Trump Pushes Baseless Fraud Claims About MI, PA Results, Calls for Invalidating ‘Hundreds of Thousands of Votes’

By Reed RichardsonNov 11th, 2020, 8:16 pm
 
Vote Counting in Michigan

Photo credit: Jeff Kowalsky, AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump escalated his desperate media campaign to undo President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, by calling for the summary invalidation of “hundreds of thousands of votes” in Michigan in Pennsylvania on Wednesday night.

Not coincidentally, Trump singled out those two states and that rough number of votes for a massive purge because only flipping Michigan and Pennsylvania by those margins would be sufficient to tip the Electoral College back to a point where a win in Georgia or Arizona could flip the outcome in his favor. Currently, Biden is on track to win the Electoral College 306 – 229 and leads Trump by nearly 150,000 votes in Michigan (16 EVs) and roughly 52,000 votes in Pennsylvania (20 EVs), margins that far exceed what any normal recount or ballot tabulation error might overturn.

Instead, Trump rested his call to disenfranchise massive number of voters based on a claim that his campaign was not given sufficient access to observe vote counting in those two states. Notably, he did not specify what, if any, fraud might have occurred without that access, but that those votes should be tossed out nonetheless.

“Nobody wants to report that Pennsylvania and Michigan didn’t allow our Poll Watchers and/or Vote Observers to Watch or Observe,” Trump falsely claimed in a tweet that was quickly slapped with its “disputed” tag. “This is responsible for hundreds of thousands of votes that should not be allowed to count. Therefore, I easily win both states.”

Trump’s tweet is false on a number of levels.

First, news organizations have covered in-depth the Trump campaign’s many legal challenges — and many losses.

Seoncd, his claims about lack of poll observers has been debunked numerous times. Last week, Trump campaign lawsuit that sought to stop the vote count in Michigan based on this claim of lack of ballot observers was quickly tossed out of court when the judge dismissed the complaint as based on hearsay evidence about supposed fraud taking place. A similar case brought in federal court in Pennsylvania was also dismissed as moot last week after that judge noted that, contrary to Trump campaign claims, poll watchers from both parties had, in fact, been present throughout the ballot tabulation. Ultimately, the Trump campaign agreed to a resolution where it was allowed equal numbers of observers as the Democrats had.

And right after Trump tweeted on Wednesday night, a Detroit Free Press reporter personally fact-checked the president, nothing that he had seen, first hand, Republican poll observers present throughout the vote counting in Detroit.

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