The 5 wildest claims from Trump’s Facebook speech

Facebook and Twitter both flagged Trump’s 46-minute-long speech containing unfounded claims of voter fraud

President Trump on Wednesday released a 46-minute-long videotaped speech on Facebook including a series of wild claims urging people not to accept the election results.

Mr Trump started the address from the Diplomatic Room of the White House saying that this “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made”.

The speech, which was pre-recorded without any journalists present to question the claims, was released on Facebook as a full video and on Twitter with a short 2-minute version with a link to the full version attached. Twitter was quick to label it “disputed” while Facebook added a note about Joe Biden’s projected victory.

In the speech recorded last week, the outgoing president repeated a series of debunked claims of voter-fraud and winning swing states. Here are the top five wildest claims President Trump made in the address.

Postal ballots without verification

Repeating his calls to delegitimise mail-in ballots, Mr Trump said: “Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and most other states allowed anyone to get an absentee ballot and cast their vote without showing any ID.”

His allegations against mail-in ballots have been refuted several times in the past, including his expressions of doubts about the credibility of the postal ballots. In an article published by The Conversation, political science professor Jake Grumbach from the University of Washington argues that fraud in postal ballots is “very rare” as only valid voters can get a ballot in the mail in the first place. Also, every state has strict guidelines to confirm the identity of voters – quite the opposite to what Mr Trump is claiming.

In most states, voters must sign the outside of their return envelope. This signature usually cannot deviate significantly from the signature on their original voter registration card, or the ballot will be rejected. Some states also require voters to obtain a signature from one or more notaries or witnesses. A few even make voters submit a copy of their official government ID, like a driver’s licence, the report states.

Mr Trump’s specific allegations have yet to find any success in either court cases or in investigations by his own administration.

Ballots by ‘dead people’

Mr Trump again repeated his claims of false voting in the name of dead people, particularly in Pennsylvania and Michigan. But according to officials in both states, there’s no evidence that something like this occurred on any kind of scale.

According to an Associated Press report quoting several experts, it is common for state voter rolls to include voters with birthdates that make them appear impossibly old, but these are usually explained by human error, software quirks or voter confidentiality issues.

One such error that caught the attention of a lot of people was reported from Michigan where a mother claimed that she saw a vote was cast in her dead son’s name. However, authorities later revealed it was a case of mistaken identity and there was no vote registered in the name of the dead person. The lawsuit filed in Michigan by the Trump campaign has also been withdrawn.

A complaint of “dead voters” was also brought up in Pennsylvania, which was “soundly rejected”, the office of the attorney general said in a statement.

“The court found no deficiency in how PA maintains its voter rolls, and there is currently no proof provided that any deceased person has voted in the 2020 election.”

Victory in swing states

Mr Trump has complained repeatedly that he was initially ahead of Joe Biden in key battleground states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and it changed as postal ballots were “dumped” overnight.

Since there’s no evidence that demerits postal ballots from getting counted, what Mr Trump is claiming as a “victory” before midnight was only the initial counting, as most swing states were expected to take longer to count votes this time.

Mr Biden maintained a lead in postal ballots in several states – understandable, experts said, as Mr Trump has been raising doubts over the process for a long time and requested his supporters to vote in person.  

Mail-in ballots, which already take longer to count since they must be removed from envelopes and verified before they are allocated, got into further delays because several states did not start counting them till the day of the elections itself.

Votes tallied in ‘foreign countries’

Donald Trump repeated the claims his lawyer Rudy Giuliani made earlier in a press conference, that the votes in the presidential elections were “counted in a foreign country”.

Alleging that the Dominion voting system switched his votes to Joe Biden, he said: “Ninety-six percent of the company's political donations went to Democrats, not surprisingly. And frankly, when you look at who's running the company, who’s in charge, who owns it, which we don't know, where are the votes counted, which we think are counted in foreign countries, not in the United States.”

A report by ABC10 has already debunked this claim, stating that votes across the country are counted within their respective counties, not outside the US.

The report quoted a spokesperson for the National Association of Secretaries of State, an association of people who typically administer elections, who said: “Elections in the United States of America are administered, run, counted and certified by state and local election officials. We have never heard of votes being tabulated in a foreign country.”

Absent Poll watchers

Mr Trump has repeated this claim multiple times and stated again that Republican poll watchers were blocked from properly observing as votes were being counted.

However, there’s been no proof so far that Democrat officials tried to to stop Republican representatives. The Trump campaign did file a case to allow observers to get closer than the guidelines otherwise allowed, and a court ruled in their favour.

The vote counting in Philadelphia, where the campaign filed the lawsuit, was also getting live-streamed.

Apart from these claims, Mr Trump also repeated that he will “not concede” the election result, seemingly no matter what.

However, with 80.9 million people voting for Joe Biden and 306 electoral college votes, the president-elect is widely expected to take over on 20 January and has already begun assembling his leadership team.

At the end of the video, Mr Trump described himself as the defender of America’s election system, saying he had been told that the single most important accomplishment of his presidency would be protecting the integrity of the vote.

At the same time, he said that if any of his claims are proved “Joe Biden can’t be president”.

Mr Trump’s overarching claims about the election met with several rebuttals from within his own administration. The Department of Homeland Security’s top elections security official called the 2020 election one of the most secure in American history — which resulted in Mr Trump later firing him. 

Attorney General William Barr, meanwhile, said this week that investigations by the Department of Justice were honing in on some minor irregularities but that there was “no fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election”.