Last week there was a US presidential election, won by Joe Biden and lost by Donald Trump.
Everyone in the world appears to know this. Except Donald Trump.
Instead the now-outgoing president has spent the days since tweeting all manner of lies and general nonsense. Unfortunately, given his not inconsiderable level of influence, millions of people are paying attention to his claims, and some – on both sides of the Atlantic – are repeating them.
So here, painstakingly, is every one of the claims he’s made on Twitter since losing the vote, and an explanation of why it’s wrong.
Let’s start with an easy one…
CLAIM: ‘I won the election.’
REALITY: He did not. Not by any measure. Even with votes still to come in in two states, Joe Biden won both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
And not even by a little bit – by loads. Biden currently leads the Electoral College 290 to 214, and the popular vote 76.4m to Trump’s 71.6m.
CLAIM: Republican election observers were not allowed into rooms where votes were being counted
REALITY: Trump has made this claim repeatedly, both on Twitter and in various remarks and statements since the weekend, and about locations in various states across the US. They are all false.
No election observers from either side have been barred from counting rooms and Democrats have not stopped Republican representatives from being able to observe the process.
He’s likely referring to social distancing measures that were in place at counts given the ongoing pandemic.
In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign won a minor victory in court when a judge ruled the president’s representatives could get closer than Covid guidelines allowed to the election workers processing mail-in ballots in Philadelphia.
But even this was nonsensical, as they already had observers in the counting rooms. Trump’s lawyers admitted this in court when one said there were “a non-zero” number of observers there, as they bizarrely put it.
Additionally, counting in Philadelphia was being livestreamed for all to see.
Trump also claimed his “campaign has been denied access to observe any counting in Detroit”, another false claim.
Absentee ballots were counted at a downtown convention centre, where some 134 counting boards were set up. Each party was allowed one poll watcher per board, said city clerk Janice Winfrey.
She said she was not aware of any Republican poll watchers being removed but noted some had been “very aggressive, trying to intimidate the poll workers and processors”.
CLAIM: Votes were ‘illegally received’ after voting deadlines
REALITY: Again, a false claim with no evidence to back it up. Many states allow votes received in the mail after Election Day to be counted and it is not illegal.
In Pennsylvania, ballots received after 8pm on Election Day were only a fragment of the total vote count, AP reports. Across the state, counties reported receiving fewer than 8,000 in total after Tuesday out of nearly 7million cast.
Most of those ballots were sitting segregated waiting to be counted and were not included in vote totals when the result was called for Biden on Saturday, and officials were weeding out ballots that weren’t postmarked by November 3.
CLAIM: The Trump campaign is making ‘BIG PROGRESS’
REALITY: This might seem like an odd thing to say given the election is over and Trump has lost, but that’s not to say he has given up hope of… well, completely undermining democracy.
The Trump campaign has launched a series of legal challenges in states where the vote took longer to count than normal due to the increase this election in mail-in voting due to the coronavirus pandemic – Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
These lawsuits have taken various forms, including attempts to get judges to reject ballots containing mistakes, claims some ballots could not be read by scanning machines and even one in Arizona that claimed any ballot filled out with a Sharpie pen was illegitimate.
Aside from the minor victory in Pennsylvania mentioned above, none have so far been successful as they are either based on nonsense or backed up with no evidence.
CLAIM: Dead people voted for Joe Biden
REALITY: Trump didn’t make this claim directly but retweeted someone who did. There is no evidence to support it but false claims have been circulating widely on social media.
The AP contacted one of the people named in one such video. She was very much alive and had just beaten her husband at cribbage.
Experts told the AP that 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.
In Pennsylvania, some active voters are listed with the birthdate “01/01/1800.” That date is used for “confidentiality reasons of the registered voters”, such as if they’re victims of domestic violence, according to a state website.
And sometimes people who appear to be voting while dead simply share a deceased person’s name and birthday, Roberts said.
In fact, the only reported case involving someone trying to vote in the name of a dead person was a registered Republican and Trump supporter in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, arrested last month.
Robert R Lynn allegedly requested an absentee ballot for his mother, who died in 2015.
CLAIM: The election was ‘stolen’
REALITY: Despite making a hell of a lot of noise claiming so, neither Trump nor any member of his team has provided any evidence the election was “stolen”.
There’s really nothing more to it than that.
There is, however, the mini-mystery of who the “best pollster in Britain” is – HuffPost UK is making some enquiries and will report back soon.
CLAIM: The US media shouldn’t declare the winner
REALITY: Trump wasn’t complaining in 2016 when the “lamestream media” declared him winner – because that’s how the US electoral system works.
Due to the way the Electoral College works, the actual official vote isn’t tallied until December. No one wants to wait that long.
Enter the media, who have turned an unofficial role as announcer into a trusted and highly accurate (barring one notable exception) election day staple.
And as much as Trump would like to say otherwise, the calls are made purely based on the numbers and do not take into account political factors.
The gold standard has been set by the Associated Press, whose executive editor Sally Buzbee told The New York Times earlier this month: “If there’s no way for the trailing candidate to catch up, no legal way, no mathematical way, then the race is decided, essentially.
“And if there is any uncertainty, or if there are enough votes out to change the result, then we don’t call the race.”
The AP called the race in Arizona for Biden, long before other networks, at 2.50am EST (5.50am GMT) on Wednesday. It said its analysis of ballots cast statewide concluded Trump could not catch up in the ballots left to be counted, and while the call initially proved controversial it has remained accurate with more than 99% of ballots now counted.
The AP has been calling elections since 1848, when Zachary Taylor became the 12th president of the United States.
CLAIM: Trump will win the election
REALITY: The vast majority of results have already come in. The election took place last week and Trump lost.
CLAIM: The Pfizer vaccine announcement was withheld so Trump couldn’t claim credit
REALITY: The company itself learned of the interim results on Sunday, and the FDA was not involved in Pfizer’s decision to announce its early results.
Additionally, the Pfizer vaccine was not funded by Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed”, so he could not have claimed credit for it anyway.
CLAIM: The media ran ‘suppression polls’
REALITY: First of all, a “suppression poll” is a poll released ahead of an election with the aim of deterring a specific demographic from voting.
In the context in which Trump is using the term, he is alleging the media published polls showing Biden so far ahead that Trump voters wouldn’t bother showing up to vote, thinking their ballot wouldn’t make any difference.
It needs to be noted that there is an actual concern at the root of all this. As HuffPost’s polling editor Ariel Edwards-Levy, wrote this week: “In Wisconsin, for instance, where Biden eked out a tight win, final polls showed Biden up by an average of roughly 7 or 8 points.
“In Texas, averages showed a tight race with Trump less than 2 points ahead, well below his actual margin of victory.”
But rather than a deliberate plot to bring down Trump, it looks more likely that polling methods are not as accurate as you’d hope. Edwards-Levy says that “nonresponse bias, in which certain groups simply don’t answer the phone” could be key.
She adds: “Polls are specifically missing a group of ‘low social trust’ voters who have little faith in the country’s civic institutions and who break heavily toward the GOP.”
It’s also worth noting that even if Trump were correct and suppression polls had been published, they had no effect – voters turned out in record numbers this election for both Trump and Biden.
CLAIM: The election apparatus in Georgia is run by Democrats
REALITY: This claim wasn’t made on Twitter but it deserves a special mention. The election apparatus in Georgia is not run by Democrats. It is overseen by a Republican, secretary of state Brad Raffensperger.
CLAIM: 71,000,000 Legal Votes. The most EVER for a sitting President!
REALITY: This is actually true. It’s just that Joe Biden got even more. And of course the tacit suggestion that there were other, illegal, votes doesn’t hold water.