U.S. Election Committees disprove Trump's fraud allegations

Biden also gets Arizona and is finally congratulated by China as president-elect

Sònia Sánchez
3 min
Màscares de Joe Biden i Donald Trump.

BarcelonaHis own government refutes it. The executive committees coordinating the elections within the government and the Agency for Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security, which is part of the U.S. Department of State, have issued a joint statement to assure American voters that "there is no evidence that any voting system has deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or been compromised in any way".

The official statement arrived on Thursday evening, just after U.S. President Donald Trump reported via his Twitter account that the Dominion application, which was used to vote in several states such as Georgia (still in dispute but leaning towards Biden), had "deleted 2.7 million votes nationwide," and that "221,000 votes in Pennsylvania were changed from Trump to Biden," amongst others accusations. These evidenceless allegations were also identified by the social network as "dubious".

Trump continues his rhetoric of denying election results that are increasingly against him: precisely this Thursday the still-contested state of Arizona finally decided in favor of Biden, so that the already president-elect obtains 290 electoral votes, twenty more than the 270 he needed to be elected as president, compared to the 217 Trump has at the moment.

The announcement from the electoral committees is, for now, the clearest and most emphatic denial of Donald Trump's accusations coming from a segment of his own government. In fact, according to several sources close to Reuters, the director of the Cybersecurity Agency, Chris Krebs, is convinced that he will be fired in the next few days. Despite being in office until January 20, when he will be replaced by Biden, Trump insists on not admitting the president-elect's victory, and in recent days he has in fact dismissed several posts in his government and replaced them with people he considers more loyal.

"While we know that there are many unfounded allegations and opportunities for misinformation about the election process, we can assure you that we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should have that confidence as well. When in doubt, go to the election officials as trusted voices since they administer the election," says the statement from the Cybersecurity Agency and the government election committees.

This is a full-blown debunking of the theories Trump is spreading through his favourite media, which is now Newsmax, a network that has grown from 65,000 to 800,000 viewers on average in the last few days thanks to President Trump's retweets. It is one of the few media outlets that grant credibility to Trump's conspiracy theories. He has even lambasted Fox, his traditional allies, on Twitter, since they have already assumed that Biden has won.

However, within Fox President Trump still has a loyal following, such as presenter Sean Hannity, who also claimed on Thursday that the Dominion app had changed thousands of votes from Trump to Biden, despite only providing as alleged evidence the accusations of Republican Party officials and excerpts from various media outlets and experts denouncing errors in the app - but in previous elections, not in 2020.

This morning, former president Barack Obama denounced these accusations as attempts to "delegitimize" U.S. democracy, "and this is a dangerous path," he said in an interview with CBS. "I'm more concerned that other Republican officials, who clearly have more knowledge, are signing up for this," he said of the Republican senators who have joined in Trump's fraud allegations.

After the win of Arizona, with its 11 electoral votes taken by Biden, only the states of Georgia (which is leaning towards Biden and has begun to count again, by hand, all the votes) and North Carolina (which is leaning towards Trump) remain to be assigned. But even if the two were to be won by the current president, he still would not have enough numbers to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, which Biden did reach days ago.

A week after Biden was awarded the victory, China finally recognized the Democrat as president-elect and sent a message of congratulations to Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris. "We respect the choice of the American people. We extend our congratulations to Mr Biden and Ms Harris", Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Friday. Moscow and Brasilia have still to admit Trump's defeat in the elections of November 3rd.

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