8 lies GOP is throwing at the wall to convince people Trump didn't lose

Donald Trump will not be sworn in again on Jan. 20, 2021, after Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, with Biden winning millions more votes and securing at least 279 Electoral College votes.

But Trump and his allies are refusing to accept the election results and continue to make the delusional claim that the race is not over and Trump can still win.

The lies in support of this claim are coming from a number of people, including Trump himself, Trump campaign surrogates such as Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s children, and Republican members of Congress.

Some Republicans say the lies are harmful to our democracy, creating doubt about the integrity of elections by pushing baseless conspiracy theories.

But Trump and his followers continue to spew them.

Here are eight lies they’ve been telling since networks called the election for Biden on Saturday.

The media doesn’t call races

Since Saturday, when Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election by the Associated Press, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and even Fox News, the Trump campaign has been stomping its feet and insisting the race is not over yet.

Trump supporters from Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to Sen. Ted Cruz to Fox News contributor and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz have claimed the media doesn’t call elections.

“The media is desperately trying to get everyone to coronate Joe Biden as the next president, but that’s not how it works. The media does not get to select our president. The American people get to elect our president,” Cruz said during an interview with Fox News on Sunday morning.

“Counties administer these elections, states certify these elections, not the national media,” Chaffetz said on Fox News Monday morning, adding that no states in the country have certified their election results yet.

Of course, when the media called the election for Trump in 2016, none of these people complained about it.

Media calls are based on math. Experts hired by major outlets crunch the number of ballots cast compared to the number of ballots remaining to determine whether a candidate has any chance of winning. Based on the vote tallies as they stand, Trump lost.

Pushing a fake newspaper cover

To try to make the point that media outlets sometimes call elections incorrectly, Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh tweeted an image of a supposed cover of an issue of the Washington Times with a headline that read “PRESIDENT GORE” in capital letters.

“Greeting staff at @TeamTrump HQ this morning, a reminder that the media doesn’t select the President,” Murtaugh said in the now-deleted tweet.

However, the front page was fake.

The Washington Times never ran a headline in 2000 that declared Al Gore the winner over George W. Bush in the election that came down to a few hundred votes in Florida. The Supreme Court ultimately ordered a recount there to stop, handing the White House to Bush.

The Washington Times responded: “Those photos have been doctored. The Washington Times never ran a ‘President Gore’ headline.”

Saying Hillary Clinton demanded recounts

As the Trump campaign mulls whether to demand recounts in states Trump lost, Reince Priebus, the former Republican National Committee chair and former Trump chief of staff, said on CBS News Monday morning that Hillary Clinton pursued recounts in 2016.

“Hillary Clinton had four recounts four years ago, and I just think the Trump campaign isn’t going to do anything as far as making statements of congratulatory statements until that’s over,” Priebus said.

Clinton did not ask for recounts.

She conceded on Nov. 9, 2016, the day after the election.

Absentee ballots are rife with fraud

Since Election Day, Trump has been trying to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election by falsely saying it was rife with mail-in ballot fraud.

“How come every time they count Mail-In ballot dumps they are so devastating in their percentage and power of destruction?” Trump tweeted on Nov. 4. 

On Nov. 5, he tweeted a link to a story published by the right-wing Breitbart News with the headline: “‘No Question’ Trump Would Have Won Nevada ‘Convincingly’ Without Mail-in Voting.”

Trump actually won some states that either exclusively use mail-in ballots, like Utah, and others that have a large percentage of their ballots cast by mail, like Florida. Trump is not calling the voting in those states fraudulent.

And mail-in ballots skewed heavily Democratic in a number of states that utilized both absentee and in-person voting because Trump told his supporters not to use the voting method.

Large numbers of Democrats voted by mail because it was safer to cast a ballot from home than go to a polling location in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

And the only reason states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin looked good for Trump early on in the vote-counting was that Republican-controlled legislatures in those states refused to allow election officials to count absentee ballots until Election Day. That created the early appearance that Trump was in the lead. In actuality, adding the absentee ballot count to the total simply resulted in more votes cast for Biden.

Dead people voted

Trump and his supporters claim that thousands of dead people cast ballots for Biden.

“The dead vote appears to have swung overwhelmingly for Joe Biden,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) tweeted, linking to a Breitbart News story making the claim that the names of thousands of dead people wound up on ballots in Pennsylvania.

CNN examined the claims, and found that “not a single one of the names examined was of a dead person voting.”

Software glitches helped Biden

Cruz continued his quest to delegitimize Biden’s win and help Trump.

In his Fox News appearance on Sunday, Cruz said that a software glitch incorrectly gave 6,000 votes to Biden in Michigan.

“They apparently caught that, but that same software is used in 47 counties throughout Michigan. That needs to be examined to determine that there is not a problem counting the votes,” Cruz said.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Cruz’s charge is false.

“The error in reporting unofficial results in Antrim County Michigan was the result of a user error that was quickly identified and corrected; did not affect the way ballots were actually tabulated; and would have been identified in the county canvass before official results were reported even if it had not been identified earlier,” Benson said in a statement.

Poll watchers weren’t allowed to witness the counts

Trump and his aides are claiming that Republican poll watchers were not allowed into rooms to watch vote-counting.

“Why were Republican poll watchers systematically blocked from observing the vote count? It’s a simple question with no satisfactory answer,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted. 

But the Trump campaign’s own lawyers have admitted under oath to judges hearing lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign that they have had poll watchers in the rooms where vote-counting has been conducted.

In Pennsylvania, a judge dismissed the Trump campaign’s case when the campaign admitted that it had been able to witness the vote-counting.

Sharpies invalidated votes in Arizona

The Trump campaign has sued a county in Arizona, claiming that some voters’ ballots were being disqualified because they’d filled them out with Sharpie markers.

The claim led to protests in the state, where Trump currently trails Biden in a race that has yet to be called.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said the claim is false, while Clint Hickman, chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said: “Sharpies do not invalidate ballots.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.