Debunked: Trump claimed thousands of ‘dead’ voters in Georgia. The state election board found only four
Trump claimed upwards of 5,000 ballots in the names of dead people were cast, which is a complete fabrication
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Your support makes all the difference.During former President Donald Trump's now infamous call to Georgia election officials pressuring them to overturn the state's 2020 election results, he claimed that 5,000 “dead people” voted in the election.
New information reveals that Mr Trump's claims were extremely off; only four votes were cast by individuals who had died by the time the election occurred.
The findings were revealed after The Associated Press analysed a recording of the hour-long call and checked Mr Trump's claims against actual facts.
Shortly after the election, Mr Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger trying to convince him to “find” enough votes for him to win the state. During the call, Mr Trump gave the official a sales pitch filled with erroneous information in an attempt to convince him to step in and manipulate the results to his benefit.
“The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted. And I think the number is in the ... close to 5,000 people,” Mr Trump told Mr Raffensperger. “And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number. And a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.”
The idea that 5,000 votes in a single state were cast in the name of dead people is difficult to believe, and for good reason; it is a lie.
On Saturday, Mr Raffensperger confirmed after an investigation that only two votes were cast in the names of dead people.
“The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. And so that's wrong,” he said in a statement.
Election officials investigated the claim and found that three people had voted illegally, and that another person with a similar name to someone who was not eligible to vote had been misidentified as an illegal voter.
In one instance, a 74-year-old widow had submitted an absentee ballot on behalf of her husband, William Nelson, after he died in September 2020.
“He was going to vote Republican, and she said, ‘Well, I’m going to cancel your ballot because I’m voting Democrat.’ It was kind of a joke between them,” Barry Bishop, an attorney for Sharon Nelson of Canton, told Georgia's State Election Board. “She received the absentee ballot and carried out his wishes ... She now realises that was not the thing to do.”
In other instances, absentee ballots had been filled out by individuals who died shortly before the election, but the ballots were sent in as they had been filled out prior to the individual's death. In total, the full number of “dead” voters who cast ballots in Georgia was four, with only two being found illegal.
The State Election Board can levy fines for people who cast illegal ballots between $100 and $5,000.
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