AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump once again promoted widely discredited 2020 election fraud allegations in a post on his Truth Social platform.
“THE PEOPLE THAT DID THIS MUST BE PROSECUTED SO THEY DON’T DO IT IN 2024, WHEN THEY WILL BE PROSECUTED. SUCH A SHAME. I WON BIG, BUT WILL WIN AGAIN!” Trump wrote Wednesday, sharing a clip of Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) summarizing allegations made by the Trump campaign in 2020.
The minute-long clip shows a brief part of Lankford’s statement during a December 2020 Senate hearing on election security.
In the clip Trump shared, Lankford lists the findings of Trump campaign attorney Jesse Binnall, whose lawsuit and allegations of voter fraud in Nevada in 2020 were dismissed by a judge as baseless.
“Forty-two thousand people in Nevada voted more than once according to your work on this, 42,000; 1,500 voted in Nevada that were dead and though they didn’t live in Nevada,” Lankford says in the clip that Trump cites as evidence of the need to prosecute election workers in Nevada.
However, the problem with Trump’s statement is that the data mentioned by Lankford has been widely discredited in a court of law.
Trump has made this claim before, sharing a Washington Examiner article in December of 2020 on Facebook and writing, “Nevada ‘fraud’: 1,500 ‘dead’ voters, 42,248 voted ‘multiple times,’ RV camps as ‘homes.’”
USA Today and other outlets have since fact-checked the claims and declared them “False.” USA Today’s McKenzie Sadeghi wrote in February 2021:
The claim that Nevada’s 2020 presidential election included cases of duplicate voting, dead voters, fake addresses and noncitizens voting is FALSE, based on our research. The claims in the post are based on a failed lawsuit where a district court found that no illegal votes were cast and counted or that any legal votes were not counted. Biden won Nevada’s six electoral votes and those results were finalized by Congress.
Despite first making the false claims well over three years ago, Trump continues to repeat them as the 2024 election cycle ramps up.
