In an hour-long verbal exchange Saturday with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump, the Republican, “found” enough votes to give Trump victory.
The Associated Press received the full audio of Trump’s verbal exchange with Georgian officials from a user on the call. The AP publishes full audio in accordance with its policy of amplifying incorrect information and unproven claims.
A look at Trump’s claims on the call and how they stack up to reality:
TRUMP: “If we can go over some of the numbers, I think it’s pretty transparent that we won, we won substantially in Georgia. “
THE FACTS: No, Trump lost Georgia in an election that the state qualified for Democrat Joe Biden. Republican election officials claimed the election was conducted and counted fairly.
With ballots counted 3 times, adding once in hand, Georgia’s qualifying totals show that Trump lost to Biden by 11,779 votes out of nearly five million votes. Raffensperger scored the totals with officials who said they couldn’t find any evidence that Trump won.
No credible allegation of fraud or systemic error has been made. Judges have ignored demanding legal situations for results, at least one is still pending in state court.
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TRUMP: “People deserve to be satisfied that they have an accurate countArray. We have other statuses that I’ll get back to you shortly. “
THE FACTS: There is no reversal of the election result in sight, in Georgia or in any other state.
Biden defeated Trump through some 7 million votes nationally and through an overall Electoral College of 306-232, gaining victory in other key states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
Former Trump attorney general William Barr did not uncover any evidence of voter fraud. Trump’s allegations of major electoral fraud have been ignored by a succession of judges and refuted through state election officials and a Department of Homeland Security branch of his own administration.
An organization of Senate Republicans, led by Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, announced plans to oppose election effects when Congress convenes Wednesday for Biden’s constituency victory over Trump.
Objections will force a vote in the House and Senate, but neither will win.
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TRUMP: “We have between 250 (thousand) and 300,000 votes that were mysteriously cast on the lists, a lot of them had to do with Fulton County, which has been verified. “
THE FACTS: There is something mysterious or suspicious about this. It describes a valid vote counting process, a sudden wave of embezzlement.
Trump appears to be referring to a large number of votes that were collected in the early hours of Wednesday morning after Election Day and later. The arrival of those votes is not a mystery, but it was expected, as many of Georgia’s 159 counties had giant stacks of mail-in ballots that had to be compiled after the polls were closed and the ballots were counted. vote in person.
In fact, news agencies and officials warned in the days leading up to the elections that the effects would most likely come as they did: user votes, which tend to count faster, would likely favor the president. He spent months warning his followers to vote by mail and vote on the user either early or on voting day.
And mail-in ballots, which take longer to count as they must be removed from the envelopes and checked before being counted, would favor Biden. States have the power to count postal ballots at the end of the process.
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TRUMP: “We believe that Array . . . if (there is) genuine signature verification going back to Fulton County, find at least two hundred thousand counterfeit signatures. “
THE FACTS: It doesn’t actually.
Anyone could have forged thousands of signatures on vote-by-mail ballots in Fulton County, as there were only 147,000 vote-by-mail ballots in Georgia’s most populated county, Array, adding about 116,000 in Biden.
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TRUMP, claiming that thousands of voters left Georgia, registered in some other state, and then incorrectly voted in Georgia: “They came back here and they voted. It is a giant number.
THE FACTS: No. Trump supporters are coming off a list of questionable accuracy, according to Ryan Germany, suggests General in Raffensperger’s office. He told Trump on the call that the allegations had been investigated and that in many cases the electorate “came back years ago. ” It’s as if it happened just before the election. There is something about this knowledge that is simply accurate. “
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TRUMP: “It doesn’t pass the smell test, because we hear them shredding thousands and thousands of ballots and now what they say (is)” Oh, we are just cleaning the Array
THE FACTS: In-office shredding is taking hold in suburban Cobb County, not Fulton County as Trump claimed. Cobb County election officials said on Nov. 24 that none of the pieces shredded through a contractor were “relevant to the election or recount” and were instead old postage labels, other documents containing information from voters, old emails and duplicate absences. vote requests
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TRUMP, attacking a legal agreement Georgia signed with the state Democratic Party on how signatures are verified on vote-by-mail applications and votes-by-mail. “You can’t determine the signatures, you can’t do that… You are allowed to harvest, I guess, on this deal. This deal is a crisis for this country.
THE FACTS: There is nothing in the March 6 consent decree that prevents Georgia’s election clerks from verifying signatures. The legal agreement responds to allegations of lack of state criteria to judge signatures on absentee voting envelopes. Raffensperger said it was not only completely conceivable to fit the signatures, but the state required it.
Ballot collection, which consists of collecting a number of postal ballots and delivering them to election officials, remains illegal in Georgia.
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TRUMP, referring to investigations into his unfounded allegations of voter fraud: “You have your American lawyer who cheats. “
THE FACTS: The American attorney in Atlanta is someone appointed through Trump. Byung J. “BJay” Pak is a long-time Republican who also served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017. He was appointed through Trump to become the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia in 2017. In announcing his appointment, the White House said Pak and five other candidates for legal office in the United States “share the president’s vision of ‘making America safe again. ‘ Pak had also worked in the past. as Assistant United States Attorney.
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TRUMP, getting 18,000 “suspect” votes: “The tape that was broadcast around the world… made it very clear that there was a primary break in the waterline. They all fled the domain and then returned. Array . . there were no Republican watchers. Array . . and there was no law enforcement. Array . . it was packed with votes. Arrangement. They were not in an official polling place, they were in what gave the impression of being in suitcases or trunks. Fix . . The minimum number that can be Fix . . 18,000 ballots, all for Biden.
THE FACTS: This is a huge distortion of what happened.
Fulton county and state election officials say the surveillance footage Trump is referring to shows no separate behavior, but the overall poll processing does not use suitcases, but voting boxes on wheels. Officials said the entire video showed the same staff in the past wrapping voting boxes with valid, untold polls.
Republicans claimed their observers had been told to leave the Fulton County count center, but the elections said they left after confusion arose because the elections believed they were over for tonight.
An independent observer and investigator monitored the vote count, state and county officials said. Trump also refers to a false confession attributed through a woman allegedly involved in the incident that was posted on social media.
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TRUMP: “In other states we think we’ve uncovered a lot of corruption with the Dominion machines, but we’ll have to see. “
THE FACTS: No “massive corruption” was found.
“There is no evidence that a voting formula has suppressed or lost votes, altered the votes or compromised in any way,” the federal firm that oversees electoral security said in a statement. joined through state and electoral sector officials.
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Associated Press editors Eric Tucker and Mark Sherman contributed to this report.
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EDITOR’S NOTE – A look at the veracity of political figure statements.
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