Here is the latest baseless voter fraud allegation, brought to you by Trump and Tucker Carlson
By: Philip Bump
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In the long history of jarringly ironic comments made by on-air talent at Fox News, a pronouncement from Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night immediately vaulted into the upper echelon.
“You can’t have a democracy if the public doesn’t believe election results,” Carlson said. “Increasingly, many people in this country don’t believe them. The solution to that problem, and it’s a significant problem, is not to scream at these people, call them lunatics or throw them in jail. The solution is to tell the truth about what happened.”
It is absolutely true that the best way for the decline in confidence in elections to be combated is for trusted voices to tell the truth about the election. And then Carlson, a trusted voice to millions on the political right, proceeded to dump in their laps an array of unproven, irrelevant or obviously incorrect claims about the presidential election.
It’s obviously the case that there’s a robust marketplace for this stuff. If Donald Trump were as adept at selling gilded Manhattan apartments as he is false claims about the 2020 election, he’d be the wealthiest real estate agent in human history. He’s deeply invested in the narrative that rampant fraud occurred for reasons of personal pride and that translates into a base of supporters eager for information bolstering his claims that then translates into demand for people like Carlson who have proven track records of prioritizing sensationalism over accuracy. (Seehere.) (Andhere.) (Andhere.) (Andhere.) (Among others.) So we get a revolving suite of claims that quickly fall apart before the whole enterprise moves to another state.
These days, that’s Georgia, the focus of Carlson’s efforts Wednesday. He began with a cinematic vignette: a warehouse holding the absentee ballots cast in Fulton County, a heavily Democratic region of the state. One night in May, right when the guards had stepped away, an alarm goes off. The guards return to find the door open — and the mystery begins.
You can go ahead and scoot back from the edge of your seat. The drama here is all in Carlson’s dishonest telling. No area related to ballots was disturbed. The motion detector that triggered the alarm was in an upstairs office. The door wasn’t found open but it was unlocked, a function of an employee who had no key leaving the building after being locked in while using the restroom. Not very Hollywood-y, sure, but reality often isn’t.
Stephen Fowler, the public radio reporter who covered the warehouse incident— and whose photo Carlson’s show used without credit — was obviously exasperated when I called him Thursday morning to talk about the allegations made during the earlier night’s program. Fowler’s been doing yeoman’s work for, what, eight months now? Pushing back on the constant stream of conspiracy theories that have been presented since the moment the state announced Trump had lost. Before that, even.
His week has been particularly harried given a pair of new allegations focused on the state, both of which made it uncritically into Carlson’s show.
The first is an analysis of Fulton County absentee ballots conducted by a group called Voter GA, which itself is run by a man named Garland Favorito. (Earlier in the day Wednesday, Favorito joined former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for a podcast discussion of the election, if you’re the type to judge people based on the company they keep.) That analysis included several allegations of inconsistencies that were presented as “massive errors and provable fraud.”
One claim was that absentee ballots had been scanned more than once, a claim Carlson accompanied by footage of a poll worker running a set of ballots through a scanner more than once on security video. It’s very useful here to point out this analysis itself undercuts Carlson’s extremely vague hints about that warehouse: Voter GA had access to scanned images of all of the ballots provided by the county. (You can download them yourself, if you wish, via the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.) But it’s also useful to point out that this doesn’t actually mean much.
For one thing, all of the ballots in Georgia were rescanned after the election. If these ballots were scanned twice and erroneously included in the vote total — an important and unproven addendum — they would then need to have been counted twice in the hand recount that was ordered by the secretary of state. And they would need to have been counted twice in the second machine count of the results in December. But all three of those counts (original, hand, machine) resulted in essentially the same number of ballots cast in Fulton County, as Fowler points out.
Of course, it’s also alleged that forged ballots were included in the mix. That’s why Carlson highlighted illicit photos taken by a poll worker which he alleged showed a stack of absentee ballots that hadn’t been folded. Here’s Donald Trump’s new spokeswoman,election-fraud conspiracy-theorist Liz Harrington, sharing the images.
Liz Harrington
@realLizUSA
· 21h
Look at these photos! Whistleblower took photos of stacks of supposed mail-in ballots that had no creases (never in an envelope) and looked like they were all photocopied ...for, (guess who!) Joe Biden!
If you can identify whether those ballots were or were not folded, much less if they look photocopied, your eyesight is more robust than my own. We have only the word of Carlson’s “whistleblower” here. There is a reason, by the way, that ballots might not have been folded for submission. In instances where a ballot is damaged in transit — ripped, stained, folded too much — poll workers occasionally duplicated the ballot by hand for it to be properly processed. The state also duplicates ballots sent in from members of the military or people living overseas.
The other new allegation Carlson covered was a report from the right-wing blog Federalist, claiming 35,000 votes were cast illegally in the state. Trump hyped that report in a Fox News interview over the weekend, hailing it as “far more, numerous times more than we need to win that state.” But the allegation isn’t that someone did something like submit a ballot in the name of a dead person or anything like that. It’s that 35,000 people cast ballots from Georgia counties where they used to live instead of the ones where they currently lived. If true — again, this is unproven third-party analysis — it’s illegal in the sense that going 67 in a 65 is illegal, not in the sense that you’re driving a stolen car. Nor is it clear how those people voted. But it serves the broad, blended narrative of “Georgia allowed illegal ballots to be cast” that serves the broader “Trump wuz robbed” effort.
When Trump first started pointing to the Voter GA claims, Fowlerput togethera Twitter thread compiling articles debunking them. He called Trump’s claims “harmful at worst and woefully misinformed at best.” Then, a few hours later, there was Carlson using them to light fires about alleged fraud.
“That is illegal. It’s not a small thing,” Carlson said of those 35,000 votes. “Violating election law is something we should care about.”
That was temperate compared to his assertions about seven apparently improperly filled-out tallies identified by Voter GA, documents that again had no obvious effect on anything related to the vote totals.
“How is that not flat-out criminal fraud?” Carlson asserted. “We’d love to know because it certainly sounds like flat-out criminal fraud.”
Just an objective journalist following the facts where they go. Just a guy seeking to build confidence in the election by telling the truth about what happened.
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Don't know why it formatted that way.
Seems some spurious claims are untrue.
Who'd of thought...
The ''deep state'' is everywhere.
Amazes me they still believe these conspiracy theories.
Three recounts that all had the same number of ballots is still not enough for them.
Oh no, a door opened and an alarm went off! The are messing with the ballots!
Yeah, a man left from an upstairs door...
yeah, a deep state of denial by trumpsters...
Meh, who is Tucker not to give what his audience craves ...
Or, where does Tucker get his talking points? FSB or SVR?
Carlson is irresponsible. Among many other partisan-based things, he is contributing to the false belief that our election results cannot be trusted. He is part of the band of liars who are doing the opposite of telling the truth.
What a miserable partisan sack of shit he is.
What gets me is the turn around and have the nerve to claim people are becoming unsure about the election.
Uh dude, you are pushing the claims....
Carlson knows exactly what he's doing. He is sabotaging Americans' belief in voting. And thereby he is destroying Americans' belief in democracy itself.
Democracy is not compatible with fascism, so it must be destroyed.
This isn't rocket science.
But hey, as long as he gets to keep cashing in it’s all good right?
[deleted]
Trump the lump
Sitting on a fence
Trying to make a dollar
Out of 85 cents
All of this boils down to dirty money. GOP is full of it. Trump brought it and the GOP bought it. Remember the Russian money laundering through the NRA? That is still pending, right? And that is the crack in the wall. Hey Treasury, you still looking in to this?
Donald Trump is on record for two different elections baselessly saying that if he loses it was because of voter fraud. Somehow he won the first one, so there was no voter fraud in his eyes. He lost the second one with zero evidence of any form of widespread voter fraud, but since he lost of course he kept spreading the falsehood just like he said he would. It is a national embarrassment that this country has so many morons that can’t see the writing on the wall.
Or this: Everything the MAGAS claim happened in 2020 did happen in 2016. Perhaps the vote count in 2016 should be audited and the truth would prove that Trump was never honestly elected and thusly was never president which would mean that every action undertaken by him is null and void.
He only did one thing that I would want to stand, making animal abuse a federal crime.
Pretty convincing evidence that his claims are bullshit.
Heres a couple interesting videos from 2016
Donald Trump: This whole election is being rigged
Of course it was. In 2016 Russia, under Putin's puny finger, directed and erected an election made by his viagra induced insecurity impurity that Trump wood B, cause you KNOW the Russians HAD THE DIRT ! HeLL'', TRUMP's Moscow building adventures proved Russia had him caught in a LIE, but Trumps somehow is expected and accepted for being a FCKN LOW LIFE LIAR !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What TOTAL BULLSHIT ! CARLSON IS A DICK HEAD with a Hood Tuckered under just fore the heck of it , cause he's now got skin in the NOT A GAME FCKN WITH OUR WAY OF LIFE< LOW< LIFE !
He basically declared that he was going to cheat in 2016.
Shouldn't have happened no matter how "miniscule" one wants to label it. Small mistakes indicate possible bigger mistakes and diminishes people's beliefs in election integrity.
Please point out were Raffensperger stated that they were scanned TWICE a second and third time. Because if they weren't, it's irrelevant to the final tally that HE certified.
That suffice? Or this........
It was revealed later through the audit
What do you get out of this, something that would not change anything.
Other than to intentionally sow discord with the public.
You are fanning the conspiracy flames.
Perhaps you missed this...............
I realize it won't change the outcome. And possibly it may sow some discord but like the proposed changes to the voting procedures (and please don't give me any shit about that because there was PLENTY of changes, legal and illegal, that took place in several states using the "but Covid" excuse for voting) it is for the integrity.
My ass. If it was 'integrity' it would be done to all counties in the state.
So you are going to say all the recounts are just a smoke screen to a larger problem.
Get real. Yes you are pushing conspiracy.
Sad that you would use a pandemic, a time of lockdown, where some tried to make it easier for people to vote as some wacky theory that it lead to massive fraud.
Do you really want that? All counties? May as well have a do over on the whole 2020 vote in the state then. Is that what you want? And no I am not pushing conspiracy.
I still voted in person pandemic or no pandemic as did everyone I know. Funny that those changes "for the pandemic" facilitated record voter "turnout" don't you think?
As you say, "My ass".
Yes you are. Where is this massive fraud? Why only pick one or two counties, that happened to vote against donald to audit?
If one cannot see the partisan nature of it, it is intentional. If one cannot see the intentional lies being spread, it is intentional.
Now you are pushing a theory that the pandemic voting rules all the sudden increased voter turnout. If it did, so what?
Isn't that what we are suppose to want? More voter turn out? Suddenly it didn't go the republican way and more voter turn out is bad?
Didn't say it was bad. It's just a bit suspicious is all. And seems like pandering to the lazy who would rather vote from the couch than be inconvenienced by having to possibly stand in line. It should be something that everyone strives to do in the traditional way if at all physically possible. It's why France and others do not allow voting by mail.
And some states send a ballot to everyone.
Not a good excuse to do away with mail in voting...that some are lazy...
So what.
Actually, NO.
From the hyperlink:
As reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ,
See there Jim. the double scans were NEVER tabulated. In short, it's a nothing burger...
If that were true, wouldn't the totals of the initial count and the audits differ? Raffensperger's website states there were NO discrepancies in the totals.
Of course.
The purpose of all this "audit" crap is to discredit elections.
This is just one aspect of the
RepublicanAmerican Fascist Party's all-out assault on democracy in America.Jeez, Ender!
Are you really only discovering now that everything the fascists say is in bad faith?
Once certified by the state and then ratified by Congress it should be over.
Gore contested Florida for 36 days, then conceded.
That's supposed to be the end of it.
Pack up the ballots and store them or burn them. Don't care which.
GA counted and audited three times with minuscule differences, now a single outside "expert" is going to start this all over?
BS. Time long passed to move on.
Same with the AZ "Fraudit".
Time to move on and get back to the Kennedy assassination conspiracies.
I'm sure that there is a ''grassy knoll'' in GA and a ''cactus knoll' in AZ.
I love how he says democracy doesn’t work if people do t trust election results, as he sits there telling millions of people not to trust election results. He acts like he is just giving voice to the concerns of all these people even though he is the one telling them to be concerned in the first place.
He is a first rate piece of shit.
Yup.
...a prep schooled trust fund punk.