A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020
but I do not know whether good
guys got it or bad guys got it.”
— Powell
Here, the Trump lawyers
embrace an especially ridiculous
claim, already debunked in
numerous fact checks and
flagged by Facebook as false. But
it demonstrates how many of
their claims are derived from
blog posts or Internet posts —
and how the Trump team is
grasping at straws.
The story was that the U.S.
Army raided the Spanish election
software company Scytl in
Germany and seized its servers
for evidence of manipulation in
the 2020 U.S. elections. But Scytl
denounced it as “fake news,”
noting that it has no offices in
Germany. The Army denied it,
too. The story was elevated after
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) said
he was told there was “a tweet in
German from Germany that the
U.S. Army had gone in and seized
the Syctl server,” and then
Trump’s new favorite network,
One America News, aired a
report on the claim, alleging that
the server would show that
Trump actually won 410 electoral
college votes, including turning
California red.
The federal Election
Infrastructure Government
Coordinating Council Executive
Committee and the Election
Infrastructure Sector
Coordinating Council said in a
joint statement that there is “no
evidence that any voting system
deleted or lost votes, changed
votes, or was in any way
compromised.”
Chris Krebs, who headed the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency before being
fired last week by Trump,
tweeted after the news
conference: “That news
conference was the most
dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of
television in American history.
And possibly the craziest. If you
don’t know what I’m talking
about, you’re lucky.”
“President Trump won by a
landslide.”
— Powell
False. Trump lost the electoral
college vote, 306 to 232. That’s
exactly his margin in his 2016
race against Hillary Clinton —
which he constantly called a
landslide. Biden also has
received more than 6 million
more votes than Trump.The Pinocchio Test
This is one of those days when
we wish we had more than Four
Pinocchios.by the hanging-chad debate in
the 2000 election. It is
headquartered in London.
“Two of the founders, Antonio
Mugica and Roger Piñate,
continue to run the company as
CEO and President, respectively,”
the company says. “The majority
of shares (83%) are held by SGO,
a company owned by the Mugica
and Piñate families. The
remaining shares are held by
employees (10%) and angel
investors (7%).”
“Smartmatic’s software is not
licensed or otherwise used by
other companies,” the company
says.
In 2017, Smartmatic reported
that the Venezuelan government
had announced a false turnout
figure for a contested election,
adding at least 1 million votes to
the number. The company said
the absence of election monitors
from the opposition — which
boycotted the election — allowed
for the manipulation of turnout
figures. The Venezuelan
government, which needed a
large turnout figure to lend
legitimacy to the election, denied
the numbers had been
manipulated. The company
stopped its work in Venezuela in
2018.
“Our votes are counted in
Germany and in Spain by a
company owned by affiliates of
Chávez and [current president
Nicolás] Maduro. Did you ever
believe that was true?”
— Giuliani
It’s not true. Votes in U.S.
elections are not counted in
Germany and Spain.
“You couldn’t possibly
believe that the company
counting our vote, with control
over our vote, is owned by two
Venezuelans who were allies of
Chávez, are present allies of
Maduro, with a company whose
chairman is a close associate
and business partner of George
Soros, the biggest donor to the
Democrat Party, the biggest
donor to antifa and the biggest
donor to Black Lives Matter.”
— Giuliani
More baseless insinuations.
Mark Malloch-Brown is
chairman of SGO, the parent
company of Smartmatic.
Malloch-Brown is also on the
board of Soros’s Open Society
Foundations, which makes
grants to civil society groups
such as Black Lives Matter. Soros
is a billionaire backer of liberal
causes but otherwise has no
connection to Smartmatic.
(Antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” is
not an official organization and,
thus, would not receive
donations.)
“That is true. [Reports that a
server was seized in Germany.]
It is somehow related to this,two vans, but “I never saw any
food coming out of the vans,
coincidentally it was announced
on the news that Michigan had
found over 100,000 more ballots
— not even two hours after the
last van left.” Kenny also
concluded that Carone’s
“allegations are simply not
credible.”
The Michigan Court of
Appeals panel Monday denied an
appeal of Kenny’s decision. Two
of the three judges on the panel
were appointed by Republican
governors.
“The Dominion voting
systems, the Smartmatic
technology software and the
software that goes in other
computerized coding systems
here as well, not just Dominion,
were created in Venezuela at the
direction of [former president]
Hugo Chávez.”
— Powell
Chávez has been dead for
seven years, but he’s influencing
the U.S. election from his grave?
Seriously, the Trump lawyers are
offering up a stew of
misinformation derived mostly
from Internet rumors and right-
wing blogs.
Dominion Voting Systems,
which makes software that local
governments use to help run
their elections, was founded in
Canada and now effectively has
its headquarters in Denver.
The company says it is
nonpartisan. “Dominion has no
company ownership
relationships with any member
of the Pelosi family, the Feinstein
family, or the Clinton Global
Initiative, Smartmatic, Scytl, or
any ties to Venezuela,” the
company says on a webpage
debunking election rumors.
“Dominion works with all
political parties; our customer
base and our government
outreach practices reflect this
nonpartisan approach.”
The company operates in 28
states, including Florida and
Ohio, two states that Trump
easily won. But the contracts are
often with individual counties.
For instance, Dominion software
was used in only two of the five
counties that had problems in
Michigan and Georgia — and the
problems in Michigan were due
to human error, according to a
detailed account posted by the
Michigan secretary of state’s
office. (The Trump campaign has
requested a recount in
Wisconsin, but strangely not in
counties that used Dominion
systems.)
Smartmatic, on its own fact-
check page, also says this is crazy.
Smartmatic, an election
technology company, was
founded and incorporated in the
United States in 2000, inspiredGeorgia’s Republican
secretary of state, Brad
Raffensperger, rebutted this
claim on Facebook when Trump
first raised it in a tweet: “Let’s
address this disinformation
about signature match. We
strengthened signature match.
We helped train election officials
on GBI [Georgia Bureau of
Investigation] signature match
— which is confirmed twice
before a ballot is ever cast.” (The
signature is checked when a
person requests an absentee
ballot and then again when the
ballot is returned.)
“She [Jessy Jacob] was
assigned to voting duties in
September, and she was trained
by the city of Detroit and the
state of Michigan. She’s
basically trained to cheat.”
— Giuliani
A Michigan judge on Nov. 13
had already found Jacob’s
presentation was unpersuasive.
“The allegations made by Ms.
Jacob are serious. In the affidavit
however, Ms. Jacob does not
name the location of the satellite
office, the September or October
date these acts of fraud took
place, nor does she state the
number of occasions she
witnessed the alleged
misconduct. Ms. Jacob in her
affidavit fails to name the city
employees responsible for the
voter fraud and never told a
supervisor about the
misconduct,” W ayne County
Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny
wrote. “Ms. Jacob’s information
is generalized. It asserts behavior
with no date, location, frequency,
or names of employees. In
addition, Ms. Jacob offers no
indication of whether she took
steps to address the alleged
misconduct or to alert any
supervisor about the alleged
voter fraud. Ms. Jacob only came
forward after the unofficial
results of the voting indicated
former Vice President Biden was
the winner in the state of
Michigan.”
“They swear to you that at
4:30 in the morning, a truck
pulled up to the Detroit center
where they were kept counting
ballots. The people thought it
was food, so they all ran to the
truck. Wasn’t food. It was
thousands and thousands of
ballots.”
— Giuliani
This claim largely stems from
a single affidavit that was filed by
an alleged witness, Melissa
Carone, a contract IT worker for
Dominion Voting Systems. But
Carone, who made a number of
voter-fraud claims, does not even
leap to the conclusions that
Giuliani drew.
In her affidavit, Carone simply
says that food was brought in onperson votes, which leaned
Republican, were reported first.
Just in Pennsylvania, more than
1.4 million votes still needed to
be counted after midnight.
Because these votes were
overwhelmingly for Biden,
Trump’s lead was wiped out as
the hours ticked by.
The opposite nearly happened
in Arizona. On election night,
Biden had a lead of more than
130,000 votes, with 750,000 to be
counted. But in this case, the
remaining votes leaned
Republican, so by the time all of
the votes were counted, Biden’s
lead had fallen to 10,000.
But Giuliani is arguing that all
of those mail-in ballots should be
tossed out in Pennsylvania and
Michigan, giving the victory to
Trump.
“Joe Biden told us a few days
before the election that he had
the best voter fraud team in the
world.”
— Giuliani
This is false. Giuliani is
referring to a bit of manipulated
video that originally started with
a tweet from a Republican
National Committee official and
then was quickly spread by Eric
Trump, White House press
secretary Kayleigh McEnany and
others. It was blocked on
Facebook, and Twitter labeled it
as misleading.
Biden actually was talking
about his campaign’s effort to
combat voter intimidation, not
an organization to commit voter
fraud. In a section of the
interview that the RNC removed
from its clip, Biden even referred
specifically to the campaign
organization: “We have over a
thousand lawyers, over a
thousand of them, they’ll answer
the phone, if you think there’s
any challenge to your voting.”
“They made significant
mistakes, like all crooks do.
And we caught them. One of
them was pushing out
Republican inspectors.”
— Giuliani
Judges in Pennsylvania and
Michigan have rejected this
claim. Trump’s own lawyers have
attested in court that his
campaign was granted access
and observed the process, both
in Philadelphia and in other
cities, and has found no evidence
of fraud.
“The recount being done in
Georgia will tell us nothing
because these fraudulent
ballots will just be counted
again because they wouldn’t
supply the signatures to match
the ballots.”
— Giuliani
False. The signatures were
already looked at — and verified
— when the ballots were
originally counted.“What we are
really dealing
with here and
uncovering more
by the day is the
massive influence
of communist
money through
Venezuela, Cuba
and likely China
and the
interference with
our elections here in the United
States.”
— Sidney Powell, lawyer for
the Trump campaign, Nov. 19
This is just a snippet of a truly
bonkers presentation made by
attorneys for the Trump
campaign on Thursday alleging
massive fraud in the U.S. voting
system.
Powell described a convoluted
scheme under which an
“algorithm” manipulated by
Democrats switched votes from
President Trump to Joe Biden.
But she claimed it broke down
because support was so strong
for Trump, so Democrats were
forced to use a “back door”
method to manipulate the vote
with mail-in ballots slipped in
during the dark of night.
If this sounds crazy, that’s
because it is.
There is no evidence to
support any of these conspiracy
theories. It would require
election workers across many
states to be engaged in a massive
fraud scheme that won Biden the
presidency but failed to flip the
Senate from Republican control
and cost the Democrats seats in
the House.
Meanwhile, her colleague,
former New York mayor Rudolph
W. Giuliani, made other
allegations that have largely
been rejected by judges when
presented with the supposed
evidence. There’s no law against
lying to the news media, of
course. But in court, Trump’s
attorneys have been more
circumspect, saying they were
not alleging fraud or a stolen
election.
Here’s a guide to some of the
key claims made at the news
conference, drawn from a long
online report, mostly in the order
in which they were presented.
“I can prove to you that he
[Trump] won Pennsylvania by
300,000 votes. I can prove to
you that he won Michigan by
probably 50,000 votes. When I
went to bed on election night, he
was ahead in all those states,
every single one of those states.”
— Giuliani
Trump’s lead disappeared
because absentee and early votes
largely could not be counted
until election night because of
rules set by the GOP-controlled
legislatures in those states. So in-
Internet rumors help fuel the craziest news conference of T rump’s presidency
The Fact
Checker
GLENN
KESSLER
retired in 2018 rather than face
Houlahan in the new
Democratic-leaning district.
Now Costello thinks that the
previous three years of politics
just represented an anti-Trump
primal scream by economically
successful, well-educated voters.
“There was a group of voters
that had to voice their
displeasure with Trump, and the
only way to do that was to vote
against those Republicans,” he
said.
In 2020, tens of thousands of
Chester County voters expressed
their opposition to Trump by
voting for Biden, then voted for
GOP candidates in other races.
In fact, of the five Republicans
running across all of Chester
County, Trump received the
fewest votes.
“Among Republicans, the
behavior has not morphed into
voting straight Democratic,”
Costello said.
Ticket splitting became easier
after the state legislature crafted
a compromise early this year
that allowed for widespread
mail-in voting but eliminated the
longtime practice of allowing
voters to simply cast a straight
Republican or straight
Democratic ticket.
Houlahan believes that made
it easier for those Republicans to
move about the ballot and
support GOP candidates down
the ballot, while also leading to
too many Democrats just
checking the box for Biden and
not voting down ballot.
Heading into 2022, Houlahan
said, the party needs to realize
that its nominee has to have a
message that appeals to both
sides of the Routes 30 and 100
interchange.
“I would hope that the
nomination would go to
somebody who would be that
kind of person who’s pragmatic
and who’s willing to have
conversations with people that
aren’t them,” she said.
[email protected]Foods country. There’s a
Tredyffrin precinct where Biden
rang up a margin of 37
percentage points, allowing him
to carry the entire county by the
largest margin in decades for a
Democrat.
But s tate Treasurer Joe
Torsella, a Democrat, won that
precinct by only 27 percentage
points, too small a margin to
make up for the losses elsewhere.
In the previous three elections
there, Democrats stomped
Republicans across the county,
winning the county commission
majority for the first time and
sweeping the “row offices,” as
locals call them, the countywide
offices such as district attorney.
After a court-ordered
redistricting condensed all of
Chester County into Costello’s
district, the GOP incumbent40-20 in terms of the electorate,”
Houlahan said, calling her
constituents “genuinely purple
people.”
The split in this county starts
at the 30-and-100 intersection in
Exton, with the municipalities to
the east being more rooted in
massive townhouse
developments and workers
commuting into the city and
those to the west including more
multi-acre, single-family homes.
Go west on Route 30 toward
West Brandywine township, and
it turns into Cracker Barrel
country. In one precinct there,
Biden, Shapiro and Houlahan all
lost by about 17 percentage
points.
Head east on Route 30, toward
Tredyffrin, the easternmost
corner of the county, closest to
Philadelphia, it turns into Wholelean would make winning their
respective party’s nomination a
battle against more ideological
wings.
For Costello, Republicans win
statewide by being very
competitive in Chester County
and by winning back the
estimated 30 percent of
registered Republicans who
voted for Biden in southeastern
Pennsylvania, where just five
counties represent more than a
quarter of the entire state’s votes.
For Houlahan, the path to
victory is appealing to Biden-
supporting Republicans and
independents while committing
to the same values as liberal
activists, to ring up the type of
big margins that she and Biden
received in her county.
“This is kind of a perfect little
petri dish of almost exactly 40-Trump, larger than any
Democratic presidential
candidate this century, the
anchor of an overall statewide
victory of more than 80,
votes.
State Attorney General Joshua
Shapiro racked up similar
margins across the region en
route to a reelection victory that
puts him at the top of
Democratic wish lists for
gubernatorial candidates in
2022.
But Shapiro’s margin in
Chester County, 11 percentage
points, trailed Biden’s. Two other
Democratic candidates, for
treasurer and auditor general,
eked out single-digit margins in
Chester County, a big reason that
they lost their statewide races.
It has left Democrats
wondering: Is Chester County
truly becoming a Democratic
bastion? Or are the suburb’s well-
educated voters turned off by
Trump but willing to support
Republicans in other races?
The answer to that question is
particularly important as
Democrats consider the 2022
Senate race, where the
incumbent, Patrick J. Toomey
(R), has announced he’s retiring.
Republicans have won that
Senate seat every six years since
1968.
“If you want to win statewide,
you have to win in places like
Chester County. If you want to
understand what’s happening
countrywide, you have to
understand places like Chester
County,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan
(D-Pa.) said in an interview
outside the Capitol on Friday.
Fresh off another double-digit
victory there, Houlahan is
among those considering a run
for the Senate in two years — just
as Costello is considering coming
out of retirement to run for the
GOP nomination.
Both think the key to
unlocking the state’s political
future resides in their home
county, although their moderateThe blue wave
sputtered ashore
at the intersection
of Routes 30 and
100, in the heart
of Exton, Pa., a suburb 30 miles
west of Philadelphia.
That intersection, at the heart
of the wealthy and thriving
Chester County, is one of the key
dividing lines of American
politics. It illustrates how Joe
Biden won the presidential
election but also explains why
the race was closer than
expected in Pennsylvania and
serves as a major warning sign
for down-ballot Democrats.
The cultural divisions are
more readily evident than the
political split. Just a mile up the
road, on the eastern side of
Route 100, a Whole Foods
recently replaced a Kmart. Three
miles west, along Route 30, sits a
popular Cracker Barrel.
“That is pretty much where
the divide of the red and the blue
is,” said Ryan Costello, a former
GOP congressman from this
region.
Chester County voters
supported Barack Obama in
2008, Mitt Romney in 2012 and
Hillary Clinton in 2016. But
when Costello retired at the end
of 2018, Chester County seemed
to be marching toward solid blue
status, with three straight
elections resulting in blowouts
against Republicans.
Sure enough, the county
delivered big time this month for
Biden, whose Delaware home is
just 30 minutes down the road.
Chester County provided Biden
the largest percentage gain of
any county in Pennsylvania. He
won by nearly 54,000 votes, a
victory of more than 17
percentage points in the onetime
Republican stronghold.
Add the three other large
suburban counties, and
Philadelphia, and Biden emerged
from Philadelphia’s “Big 5” with
a vote margin of more than
765,000 votes over President
Pennsylvania county illustrates why Biden won but other Democrats struggled
@PKCapitol
PAUL KANE
RACHEL WISNIEWSKI/REUTERS
An election worker with m ail-in ballots in Chester County, Pa., on Nov. 4. Joe Biden outperformed
down-ballot Democrats there, a sign that his party has yet to decode the complexities of that electorate.