In this week’s fact-checking video, CNN’s Jake Tapper looks at several dubious claims about voter fraud in Florida.
Tapper begins with a claim President Donald Trump made in an interview with the Daily Caller on Nov. 14, in which he accused Democrats — without any evidence — of voting illegally multiple times by simply changing clothes.
Trump, Nov. 14: The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes. … When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.
Voting experts we talked to pointed to numerous studies that have found such in-person voter fraud is virtually nonexistent. A Government Accountability Office report released in October 2014 said that “no apparent cases of in-person voter impersonation [were] charged by DOJ’s Criminal Division or by U.S. Attorney’s offices anywhere in the United States from 2004 through July 3, 2014.”
Tapper also discusses Trump’s baseless claim that Florida Republicans Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis won the races for Senate and governor, respectively, on election night, but that Democrats were trying to go back and “steal” those elections. As we explained, however, the results on election night were preliminary and ballot counting in Florida is proceeding in due course. It often takes more than a week for counties around the country to count mail-in, absentee and provisional ballots. What’s unusual is that these elections are so close, these ballots could tilt the results one way or the other. And in Florida, a mandatory recount was triggered in the very close elections for Senate and for governor.
For more information on bogus voter fraud claims, please see our stories “Bogus Voter Fraud Claims” and “Trump Jr.’s False Noncitizen Voting Tweet.”
Previous videos in our collaboration with Tapper and CNN’s “State of the Union” are available here.