Million-dollar offer to find proof of US election fraud

American voters are being offered bounties by right-wing groups for information about fraud.

Republican commissioner for Philadelphia Al Schmidt said he had not seen any evidence of widespread fraud. Picture: AFP

American voters are being offered bounties by right-wing groups for information about fraud, with Donald Trump’s “election defence taskforce” saying it has received 11,000 reports of potential cases.

A senior Republican in Texas unveiled a fund of $US1m ($1.37m) to pay whistleblowers $US25,000 — an offer matched by Project Veritas, a fringe activist group — as Mr Trump’s supporters kept up his campaign to overthrow the US election result. Mr Trump, 74, is concentrating his efforts on Pennsylvania and Michigan, two rust belt states he won in 2016 but which Joe Biden has flipped.

Rudy Giuliani, Mr Trump’s lawyer, said the campaign was looking into allegations that Republican observers were denied proper access during counting, postal votes received late were backdated, and that “dead people” had voted.

None of the allegations has succeeded in the courts.

Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of Texas, said he would use $US1m of his own campaign funds to “make sure that every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is disqualified”. John Fetterman, the Democratic Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania, retorted in a tweet: “I’d like to collect your handsome reward for reporting voter fraud. I got a dude in Forty Fort, PA who tried to have his dead mom vote for Trump.”

As the final votes were being tallied on Thursday AEDT, Mr Biden moved more than 51,000 votes ahead in Pennsylvania.

Republican commissioner for Philadelphia Al Schmidt said he had not seen any evidence of widespread fraud.

Sidney Powell, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, told Fox News of “stories we’ve heard where people have done everything from take piles of ballots and fill them out all the same way to bringing in pallets or boxes of ballots and dumping them in”.

She added that George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who is frequently accused of nefarious misdeeds by right-wing conspiracy theorists, “had a connection” to election computers with “Chinese parts” that assigned votes intended for Mr Trump to Mr Biden.

The claim arises from the mistaken assignment of several thousand votes to Mr Biden in Michigan, attributed by state officials to “human error”.

David Axelrod, a former adviser to Barack Obama, tweeted: “The only fraud being committed is by the @POTUS and his enablers in cynically attacking the most fundamental institution of our democracy.”

The Times