Issue One releases second “Truthtellers” video to expose Trump election disinformation

Today, Issue One released the second episode in its “Truthtellers” video series that exposes the massive disinformation campaign about the 2020 election that former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters continue to spread. Each episode — narrated by Weston Wamp, a millennial conservative, Republican political reformer, and host of Issue One’s “Swamp Stories” podcast — sets the record straight for the many Americans unsure about the facts of the 2020 election.

Each episode in this unique series examines different widespread false claims in a short two-minute format, one of the few places where a conservative Republican is taking on the former president’s lies for his fellow conservatives. The first episode, “No Basis in Fact or Law,” has already been viewed more than 360,000 times across all social media platforms. Wamp has also focused on election disinformation in season 2 of “Swamp Stories,” with episodes dedicated to Georgia, Pennsylvania, and how election officials helped make the 2020 election the most secure election in American history despite the numerous challenges they faced.

The second episode, “Overnight Votes,” examines one of the most common misunderstandings about how votes were counted in 2020. “Were there actually hundreds of thousands of votes for Biden dumped in the middle of the night?” Wamp asks in the opening of the episode, echoing a claim spread by many disinformation spreaders about the Keystone State. “The answer is no.”

“Most of the ballots counted overnight were absentee,” Wamp goes on to say. “Why were they overwhelmingly for Biden? And why were they being reported in the middle of the night? President Trump asked his supporters to vote in person, and Biden asked his supporters to vote by mail. According to polling, that’s exactly what they did. So it makes sense that as the absentee votes rolled in, they favored Biden. But a lot of folks wondered, why were these absentee votes being counted in the middle of the night in the first place? There’s a straightforward answer here — and a solution for the future.”

Wamp explains how in Pennsylvania there were 10 times the mail-in votes in 2020 as compared to 2012. But the Republican state legislature didn’t allow mail-in ballots to be prepared for counting until the morning of Election Day. By contrast, in Florida, where ballots were able to be processed by officials the day they were received, ballots were counted on Election Day and results were reported shortly after the polls closed.

The backlog seen in Pennsylvania could have been prevented, Wamp explains. “States should simply allow election workers to begin processing ballots when they are received so that the ballots can be counted in a timely manner on Election Day.”

“Our democracy won’t survive if voters can’t trust the results of free and fair elections,” said Issue One Founder and CEO Nick Penniman in response to the second episode. “It’s vital that we expose these baseless claims of fraud and block state laws making it harder to vote and easier for partisans to take over election administration — all based on the false claims about the 2020 election.”

Future videos will look at claims specific to other states, including Arizona.

Learn more about the project at IssueOne.org/Projects/Truthtellers, and click here to listen to a recent “Swamp Stories” episode exploring similar claims about what occurred in Pennsylvania to shine a light on how disinformation was used to raise doubts about the integrity of the state’s election.