President Donald Trump’s recent press conference, his first public speech since he announced himself early Wednesday morning as the winner of this year’s election, was littered with baseless accusations of voter fraud and miscalculated results.
Among the statements that were scrutinized in the wake of the president’s remarks on Thursday evening were those referring to election workers in the major states where no election campaign has yet been declared. Trump explicitly claimed that the electoral procedures in these states “are in all cases conducted by Democrats.
The assertion
Trump hinted that the recent surge in votes in favor of Joe Biden was rooted in a Democratic conspiracy to “steal” the presidency, saying that Democrats oversee the election process in those states where ballots continue to be tabulated on Thursday night. At that time, these states were: Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The Associated Press previously called for Arizona for Biden, although some doubted that the forecast came too soon.
Trump, a vocal opponent of expanded participation in the postal vote, suggested during his press conference on Thursday that the postal vote process was “one-sided” and an “advantage of the Democrats. He claimed that the influx of postal votes across the country in 2020, a byproduct of the new coronavirus pandemic, had “diminished” the votes that supported his re-election.
“I won very, very much in Georgia, with a margin of almost 300,000 votes on election night in Georgia,” Trump claimed, before seemingly pointing to the rapidly narrowing gap between the votes for him and the votes for Biden. “The election apparatus in Georgia is run by democrats,” he concluded.
“There are states that have yet to be decided in the presidential campaign,” Trump said earlier. “The electoral apparatus of these states is in all cases led by Democrats. We actually won by lot in all the important places, and then our numbers were miraculously destroyed.
The president also claimed that the election officials who oversaw the counting of votes in Pennsylvania, where his campaign launched several lawsuits to stop the tabulation and invalidate certain votes, were “all part of a corrupt democratic machinery.
The Facts
In Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, election operations are overseen by secretaries of state. The Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, is a Republican, as is Nevada’s Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, while the Secretary of State of Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar, is a Democratic Party member. The North Carolina election process is overseen by the State Board of Elections.
Preliminary ballot counts in states like Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania showed that Trump is leading his Democratic opponent. However, as polling officials continued to receive, tabulate and count large quantities of postal ballots, which registered Democrats throughout the United States distributed at a far greater rate than Republicans from afar, Trump’s lead began to fade.
The Associated Press called Michigan on Wednesday for Biden, and by Thursday night the data showed that the two candidates were essentially level in Georgia and Pennsylvania. All three states are important battlegrounds, and the race in Georgia was surprisingly close despite decades of state support for Republican presidential candidates.
The verdict
Wrong.
The secretaries of state in Georgia and Nevada who oversee the elections are both Republicans. Of the states where the results of the presidential campaign had not been announced by Thursday night, only the election process in Pennsylvania is supervised by a Democratic official.
