51 million unaccounted, unvetted, non-electioneering-proof mail-in votes and a vote record set by a pair who polled no higher than 3% among their own party against an incumbent who increased on his winning total by 17%. All unprecedented. No investigation by democrat Pravda. Disparagement from alleged journalists just for mentioning those elephants shitting in the room.
You are beyond dishonest.
don't you mean 15 million, not 51 million ??? those are the facts
Former President Donald Trump and his allies haven’t abandoned their argument that voting by mail can’t be trusted.
"Stunning report: nearly 15 million mail-in ballots were not counted in the 2020 election," stated a Sept. 4
Instagram post from a pro-Trump site.
The image in the post was a
headline on an article from the site, 100percentfedup.com. The article cited a report by the
Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group headed by J. Christian Adams, who served on
Trump’s short-lived voting integrity commission and has been critical of voting by mail. The group’s report highlights the number of mail ballots that were "unaccounted for" because they were undeliverable, rejected or listed in federal data as "unknown."
Trump touted the foundation’s report in a
fundraising email stating: "We. Cannot. Trust. Mail. In. Ballots." Trump’s website also promoted
Adams’ interview with Breitbart, a conservative news outlet, in which Adams argued that voting by mail is a "mess."
This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our
partnership with Facebook.)
The reference to a "stunning report" gives the impression that a major voting irregularity was uncovered in the report. That’s not the case. Moreover, the post implies that 15 million mail ballots that should have been counted were not tabulated. That’s a misinterpretation of data from a federal report about mailed ballots of "unknown" status.
It’s an example of how a bit of government data can be twisted to tell a misleading story.
The caption on the Instagram post cited the statistic as evidence that there are "serious risks of relying heavily on mail-in-ballots."
This ignores the evidence from election officials nationwide, including some in Trump’s administration,
affirming that the 2020 election was "the most secure in American history."
And, election experts say, it ignores the principal reason that millions of mailed ballots legitimately end up in the "unknown" category: Some people just don’t vote.
The report from Adams’ group
Adams’ group released a
two-page report in August that stated that of the 90.6 million ballots sent to voters, the outcome of 14.7 million ballots was "unknown." That works out to about 16.2% of the mail ballots.
"This report is about comparing mail balloting to in person voting," Lauren Bowman, a spokesperson for the group, told PolitiFact. "We are pointing out major system breakdowns that occur when elections are conducted by mass vote by mail."
The foundation wrote that there are various reasons why a ballot may be in the "unknown" category: "A ballot can be put in the wrong mailbox and land in an unfriendly neighbor’s trash. It can be thrown out with your unpaid bills. It can be left outside for the wind to carry the last mile (like seen in Nevada in 2020). Election officials simply do not know what happened. Unknown ballots are the greatest blind spot in the American electoral system." (The Nevada reference pertains to news reports about
10 ballots found on a road in the Las Vegas area in November.)
But that characterization of unknown ballots leaves a misleading impression, because it fails to mention the obvious reason many ballots ended up in the "unknown" category: A lot of mail ballots in 2020 were sent to voters automatically and then not returned by them, said Charles Stewart, an MIT political scientist.
