Trump’s day on Twitter: Living in an immaterial world

“I won the Election!”

— 8:51 a.m.

No, Trump lost the election. Joe Biden won enough states to claim 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, according to nearly complete vote counts. Trump says he’s fighting in the courts to reverse the result, but his claims keep getting rejected by judges after they review the evidence.

“The Fake recount going on in Georgia means nothing because they are not allowing signatures to be looked at and verified. Break the unconstitutional Consent Decree!”

— 9:04 a.m.

Neither the Trump campaign nor the White House would explain what Trump was talking about, so we have to venture a guess. After all, the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has ordered a hand recount of all ballots in Georgia, where Biden has a narrow 14,000-vote margin of victory.

Trump complains that signatures are not being looked at as part of the recount. That’s because they were already looked at — and verified — when the ballots were originally counted.

“For the first time in the history of Georgia, Absentee ballots submitted through our electronic portal required photo ID,” Raffensperger wrote in one post. “My team — we made that happen.”

He added: “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.)

The “consent decree” refers to a legal settlement signed in March, after a lawsuit by the Democratic Party, that set statewide standards for judging signatures on absentee ballot envelopes. The Democrats had argued that minorities ended up having a larger proportion of their ballots rejected, so the settlement laid out steps to notify voters if there was a potential problem with a signature match.

Atlanta lawyer Lin Wood has filed a lawsuit in federal court to block certification of Georgia’s election until all ballot envelopes are inspected.

“Trump Campaign Rejects Media Reports of Changed Pennsylvania Case. Just more Fake News. Harassment and exclusion of our Poll Watchers is a big part of our case. Unconstitutional!”

— 10:29 a.m.

Here, Trump cites a Breitbart news article on a Trump campaign news release disputing a Washington Post report that the campaign had significantly watered down its lawsuit seeking to challenge the results of the election in Pennsylvania. As our colleague Aaron Blake explained, the Post article was right, and the news release was just disingenuous spin to cover a faltering legal effort. (We’re not sure whether Trump understands this, however.)

“The Radical Left Democrats, working with their partner, the Fake News Media, are trying to STEAL this Election. We won’t let them!”

— 10:37 a.m.

Again, Trump lost. There was no stolen election.

“Georgia won’t let us look at the all important signature match. Without that the recount is MEANINGLESS. Open up unconstitutional Consent Decree, NOW! @BrianKempGA”

— 11:59 a.m.

Another blast at Georgia for failing, as part of the recount, to revisit signatures that already had been verified. Note that Trump namechecks Georgia’s governor, a Republican.

Raffensperger, in an interview with our colleague Amy Gardner, reported that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) had queried him “about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures,” and “asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures.”

Raffensperger said he was stunned by the request.

“The rate of rejected Mail-In Ballots is 30 X’s lower in Pennsylvania this year than it was in 2016. This is why they kept our poll watchers and observers out of the ‘SACRED’ vote counting rooms!”

— 4:23 p.m.

Here, Trump is citing a report from Just the News, a right-leaning website, which claims that mail-in ballots were rejected at rate 30 times lower in this election compared with previous years. The report did not mention that there was a major public education campaign this cycle to help voters understand how to comply with mail-in ballot rules, given that so many people were mailing ballots because of the pandemic.

The report claimed that 28,000 people might have had their ballots rejected under the ordinary ratio of rejected ballots, compared with nearly 1,000 people in 2020.

We are not going to bother to check whether the math is right. That’s because at the time of this tweet, Biden was leading Trump by more than 68,000 votes in Pennsylvania. In other words, even if all these ballots had been rejected (and they were all for Biden), it would have made no difference in the outcome. (Also, no evidence has emerged that GOP poll watchers were not able to observe the counting of ballots.)

“Big victory moments ago in the State of Nevada. The all Democrat County Commissioner race, on same ballot as President, just thrown out because of large scale voter discrepancy. Clark County officials do not have confidence in their own election security. Major impact!”

— 6:43 p.m.

There was no “big victory.”

Trump tweeted this over a tweet by one of his lawyers in Nevada, Adam Laxalt, who wrote that “the Clark County Commission just threw out an election that represents almost 1/6 of the total votes cast in Clark County because there were too many ‘discrepancies’ to be sure that that the results in that election can be certain.” But if Trump had read more deeply into the Twitter thread on which Laxalt was commenting, he would have seen that this involved only the Clark County Commission District C race. Just 10 votes separated the two candidates, with the Republican behind. There were enough questions about various ballots, such as possible double votes, to make a difference in this race.

“It is common practice in the county to report election discrepancies,” noted the Las Vegas-Review Journal. “Of nearly 975,000 votes cast for all races countywide, there were 936 issues identified, according to [Registrar of Voters Joe] Gloria, not enough to doubt the results of other contests.” It’s possible another election for the commissioner slot will be arranged.

The 936 discrepancies make up .096 percent of total ballots cast in Clark County in this year’s election, noted the Nevada Independent. Even the campaign for the Republican in the race, Stavros Anthony, distanced itself from Trump’s tweet: The campaign manager told the Independent that Anthony “has never subscribed to the conspiracy side of that” with regard to the discrepancies. “What we’ve consistently talked about is human error,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re counting ballots or making pizzas, there’s going to be errors.”

The results in all of the other races were certified, including the presidential election. Trump is behind by more than 33,000 votes in the state. Clark County has 72 percent of the state’s population.

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