Kentucky Republicans share debunked claims in support of Trump’s allegations of fraud
Rep. Thomas Massie and Sen. Rand Paul joined a growing number of Republican politicians echoing Trump’s election fraud claims Thursday with debunked claims.
Massie shared a video presenting alleged evidence of election fraud in Michigan. But the video which Massie shared was debunked by PolitiFact and the information in it was false, according to Michigan officials.
The video originated from James O’Keefe, a self-described “guerilla journalist” at Project Veritas. The video showed O’Keefe interviewing a man who was allegedly a postal worker in Traverse City, Mich. The man told O’Keefe that he and his coworkers were instructed to collect any ballots they found in outgoing mail from mail collection boxes and the like at the end of the day on Wednesday and separate them so they could be backdated to Tuesday, Election Day.
The video alleged that the intention of backdating the ballots was to allow late votes. Massie, who won re-election in the Northern Kentucky congressional district, called it “election fraud.” He said on Twitter that he had tried to stop it from happening.
“I predicted this kind of election fraud would happen at the Post Office and I even offered legislation in the Oversight Committee on September 16th to make this ILLEGAL, but EVERY Democrat on the committee voted against my amendment,” Massie said in a tweet posted Thursday.
But Michigan state election law didn’t allow ballots to be counted if they were received at election offices after 8 p.m. on Election Day, no matter what date they were postmarked, according to the state’s voter information center. A spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of State said the information in O’Keefe’s video was “entirely false,” according to PolitiFact.
“Changing postmarks on ballots yesterday would not have mattered,” spokeswoman Tracy Wimmer said. “Any ballots in the post office yesterday means they were not already in the hands of a clerk Tuesday night and therefore would be rejected.”
Only two ballots from Traverse City had arrived late as of Thursday, according to PolitiFact. Neither of them were postmarked for Nov. 3.
Michigan was a battleground state in this General Election, but the state has been called by multiple outlets, including the Associated Press, in favor of Democrat Joe Biden.
Rand Paul says mail-in voting makes fraud more likely
Paul had a tweet flagged for potentially misleading information Friday morning. The flag was later removed. He referenced Kentucky native Ed Prichard’s conviction of voter fraud in 1949 and then said mail-in voting caused more fraud.
“His biographer said: ‘the untidy truth was that widespread vote fraud was America’s dirty little secret . . .,” Paul said in the tweet. “Elections with millions of mail ballots makes fraud more likely not less.”
Prichard was a Bourbon County native who held several positions in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. He publicly admitted to ballot-stuffing as he made an effort to rehabilitate his image after serving prison time for the offense, according to the Washington Post.
Paul also tweeted earlier Friday morning that the “history of voter fraud in absentee voting is long” and that the higher volume of COVID-19-prompted mail fraud this election makes it more likely such fraud could affect the election. T
Objective fact-checking services have repeatedly debunked the notion that vote fraud has happened repeatedly and debunked the claim that larger volumes of mail-in ballots increased the fraud.
“Trump has yet to provide any hard evidence that mail-in voting is fundamentally corrupt, and he himself has used the mail-in voting system in at least three past elections, including the Florida primary this year,“ Politifact said.
Paul didn’t include any evidence of fraud in the 2020 General Election in his tweets.
Trump’s fraud claims met with mixed response from Republicans
Trump and fellow Republicans have made frequent election fraud claims this week, many of which have been debunked. More than a dozen of Trump’s tweets since Wednesday had been flagged by Twitter for containing false or misleading information about the election.
Sen. Lindsey Graham from South Carolina said Thursday night he’s donating $500,000 to Trump’s legal team to fight the alleged election fraud. Graham made the announcement on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News.
Sen. Ted Cruz also joined Hannity’s show Thursday night to claim election officials in Philadelphia weren’t letting election observers into the ballot counting area. He said it was a “partisan” effort to damage the Republican vote.
Cruz later said in a tweet that observers were allowed in, but they were being forced to stand too far away from the workers counting the ballots. A new court order allowed observers to stand within 6 feet of the workers counting the ballots, Cruz said in a tweet.
While some Republican representatives are aligning themselves with the president’s claims, about a dozen Republican politicians, ranging from governors to senators to congressmen and even Trump advisers, have condemned the president’s comments over the last few days.
“This kind of thing, all it does is inflame without informing,” said Chris Christie, former New Jersey governor and Trump adviser, on ABC Thursday. “And we cannot permit inflammation without information.”
Those not coming to Trump’s defense have been publicly criticized by the Trump family.
“The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted Thursday. “They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell, who won re-election in Kentucky Tuesday, has remained neutral in his comments on the ballot-counting controversies.
“Every legal vote should be counted,” McConnell tweeted Friday morning. “Any illegally-submitted ballots must not. All sides must get to observe the process. And the courts are here to apply the laws & resolve disputes.”
He made similar comments the day after the election, and refused to answer further questions about the issue Friday.
This story was originally published November 6, 2020 at 9:13 AM.