Donald Trump posts speech on Facebook repeating US election misinformation

Donald Trump has surprised the United States by posting a lengthy speech on his social media accounts addressing the election result.

President Donald Trump has surprised the United States by posting a lengthy speech on his social media accounts, in which he repeats a deluge of baseless and disproven claims about last month’s presidential election.

The prerecorded speech, which is 46 minutes long, was filmed in the White House. Mr Trump posted it without warning shortly before 4pm, local time.

“This may be the most important speech I’ve ever made,” he tells the camera.

“I want to provide an update on our ongoing efforts to expose the tremendous voter fraud and irregularities which took place during the ridiculously long November 3rd elections.”

Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election on Saturday, November 7, four days after the polls closed.

The delay was caused by a relatively slow vote count across several swing states – specifically Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.

A month after the election, Mr Trump and his legal team have yet to provide any evidence to support their claims that widespread fraud robbed him of victory.

The President and his allies have suffered dozens of defeats in court. Judges have repeatedly labelled their claims not credible, without merit or unsupported by proof.

For a taste of what I’m talking about, you can check out our story on the Third District Court of Appeals’ recent judgment throwing out the Trump campaign’s most significant remaining lawsuit, in Pennsylvania.

It was written by a conservative judge Mr Trump himself appointed, and there have been dozens more like it.

RELATED: Conservative judges slaps down Trump’s biggest lawsuit

Statement by Donald J. Trump, The President of the United States

Full Video: https://t.co/EHqzsLbbJG pic.twitter.com/Eu4IsLNsKD

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2020

Back to the speech. Be warned, we’re going to have to fact-check pretty frequently here.

“We used to have what we called election day. Now we have election weeks and months. And lots of bad things happened during this period of time,” Mr Trump said.

“Especially when you have to prove almost nothing to exercise our greatest privilege, the right to vote.

“As President I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States. That is why I am determined to protect our election system, which is now under co-ordinated assault and siege.

“For months leading up to the election, we were warned that we should not declare a premature victory. We were told repeatedly that it would take weeks, if not months, to determine the winner, to count the absentee ballots, and to verify the results.”

No one said it would take months to determine a winner. The warning from election experts, covered extensively in the news media, was that a surge in mail voting due to the coronavirus pandemic meant there might not be a clear result on election night.

The experts said Mr Trump and Mr Biden would each appear to be well ahead in certain states, depending whether or not the state in question counted mail-in ballots (which were overwhelmingly Democratic) ahead of time.

They said these early leads would prove to be a “mirage” – a blue one in some states and a red one in others.

This happened as forecast across much of the country. In states such as Florida and North Carolina, which allowed election officials to count the mail vote before election day, Mr Biden leapt to early leads. Mr Trump won both states.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, where officials had to wait until election day to start, Mr Trump led by large margins early and Mr Biden eventually reeled him in.

The President declared victory on election night, before most of the mail-in votes across those states had been counted, despite the experts’ warnings. Ever since, he has argued that Mr Biden’s comeback was suspicious and tainted by massive fraud.

He has also taken to arguing that Mr Biden has claimed victory prematurely.

“It was all very, very strange. Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to annoint a winner even while many key states were still being counted,” Mr Trump continued.

“We are going to ensure the honesty of the vote by ensuring that every legal ballot is counted, and that not illegal ballot is counted.

“This is not just about honouring the votes of 74 million Americans who voted for me. It is about ensuring that Americans have have faith in this election and in future elections.”

RELATED: Americans warned to expect ‘mirage’ on election night

Donald Trump. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

He went on to claim the campaign “already has the evidence” it needs to prove its assertions about fraud.

“This election was rigged. Everybody knows it,” said Mr Trump.

“I don’t mind if I lose an election. But I want to lose an election fair and square. What I don’t want to do is have it stolen from the American people.

“That’s what we’re fighting for, and we have no choice (but) to be doing that. We already have the proof, we already have the evidence, and it’s very clear.

“Many people in the media, and even judges so far, have refused to accept it. They know it’s true, they know it’s there, they know who won the election. But they refuse to say, ‘You’re right.’ Our country needs somebody to say, ‘You’re right.’”

The fundamental problem here is the dramatic disconnect between Mr Trump’s claims in public and his lawyers’ claims in court, where they have not alleged a single specific instance of voter fraud.

I mentioned the lawsuit in Pennsylvania earlier, in which the campaign tried to stop the state from certifying its results.

The head of Mr Trump’s legal team, Rudy Giuliani, argued that case himself. Under questioning from Judge Matthew Brann, he conceded it was “not a fraud case”.

Rather, the campaign has argued a patchwork of legal technicalities in an attempt to disqualify votes that favoured Mr Biden. For example, in that Pennsylvania case, it said 680,000 ballots from Philadelphia should be thrown out because Republican poll watchers were blocked from properly observing as they were counted.

Incidentally, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rejected that claim, saying election officials’ treatment of observers was lawful.

The closest the campaign has come to presenting proof of actual fraud was in the form of affidavits signed by some of its observers.

Mr Giuliani often says he has hundreds of these affidavits, though only a handful have actually been filed in court. Thus far, they have failed to impress any of the judges.

For example, Judge Timothy Kenny ruled that about half a dozen affidavits from Republican poll watchers in Michigan were “incorrect and not credible”, saying the people in question did not “have a full understanding” of the vote-counting process.

That is polite judge-speak for saying they had no idea what they were talking about. You can read Judge Kenny’s full decision here.

A judge in Arizona berated Mr Trump’s lawyers over the affidavits they had submitted to him, noting they had solicited testimony from witnesses without checking whether it was actually reliable.

ICYMI:

A supercut of an Arizona judge examining the electronic form-letter affidavit collection process used by the Trump campaign to support one since-dismissed case.

It yielded lies and "spam."

Spoiler alert: He didn't let in the dodgy affidavits: https://t.co/iIy9SIIaxL https://t.co/dWOLCuJHdG pic.twitter.com/hse0Iyjprq

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) November 20, 2020

We could go on. The point is, Mr Trump and Mr Giuliani have been saying for weeks that they already have convincing, incontrovertible evidence. All this time later, none of that proof has shown up in a courtroom.

In other words, the President is accusing judges - some of whom he appointed himself - of “refusing to accept” evidence his lawyers have not even presented.

Moving on. Mr Trump said the Democratic Party had “systematically put into place” a “corrupt mail-in balloting scheme” across the swing states.

“What changed this year was the Democrat Party’s relentless push to print and mail out tens of millions of ballots, sent to unknown recipients, with virtually no safeguards of any kind,” the President said.

“This allowed fraud and abuse to occur on a scale never seen before. Using the pandemic as a pretext, Democrat politicians and judges drastically changed election procedures just months, and in some cases, weeks before the election.”

Democrats did indeed push for access to mail voting to be expanded before the election, citing the pandemic, with some success.

The rules around mail-in ballots vary from state to state.

In Georgia, for example, voters have to actively request a ballot. They sign the request, and that signature is then checked against the voter database. They then sign the return envelope as well, meaning their signature is verified a second time before the ballot is counted.

Other states decided to automatically send mail-in ballot applications to every registered voter, meaning everyone received an application (not a ballot) whether they had actively requested one or not.

Mr Trump’s reference to judges “changing election procedures” is specifically about a decision made by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. It ruled that any mail-in ballots arriving up to three days after the election should be counted.

To be clear, we’re not talking about votes cast after election day. We’re talking about ballots that were mailed on or before election day, but arrived late.

The court did also rule that ballots should be counted if their postmarks were illegible, which outraged Republicans.

They challenged the decision, but the US Supreme Court tied 4-4 before the election, leaving the lower court’s ruling in place.

There is a genuine legal debate to be had here, the question being whether the state Supreme Court actually had the right to change the rules, or whether that power resides solely with the state legislature.

So yes, Mr Trump can certainly mount a fair argument on this point. That said, it doesn’t affect nearly enough votes to change the outcome in Pennsylvania, where Mr Biden’s margin of victory is more than 80,000 ballots.

President-elect Joe Biden. Picture: Chandan Khanna/AFP

What next? Mr Trump expressed confidence that his campaign could prove fraud on a scale large enough to change the election result.

“We have, in all the swing states, major infractions or outright fraud, which is far more in numbers or votes than we need to overturn the results,” he said.

“In Wisconsin, as an example, where we were way up on election night. They ultimately had us miraculously losing by 20,000 votes.”

The President produced a chart showing when vote totals were tallied.

“I can show you right here. Wisconsin, we’re leading by a lot, and then at 3:42 in the morning, there was this - it was a massive dump of votes, mostly Biden. Almost all Biden.

“To this day, everyone’s trying to figure out, ‘Where did it come from?’ I went from leading by a lot to losing by a little, and that’s right here. That’s at 3:42 in the morning. That’s Wisconsin, a terrible thing. Terrible, terrible thing.”

I kind of covered this earlier - it’s the “mirage” phenomenon election experts warned everyone to expect ahead of time - but for clarity, no one is actually wondering where the swing back towards Mr Biden came from.

It came from election workers counting the votes. Specifically, totals started to come in from Wisconsin’s more populous urban areas, which lean heavily Democratic and take longer to count.

The Trump campaign has not proven a single one of these votes was anything other than legally cast. The President requested a recount in certain counties, as he had every right to do, and that recount confirmed Mr Biden’s victory in the state.

“We will have far more, many times more than the 20,000 votes needed to overturn the state,” Mr Trump promised.

“If we are right about the fraud, Joe Biden can’t be president. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of votes. We’re talking about numbers like nobody has ever seen before.”

Again, Mr Trump’s lawyers have yet to prove one vote in Wisconsin was fraudulent, let alone hundreds of thousands. If the evidence exists, it has yet to be presented in court.

The campaign currently has no active lawsuits - none - which threaten to overturn Mr Biden’s margin in a single state. And Mr Trump needs to flip at least three.

Donald Trump. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

Finally, the President repeated his conspiracy theory that electronic voting systems made by a company called Dominion changed votes cast for him to support Mr Biden instead.

“On top of everything else, we have a company that’s very suspect. Its name is Dominion,” Mr Trump said.

“With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you could press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden. What kind of a system is ths?

“We have to go to paper. Maybe it takes longer. But the only secure system is paper. Not these systems that nobody understands.

“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.

“Dominion is a disaster.”

Dominion Voting Systems is a Canadian company which sells the software some of America’s counties use for their elections.

The company’s voting machines leave paper trails. So for instance, when Georgia conducted its recount by hand, the paper ballots were compared to the results reported by Dominion’s machines.

There was no significant difference. Mr Biden still won the state by more than 12,000 votes.

The Dominion conspiracy theory has been repeatedly debunked, including by Mr Trump’s own government. Oh, and no, America’s votes are not counted in foreign countries.

We could keep going for another 2000 words here, but I think you get the picture. Mr Trump’s speech was full of the same baseless claims he has been making on Twitter since his defeat. He provided no more evidence to back them up today than he has in the past.