President Donald Trump put forth an array of fuzzy accounting and false claims in a phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state seeking a reversal of his election defeat. In the hourlong conversation Saturday with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump suggested that the Republican find enough votes to hand Trump the victory. The Associated Press obtained the full audio of Trump’s conversation with Georgia officials from a person on the call. The AP is not publishing the full audio in keeping with its policy of not amplifying disinformation and unproven allegations. A look at Trump’s claims on the call and how they compare with the facts: TRUMP: “If we can go over some of the numbers, I think it’s pretty clear we won, we won very substantially in Georgia.” THE FACTS: Trump lost Georgia in an election the state has certified for Democrat Joe Biden. Republican election officials have affirmed the election was conducted and counted fairly. With ballots counted three times, including once by hand, Georgia’s certified totals show Trump lost to Biden by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million cast. Raffensperger certified the totals with officials saying they’ve found no evidence that Trump won. No credible claims of fraud or systemic errors have been sustained. Judges have turned away legal challenges to the results, although at least one is still pending in state court. TRUMP: “People should be happy to have an accurate count. … We have other states I believe will be flipping to us shortly.” THE FACTS: No reversal of the election outcome is in the offing in any states. Biden defeated Trump by about 7 million popular votes nationwide and by a tally of 306-232 in the Electoral College, including winning key states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, found no evidence of widespread election fraud. Trump’s allegations of massive voting fraud have been dismissed by a succession of judges and refuted by state election officials and an arm of his own administration’s Homeland Security Department. A group of Senate Republicans, led by Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, say they plan to object to the election results when Congress meets Wednesday to tally Biden’s Electoral College victory over Trump. The objections will force votes in both the House and Senate, but none are expected to prevail. TRUMP: “We have anywhere from 250 (thousand) to 300,000 ballots were dropped mysteriously into the rolls, much of that had to do with Fulton County, which hasn’t been checked.” THE FACTS: Trump appears to be referring to large numbers of votes that were tabulated in the early hours of Wednesday morning after Election Day and later. The arrival of those votes was expected because many of Georgia’s 159 counties had large stacks of mail-in ballots that had to be tabulated after polls closed and in-person ballots were counted. News organizations and officials had warned in the days leading up to the election that the results would likely come in just as they did: In-person votes, which tend to be counted more quickly, would likely favor the president. And mail-in-ballots, which take longer to count since they must be removed from envelopes and verified before they are counted, would favor Biden. States tend to count mail-in ballots at the end of the process. TRUMP: “We think … if (there is) a real check of signatures going back in Fulton County, you’ll find at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures.” THE FACTS: It would be impossible for anyone to have forged hundreds of thousands of signatures on mail-in ballots in Fulton County because there were only about 147,000 mail-in ballots in Georgia’s most populous county, with about 116,000 of them going to Biden. TRUMP, saying thousands of voters moved out of Georgia, registered in another state, and then improperly cast ballots in Georgia: “They came back in, and they voted. That was a large number.” THE FACTS: Not so. Trump supporters are working from a list of questionable accuracy, according to Ryan Germany, the general counsel for Raffensperger’s office. He told Trump during the call that those claims have been investigated and that in many cases, voters “moved back years ago. It’s not like it happened just before the election. There’s something about that data that it’s just not accurate.” TRUMP: “It doesn’t pass the smell test, because we hear they’re shredding thousands and thousands of ballots and now what they’re saying (is) ‘Oh, we’re just cleaning up the office.'” THE FACTS: The shredding in question was taking place in suburban Cobb County, not in Fulton County as Trump said. Cobb County elections officials said November 24 that none of the items shredded by a contractor were “relevant to the election or the re-tally” and instead were things like old mailing labels, other papers with voter information, old emails and duplicates of absentee ballot applications. TRUMP, about a legal settlement that Georgia signed with the state Democratic Party over how signatures on absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots are verified: “You can’t check signatures, you can’t do that. … You’re allowed to do harvesting, I guess, in that agreement. That agreement is a disaster for this country.” THE FACTS: There is nothing in the March 6 consent decree that prevents Georgia’s election clerks from scrutinizing signatures. The legal settlement addresses accusations about a lack of statewide standards for judging signatures on absentee ballot envelopes. Raffensperger has said that not only is it entirely possible to match signatures, but that the state requires it. Ballot harvesting, the practice of collecting numbers of absentee ballots and delivering them back to elections officials, remains illegal in Georgia. TRUMP, referring to investigations into his baseless claims of voter fraud: “You have your never-Trumper U.S. attorney there.” THE FACTS: The U.S. attorney in Atlanta is a Trump appointee. Byung J. “BJay” Pak is a longtime Republican who also served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 until 2017. He was nominated by Trump to become the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia in 2017. In announcing his nomination, the White House said that Pak and five other nominees for U.S. attorney’s posts “share the president’s vision for ‘Making America Safe Again.'” Pak had previously also worked as an assistant U.S. attorney. TRUMP, citing 18,000 “suspicious” votes: “The tape that’s been shown all over the world … they said very clearly there was a major water main break. Everybody fled the area and then they came back … there were no Republican poll watchers … and there was no law enforcement. … It was stuffed with votes. They weren’t in an official voter box; they were in what looked to be in suitcases or trunks. … The minimum number it could be … was 18,000 ballots, all for Biden.” THE FACTS: State and Fulton County election officials say that the surveillance video Trump refers shows no improper behavior, but normal ballot processing using not suitcases, but ballot containers on wheels. Officials said that the entire video showed the same workers had earlier packed the ballot containers with valid, uncounted ballots. Republicans have said that their observers were told to leave Fulton County’s vote counting center, but elections officials said they left after confusion that arose because election workers thought they were done for the night. An independent monitor and an investigator oversaw the vote count, according to state and county officials. Trump also refers to a phony confession attributed by a woman allegedly involved in the incident that was posted on social media. TRUMP: “In other states we think we found tremendous corruption with Dominion machines, but we’ll have to see.” THE FACTS: No such corruption has been found. There’s “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” said the federal agency that oversees election security, in a statement joined by state and electoral-industry officials.
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