Posted on 11/21/2020 6:22:13 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Campaign officials for President Donald Trump and supporters have promoted the faulty claim that Joe Biden received nearly 100,000 votes in Georgia through ballots that only included selections for president, suggesting it’s “suspicious.” But the claim ignores that some voters do not vote a straight-party ballot.
Social media posts spread by Trump campaign officials suggest that voter fraud may have occurred in Georgia, based on the claim that President-elect Joe Biden secured nearly 100,000 votes through ballots that were “ONLY” cast for Biden — and not for any candidates in other races.
But that claim rests on a flawed assessment of vote tallies.
The claim has nevertheless been passed along by thousands through various social media posts in recent days.
“Nothing suspicious about this at all!” one of President Donald Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr., wrote with a retweet of a post spreading the claim. Both tweets have since been deleted.
“In Georgia, ballots where the voter ONLY voted for President: • Trump: 818 • Biden: 95,801,” the post read. The tweet came from an account using the name “Sarah Hucklebee” that was made to look like an account for former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
The claim was put forward in a Nov. 10 video by Steve Cortes, a Trump campaign adviser, in which he outlined what he deemed a “statistical case” demanding further “investigation.”
“Biden, though, a 95,000 vote differential — there were almost 96,000 people in Georgia, allegedly, who voted Biden-only and then did not vote for Senate,” he said in the video. “That seems far too wide to be believable.”
We don’t know how many voters only voted for Biden, but Cortes’ number doesn’t represent that.
Instead, the figure refers to the fact that Biden won almost 100,000 more votes in Georgia than Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff. But it’s faulty to assume that all of those votes must have been on ballots for Biden only, ignoring that some voters in the state selected Biden for president but didn’t adhere to a strictly party-line vote for the Senate.
As of early Nov. 12, there were 4,992,420 votes counted in the presidential race in Georgia. While the total number of votes fluctuates across other races — since, indeed, some people don’t cast a vote for every race — there were 4,945,792 votes counted in the Senate race between Republican Sen. David Perdue and Ossoff.
That’s a difference of 46,628 total votes — or almost half of what’s being alleged in the viral posts.
The conservative National Review’s Dan McLaughlin said the difference between the total votes cast for the presidential race and the Perdue-Ossoff contest renders “the 95,000 number … mathematically impossible.”
McLaughlin also pointed out that one could look to the election in Maine — where Republican Sen. Susan Collins received 55,468 more votes than Trump as of Nov. 12.
That “means that some voters went for Biden and Collins, as voters have been doing as long as there have been elections,” McLaughlin wrote, later adding: “Split-ticket voting is not fraud, and there is nothing unusual about it.”
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us in an email that it’s “difficult to assess the accuracy of the factual claims being made” about “Biden-only” ballots.
“How do these folks know how many voters selected Biden or Trump for president but skipped the Senate race?” he said. “Knowing that would require individual-level information from ballots, not aggregation information about ballots cast in each race.”
Burden also said it’s common that voters “choose a candidate at the top of the ballot and then ‘roll off’ as they move down the ballot. There is nothing suspicious about lower participation in lower level races.”
And “even in an era of strong partisanship, some voters split their tickets. That is precisely why aggregate totals can be deceptive when trying to reach conclusions about individual voter behavior.”
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, made note of many voters straying from party-line votes during a press conference on Nov. 9.
“The other thing we’ve discovered is, from our initial assessment, there was a lot of ticket-splitting going on,” he said.
Biden’s lead in Georgia stood at about 14,000 votes on Nov. 12. Georgia’s secretary of state has announced the state will conduct a hand recount of the presidential race.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here.
This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.
Burden, Barry. Director, Elections Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Email to FactCheck.org. 12 Nov 2020.
“Georgia Election Results.” New York Times. Accessed 12 Nov 2020.
“Georgia Secretary of State Update on 2020 Election.” C-SPAN. 11 Nov 2020.
“Maine Election Results 2020.” Politico. Accessed 12 Nov 2020.
McLaughlin, Dan. “No, There Were Not 95,000 Biden-Only Ballots in Georgia.” National Review. 11 Nov 2020.
“News Conference on Georgia Vote Count.” C-SPAN. 9 Nov 2020.
Do we get to see the ballots or are we just going to take the Dems word for it? If there are “pristine” unfolded ballots that are on different paper than the official ballots and seem to have come out of in inkjet printer as reported that would be significant. If no such ballots exist then someone was mistaken.
All this mistrust could have been avoided if people from both sides had been able to see the entire process and conclude on its legitimacy.
They should do an audit. At least that way, they could weed out all those perfectly-filled Biden ovals. I might as well do a handstand on one hand as to fill out even one of those ovals perfectly.
So they have no actual proof it is false.
They are not proving Trumps claims are wrong, they just THINK that it probably false because reasons.
OK.. then let’s see the ballots.
They no longer worried about voter integrity.
The claim rests on people seeing Biden only ballots which appeared to have never been mailed, and filled in by a machine. I am seeing so much evidence, I don’t remember which state.
The analysis in this article is pure sophistry.
The discussion of straight ticket voting is a diversion.
The reality is that number crunchers pore over election results constantly. While a select number of voters will cast a ballot containing only a single vote for one candidate and ignore all other candidates and election contests completely. the number doing of voters doing so is relatively small.
The fact that Biden’s purported victory relies upon so many such ballots is completely out of proportion to the number of similar ballots cast in numerous elections. It is a red flag that something less than kosher took place.
There! They admitted it!
That makes no sense.
You said “(f)raud or not”. That appears to include fraud, which is obviously not the true vote. Sorry if I misread you.
This whole “fact-check” stuff ticks me off on so many levels.
What makes these jerks think they know the reality of all things being censored?
And, why didn’t this start before COVID?
I mean, why not fact-check me when I type something on FB or UT that might be wrong about Secretariat? I get in horse arguments all the time that even I can easily correct the poster on.
Maybe they’d like to FC us when we discuss past politic, like whether there really were that many homeless during Reagan’s tenure?
Ok....just meant that if there is fraud than that must be looed into and people g to jail.....but the election still needs the votes for Trump....otherwise Biden is in.
Horse puckey.
Terence McKenna had a great line that is _so_ relevant to these arrogant jerk “fact checkers”.
He said something to the effect “nowhere is it written that we apes have a right to know the truth about anything”.
It’s clear how these fact-checkers work. If Trump or one of his allies asserts anything, it is a lie. They’ll make up some gobbledygook to support that conclusion. If a leftist makes an assertion, it true on its face, no matter how ridiculous. They’ll make up some gobbledygook to support that conclusion.
Look up Ministry of Public Enlightenment From the middle of last century. Our version has so many more tools.
[But we do know, based on what the candidates stand for, that it’s statistically far fetched to believe that 100K Biden ballots didn’t have a missing senatorial pick. ]
Total presidential votes: 4,114,732
Total senatorial votes: 3,897,792
Total Trump votes: 2,089,104
Total Hillary votes: 1,877,963
Total Isakson (R) votes: 2,135,806
Total Barksdale (D) votes: 1,599,726
The problem is proof. While absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence (of a crime), we do need hard evidence of wrongdoing to either redo an election or overturn the facial results of an election by resorting to judicial fiat. Unless that evidence surfaces, I don’t see the Supremes moving forward with the annulment of the numbers we’ve seen to date and re-running the election. I could be wrong, but on the surface, it’s not looking good, unless Trump’s team comes up with a smoking gun, in the weeks ahead, that has so far been shrouded from public view.
I think a do-over would be great for Trump’s prospects, given the now widely-known revelations about Hunter and the post-election disclosure that not one, but two highly-effective vaccines are available. But getting that do-over is another matter.
We need a real audit.
[We need a real audit. ]
Look up Ministry of Public Enlightenment From the middle of last century. Our version has so many more tools.
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