Donald Trump on Monday night tweeted a series of video clips providing a litany of accusations of electoral fraud, which were immediately flagged by Twitter as disinformation.
The president began with a clip from Newsmax, owned by his friend Chris Ruddy.
The host interviewed Liz Harrington, RNC National Spokesman, who said: ‘what is going on right now is a total travesty.’
She said it was ‘not media organizations’ who decide the election – an argument taken up with gusto by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer.
They are right – but it is not the media who decide the election; they simply work out who they can confidently predict as the winner.
‘There are no official results on Election Night — there never have been,’ said Edward B. Foley, an Ohio State University constitutional law professor who specializes in elections.
Liz Harrington’s interview with Newsmax was retweeted by the president
Trump was on his golf course when Saturday’s results came, and again Sunday (pictured)
He told the Austin-American Statesman: ‘Election Night tallies are always just preliminary, pending certification of the canvass of returns under state law, which takes time. Every state has a law on this point.’
In the United States an exceptionally complicated federal system has evolved.
After Election Day, states count and certify the results of the popular vote. When completed, each governor is required by law to prepare ‘as soon as practicable’ documents known as ‘Certificates of Ascertainment’ of the vote. The certificate, carrying the seal of each state, is sent to the archivist of the United States. This must be done by December 8.
On December 14 the members of the Electoral College – Electors – vote by paper ballot in their respective states and the District of Columbia, according to how the popular vote in their state went.
But people are impatient, and want to know the results before December 14.
That’s where the media organizations come in.
They hire analysts and statisticians to work out whether they can say with confidence that a candidate will win a state. Some states remain too close to call – Georgia has still not been decided. Yet others were called very quickly, such as New York, which is still counting votes but is overwhelmingly Democrat.
Harrington said she had seen ‘a report in Nevada about dead voters’.
She seemed to be referencing a lawsuit filed on November 5 against Nevada’s secretary of state and the Clark County registrar of voters, which alleges that ‘irregularities have plagued the election in Clark County.’
Clark County is Nevada’s most populous county, is home to Las Vegas and has the state’s highest number of registered Democrats.
The lawsuit claims that there were ‘over 3,000 instances of ineligible individuals casting ballots,’ and that ballots were cast on behalf of deceased voters.
Trump on Thursday addressed the nation and vowed to fight through the courts
Politifact analyzed the document and found it does not include evidence to back those claims.
A local news team, I News, did find two ballots returned from people who had recently died. One was returned by a relative, who did not cast her own ballot. A second was returned by an unknown person.
But officials said it looked highly unlikely that 3,000 ineligible ballots had been cast.
Harrington said she had heard of ‘vans marked Biden Harris with full truckloads of ballots’.
It was unclear what she was referring to.
She said that ‘what happened in Pennsylvania is totally unconstitutional’.
In Pennsylvania, due to the pandemic, the state Democratic Party and a liberal group, the Pennsylvania Alliance for Retired Americans, sought an extension of the Election Day deadline to count mailed ballots.
On September 17 the state Supreme Court agreed, and said ballots must be postmarked by the time polls close and be received by county election boards at 5pm on Nov. 6 – three days after the election.
On October 19 the nation’s Supreme Court upheld the decision from the state Supreme Court.
It meant that, come Election Day, 22 states — 10 of which backed Trump in the 2016 election — has a post-Election Day deadline.
She said: ‘The governor does not have the right to unilaterally decide which ballots can come in after an Election Day’.
A spokesman for Tom Wolfe, the governor of Pennsylvania, said he did.
Lyndsay Kensinger said provisions of the Emergency Management Services Code give Pennsylvania governors the authority to protect the opportunity to vote by extending deadlines during a disaster emergency, such as a pandemic.
Harrington concluded that poll watchers in Philadelphia had been ‘blocked’ so that Democrats ‘could stuff the ballot box’.
Philadelphia has been live-streaming the count online, and poll watchers from both parties are present to witness proceedings.
Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, said there was a complaint that the poll workers were too far away.
He told 60 Minutes that they resolved the matter, moving the watchers from 10 feet away to a closer six feet away.
‘Joe Biden did not win this election. President Trump did,’ she said, without evidence.
Biden is confident of his margins in the Electoral College votes, and unquestionably won the popular vote.
As of Monday night he had 4,898,765 more votes than Trump.
A second video tweeted by Trump was also from Newsmax, this one featuring Jody Hice, a Republican congressman for Georgia’s 10th district.
Jody Hice, a congressman for Georgia, was also on Newsmax
Georgia is yet to be called for either candidate, and an automatic recount will be carried out given that the margin is under 0.5 per cent.
He said there were ‘issues’ in Fulton County – which is correct.
On Friday the officials there said there had been slight problems.
On Monday Gabriel Sterling, an electoral official in the secretary of state’s office, explained that one problem was that they were missing around 500 ballots when their count was reported.
Sterling said they discovered 126 provisional ballots that had been scanned as absentee ballots. So the absentee ballot count was 126 higher than it should have been.
Then there were 358 provisional ballots that had been damaged by the knife in the automatic opening machine.
They had to replicated, with a worker essentially inputting the vote on a voting machine.
Sterling said both Republican and Democrat monitors were on site to observe this process, as well as monitors from the Secretary of State’s Office, and the issues were now closed.
Hice said that there were ‘glitches’ in Gwinnett County.
The count in the district took nearly a week in part due to a series of software glitches from the state’s new elections system, run by Dominion Voting Systems.
Elections workers repeatedly endured issues when trying to submit totals to the state, and an election night software error forced the county to re-adjudicate thousands of absentee ballots that had already been processed.
But it was overcome, and the vote certified. They did not affect the count.
He said they ‘were stopping counting’ – something factually incorrect.
Hice said that in Michigan Republican votes were being ‘flipped’ to Biden by machines.
On Monday officials concluded issues in the unofficial vote counts in Michigan’s Antrim and Oakland counties were caused by human error, not software glitches, according to reviews by the Michigan Department of State, county clerks and election security experts.
Officials in Michigan said that they were isolated cases that did not signal wider issues with vote counts elsewhere.
A third clip retweeted by Trump was also full of unsubstantiated allegations.
Ric Grenell appeared in a third Newsmax clip watched and retweeted by Trump
Ric Grenell claimed that ballots were being mailed to Nevada from out of state.
He appeared to be making the same point as Harrington.
Joe Gloria, registrar for Clark County, Nevada, said it was not unusual to have out-of-state ballots.
‘We’ll have to look through those numbers, but it’s not out of the ordinary at all for somebody not to live here but be eligible to vote here,’ said Gloria.
‘This is just the tip of the iceberg,’ said Grenell, again without evidence.
‘We have a very long fight ahead to fix the voter rolls and the registration lists.’
He said they had one confirmed process of a dead person voting.