President Trump lost his reelection bid. He still doesn’t accept this reality, of course, and he’s desperately grasping at any and all ideas — no matter how fake-conspiratorial they might be — while hiding out in the White House and doing nothing about the pandemic. He’s doing a lot of tweeting, though, which is only making his situation worse for him because Fox News is largely refusing to stand by his false claims (which is only making him more furious). The latest Trump election lie revolves around this all-caps doozy of OANN’s conspiracy fuel — he’s claiming that nefarious Dominion software selectively deleted millions of pro-Trump votes in Pennsylvania and other states while transforming them into Biden votes.
“REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN.” @ChanelRion @OANN
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2020
No evidence exists for this claim. Trump’s just tossing it out there, whether he believes it or not, because he knows that it will fuel chaos and resistance to Biden’s victory. And even though Trump’s own attorneys have decided to stop representing him on his Pennsylvania voter-fraud claims, George Washington University Law School legal professor Jonathan Turley went on Fox & Friends to defend Trump’s baseless claims and add his own about Michigan. Turley claimed that thousands of Michigan Trump votes were suspiciously transformed into Biden votes. He added, however, “That doesn’t mean it was a nefarious purpose. This is a new software that apparently is vulnerable to human error.”
Steve Doocy wasn’t here for this mess: “I looked into it.”
Watch Fox mouthpiece Jonathan Turley get fact checked by constitutional scholar Steve Doocy. pic.twitter.com/CXsS2FhuYs
— Obama’s Portrait (@2016Primary) November 13, 2020
“With that Dominion software, five counties in Michigan and Georgia had problems,” the co-host countered. “And the Dominion software was used in two of the counties and in every instance largely it was human error, a problem, but the software did not affect the vote counts.”
The Associated Press also looked into it and concluded that this Dominion software conspiracy theory is only “the latest in a series of baseless theories suggesting vote counting problems that the president has been promoting.” The AP added statements from several election officials that debunked the theory while insisting that no technical or software-based errors occurred, and that this election was even more scrupulously monitored than usual in all states. The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal agency that ensures election security in the U.S., added, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” and “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Time to move onto the next theory for Trump? He’d better not bring it to Steve Doocy.
(Via Mediaite & Associated Press)