, in keeping with the Brennan Middle for Justice. The following 12 months, the federal Election Help Fee modified its pointers to suggest each jurisdiction use paper.
The one state to not use a voting system with paper ballots or a paper path of any type is Republican-run Louisiana.
Republicans and Democrats inspired mail voting in the course of the pandemic
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “They used COVID to cheat.”
THE FACTS: Trump’s central argument is {that a} grand Democratic conspiracy modified voting procedures in the course of the coronavirus pandemic to make mail voting extra standard and that the conspirators then rigged the election towards him by means of these mail votes. That’s not what occurred.
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When the pandemic first hit in the course of the 2020 presidential main in March, Republican and Democratic election officers shortly switched to encourage mail voting to keep away from crowded polls. This was comparatively uncontroversial till Trump turned towards it, claiming it might lay the seeds for potential fraud.
In doing so, Trump was returning to his regular playbook, claiming that any election he doesn’t win is fraudulent. He made that declare concerning the first contest he misplaced, Iowa’s 2016 Republican caucus. He even claimed he misplaced the favored vote in 2016 due to voting by unlawful immigrants, although a presidential fee he empaneled to search out proof of it disbanded with out discovering any proof.
The 2020 election was free of serious fraud
THE FACTS: Remoted circumstances of voters fraud have lengthy occurred, however in trendy occasions haven’t reached the degrees wanted to sway a nationwide election. An Related Press evaluate discovered fewer than 475 circumstances in all six battleground states that Trump misplaced by greater than a mixed 300,000 votes — far too little to vary the result.
