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November 5, 2020 at 6:12 AM EST
Trump and his allies boost bogus conspiracy theories in a bid to undermine vote count
By Isaac Stanley-Becker, Tony Romm, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Drew Harwell
Trump, his son and top members of his campaign advanced a set of unfounded conspiracy theories on Wednesday about the vote-tallying process to claim that Democrats were rigging the final count.
Eric Trump tweeted a video, first pushed out by an account associated with the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, that purported to show someone burning ballots cast for his father. The materials turned out to be sample ballots, and Twitter quickly suspended the original account that circulated the misleading clip.
Trump’s son and others, including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, claimed falsely in tweets later hidden by warning labels that the president had won Pennsylvania — even though no such determination had been made. And the campaign’s spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, claimed without evidence that crowd control at a processing center in Detroit was an effort to thwart Trump’s chances of reelection.
