Truthtellers

Yes!

When President Trump first claimed that the 2020 election was stolen, millennial conservative and host of the “Swamp Stories” podcast Weston Wamp was suspicious. How did Republicans win congressional seats all across the country — gaining seats in the U.S. House — on the same day that Trump claimed there was rampant fraud by Democrats?

But, still, Trump’s claim of a rigged election deserved to be properly investigated. And here’s the key: it was.

Watch episode 1, “No Basis in Fact or Law”

One of his most loyal allies, Attorney General William Barr, said that the Trump Justice Department uncovered no evidence of fraud at a level that would affect the outcome of an election.

More importantly, in more than 60 court cases filed by the Trump campaign all across the country, there were zero rulings supporting their claims of fraud.

Many of the judges were appointed by Republican presidents. Eight of them were appointed by Trump himself.

Here’s what the Trump-appointed judges said:

The Trump campaign’s claims are “bizarre.” “(Trump) lost on his merits” – Trump appointee Judge Brett Ludwig

Sources: Fox News and USA Today

“Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.” – Trump appointee Judge Stephanos Bibas

Source: 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion

Trump’s attorneys “harm the public interest” and their arguments have “no basis in fact or in law” – Trump appointee Steven Grimberg

Source: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia

Trump lost on his merits. No specific allegations or proof. No basis in fact or law.

Trump’s own attorney Sidney Powell, who claimed that Dominion Voting machines were manipulated to help Biden, changed her narrative altogether once she faced a lawsuit from the company.

Her attorney actually said that people shouldn’t have been foolish enough to believe her. This was her defense:

“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” – Attorney for Sidney Powell

Source: Motion filed with U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia

No!

One common question many people still have about the 2020 election: Were there actually hundreds of thousands of votes for Biden dumped in the middle of the night?

The answer is: no.

Watch episode 2, “Overnight Votes”

Most of the ballots counted overnight were absentee. But why were they overwhelmingly for Biden? And why were they being reported in the middle of the night?

Well, 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, 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.

Take Pennsylvania: there were 10 times the mail in votes in 2020 compared to 2012.

But the Republican state legislature wouldn’t even allow ballots to be prepared for counting until the morning of the election.

And waiting to do that makes counting take longer. But Florida had no delays on election night. That’s because ballots are processed by officials the day they are received.

But not in Pennsylvania, so they had a huge backlog — and one that could have been prevented.

Obviously, we’ve gotta avoid this happening again. In this case, 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.

No!

In Arizona,  long after the votes were counted — and counted again — by bipartisan election officials, the Republican-led state senate ordered a so-called audit of the 2020 election.

The debate about the results themselves has now gone so far off the rails that we need to break it down, because the facts are actually very clear.

Watch episode 3, “Off the Rails”

Take Maricopa County, Arizona, which is the fourth largest county in the country. Trump and his attorneys have alleged widespread fraud — but they haven’t given any evidence.

Here’s a little-known fact that’s virtually been unreported by the mainstream media that undermines the entire fraud narrative.

Biden won the county with 49.8% to Trump’s 47.7%.

In the high profile Senate race, the results were similar. Democrat Mark Kelly actually outperformed Biden, defeating Republican Senator Martha McSally 50.9% to 47.1%.

On the same exact ballot, the top election official in Maricopa County, Democrat Adrian Fontes, was up for re-election.

We spoke with Fontes:

“The integrity of the Maricopa County election in 2020 is beyond reproach. It was done with a bipartisan team at the highest elected level, including myself and the 4-1 Republican board of supervisors.”

So here’s the catch. Adrian Fontes lost his own re-election campaign on the same day Trump lost.

That means that the entire fraud narrative relies on you believing that Trump lost Maricopa County by two points, Martha McSally lost by almost four points… and on the same day, one of the people who presumably was complicit in the fraud, the Democratic county recorder in Maricopa County, lost his race.

That makes no sense. In reality, Fontes is a public servant. He’s a dedicated election official who simply believes that he lost his election fair and square.

Said Fontes: “I was up on election night, and we lost our lead, and ultimately lost the race. I felt good about the process though because that’s what’s supposed to matter here.”

Whoever thinks we would believe that Democrat Fontes lost on the same day that Trump alleges Democrats pulled off the biggest election fraud ever must think that we’d believe anything.

No!

In Virginia’s 2021 election, Republicans swept what has become a blue state in recent years, taking back the House of Delegates, the attorney general’s office, and the governor’s office. And nobody complained about how the election was run.

In fact, it was the first election after the Democrat-led Virginia State Legislature enacted measures aimed at increasing voting access. More early voting, no excuse absentee voting, automatic voter registration for anyone with a driver’s license, and making Election Day a state holiday. These were many of the same reforms that were at the center of this year’s hyper-partisan debate in Congress around voting rights.

And what was the result of making voting easier in Virginia?

Voting was found to be secure. Republicans won big. And not only did Republican Glenn Youngkin win, but more votes were cast than in any governor’s race in the state’s history.

Interestingly, there were no allegations of fraud in the Virginia races.

The point we’ve been making here and in the “Swamp Stories” podcast is that we shouldn’t buy into disinformation about the 2020 election. Republicans won many congressional races that year too – more than expected. So it makes little sense to cast doubt on the outcome of the presidential race. The truth is former President Trump lost his bid for reelection.

It seems that there is a basic lesson to be learned from Virginia — that when more people vote in safe, secure, and fair elections, we all win.

Ahead of the 2022 midterms, don’t buy the hype that American elections aren’t secure. Just look at Virginia, a recently blue state, where record turnout led to a huge Republican victory.

No!

To this day, many Republicans remain suspicious of voting machines because of claims by some Trump supporters that Dominion’s machines changed votes during the 2020 election.  One version said there was an invisible algorithm changing votes.  Another said it was the Venezuelans controlling Dominion.

Two year laters, some Trump supporters are still obsessed with this claim.

But none of the allegations about Dominion were specific. And no one has provided any supporting evidence.

On November 19, 2020, Sidney Powell and other lawyers representing the Trump campaign called a press conference to accuse Dominion of using software created by Smartmatic, and that together with George Soros and  Venezuelan authorities, they had rigged an American election.

Of course, days before, a memo circulated within the Trump campaign that made clear that Dominion and Smartmatic were independent companies, and that Dominion had no relationship whatsoever with George Soros or Venezuelan leaders.

And what about lawyer Sidney Powell, who led the effort to spread the Dominion lies? Well, when the company sued her for defamation, her lawyers responded that “no reasonable person” would conclude her unfounded claims were statements of fact.

Let’s end where we started: Dominion voting machines all across America tabulated results where Trump won and where he lost.

Dominion voting machines are widely used in some of the reddest states in America like Alaska, Louisiana, and Kansas where Trump and Republicans won big.

We should always strive to continually improve security protocols – insisting, for example, that paper records are kept of each ballot cast.

But Dominion voting machines did not rig the 2020 election. Even worse, the Trump campaign knew that was the case and sat silently as its attorneys falsely claimed otherwise.

Yes!

Voting by mail hit a historic high in the 2020 election — largely due to the pandemic. Many have claimed that so many mail ballots led to fraud, which swung the presidential election.

In this episode, we’re talking about why voting by mail is actually good for Republicans, and the fact that fraud is so extremely rare barely anyone, anywhere, at any time has shown evidence of it.

Now, there is one recent exception. After widespread claims of Democratic voter fraud in the 2020 election, the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick offered a $25,000-plus reward to anyone across the country who tipped off law enforcement to voter fraud that led to a conviction.

Well, in late 2021, Patrick paid out his first, and as of now only, $25,000 bounty to a Democrat in Pennsylvania who turned in a Republican for casting a second vote in his son’s name.

Perhaps the best example of voting by mail in action is Utah. The Republican Party does pretty well there. In 2012, the state passed a law allowing counties to go entirely to a vote by mail system, and in 2020, every registered voter was automatically sent a ballot. In the 2020 general election, 92% of votes in Utah were cast through the mail.

In the two Senate elections since Utah started voting by mail, Republicans have received 68% and 62% of the vote. Today, all four of Utah’s representatives in the House are Republicans after the lone Democrat incumbent lost in 2020.

Additionally, voting by mail is how our servicewomen and men overseas get to participate in our elections, and those in the military have voted absentee since the Civil War. Plus, that’s exactly how former President Trump voted in the 2020 primary election.

States should be embracing all safe and secure methods that let everyone eligible in their state have their voices heard. As more and more Republicans are seeing, there is no downside to voting by mail.