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Six months after a disinformation campaign pushed by former U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters alleging mass-scale voter fraud incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson took to his show to again promote similar claims. In the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump and his supporters falsely claimed the election was stolen by means of a massive voter fraud conspiracy, but never presented evidence for these claims that withstood scrutiny. Trump's own Department of Homeland Security stated that the 2020 election, which took place during a pandemic, was, in fact, the most secure in American history. Georgia's ballots have been counted three times. None of the lawsuits put forward by Trump or his supporters were successful in court and in fact, Trump's attorney in the matter, Rudy Giuliani, had his law license suspended for spreading election lies. Despite the fact that there is no evidence for claims of mass voter fraud and even though those claims have led to deadly violence, Carlson persisted in promoting them. The segment that aired on July 14, 2021, contained various claims that have either been already debunked, or are statements based on supposition and lack evidence. (We note that Carlson's employer, Fox News, argued in a court case that Carlson's show shouldn't be viewed as factual.) During his July 14 primetime show, Carlson stated, It now appears there actually was meaningful voter fraud in Fulton County, Georgia last November. He later added, That is not a conspiracy theory. It's true. Carlson's July 14 segment cited the findings of an activist group called VoterGA. The group supports Trump's false claims of massive election fraud and has embarked on a search for evidence of said fraud. Here's how Georgia Public Broadcasting described the group: We will now look at the claims Carlson made on his show. The segment opened with a weeks-old piece of disinformation about an alarm sounding at an election warehouse in Fulton County. Carlson stated: In fact, we do know. Georgia Public Broadcasting reporter Stephen Fowler took to Twitter to point out that not only did Carlson use a photograph taken by Fowler without crediting him, the photograph was lifted from a story that explains why an alarm went off and what happened with the door. Fowler reported in June 2021 that the alarm didn't come from the area where ballots were secured. The source of the alarm was a motion detector in an upstairs office belonging to the Clerk of Superior Court in the warehouse, and the county said a test showed that alarm is audible from where the private security officers were stationed off property. As for who opened the door, it was law enforcement. Fowler reported that two off-duty Douglas County Sheriff's officers in a marked patrol car approached the warehouse and found the outer door unlocked. The officers opened it themselves, and it was not 'left wide open,' as pro-Trump media had reported at the time, Fowler explained in the report. Carlson claimed VoterGA found double-scanned ballots accounted for more than 3,300 votes for President Joe Biden and 865 votes for Trump. But there's no evidence thousands of double-scanned ballots were reflected in Georgia's official vote tally. Surveillance footage obtained by VoterGA appears to show large numbers of ballots being scanned multiple times, Carlson stated. In this segment, Carlson directed viewers' attention to a woman wearing a yellow shirt in a video he said was obtained by VoterGA. But that video doesn't prove that the state's election results were falsified by ballots scanned multiple times, and importantly, Georgia's election results were recounted after the election, including by hand. That means that if any ballots were scanned more than once, in order for it to end up in the final vote tally, those ballots would have needed to have been counted more than once in both the heavily-scrutinized machine recounts and in the hand counts of the ballots. The video used by Carlson was from a surveillance camera at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, where ballots were being processed on the night of the election. Investigators looked into allegations of fraud at that time and found no evidence of wrongdoing. The closest Carlson came to offering an independent source for the figures he regurgitated from VoterGA was a July 13 report by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC). In doing so, not only did Carlson acknowledge that VoterGA is a problematic source on its own, he also misrepresented the Journal-Constitution's report. Carlson stated: The AJC didn't report that hundreds of ballots were improperly duplicated. It reported that nearly 200 ballots were scanned twice before a recount. An important part of the AJC report left out by Carlson was that there was no indication any vote for president was counted more than once in official results. The newspaper, which offered readers the opportunity to look at ballot images themselves, further reported: Although it's true that a small number of ballots were duplicated in Fulton County, the numbers are nowhere near as large as Carlson claimed; and contrary to what Carlson stated, the amount wouldn't have changed the outcome of the presidential election. The source for this assertion is a July 13 news release posted by VoterGA which claimed that the group found 7 falsified audit tally sheets containing fabricated vote totals for their respective batches. This claim originated with a comparison made by VoterGA between ballot batches from the initial election machine count to ballot batches from the state's manual recount and audit, per Mark Niesse, reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who has covered the election and its aftermath. But a discrepancy between those two numbers is not evidence of fabricated vote totals or even of wrongdoing. At this time, we don't know how election workers sorted and counted ballots. But Niesse pointed out that neither the initial count nor the audit were the the official, certified vote totals for the presidential race. The official results came from the machine recount requested by Trump. He also pointed out that the official tally closely matched the initial count. Carlson cited a whistleblower who stated she saw mail-in ballots without creases on them. That's strange because of course mail-in ballots need to be bent in order to be mailed in, Carlson observed. Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling explained this to The New York Times in an interview published Jan. 4 about false election fraud claims being promoted by Trump and his supporters: Nearly 35,000 Georgia voters moved out of their county of residence more than a month prior to election day, Carlson said. They were ineligible to vote. And yet they did. This claim comes from a July 12 story published by the pro-Trump website The Federalist. Although the article cites an expert in voter data analytics and residency issues named Mark Davis, it doesn't link to his work. It only reports that he compared two different databases, the U.S. Postal Service national change of address database and data from the Georgia Secretary of State's Office, and came up with a figure: 35,000 Georgians registered a change of address but voted in their old county. But The Federalist admitted the reason for this isn't known and it may be perfectly legitimate in most cases: Insinuating that there were 10,300 votes cast by people illegally is pure supposition, however. No evidence is offered that this number, if accurate, represents 10,300 illegally cast votes. About that, The Washington Post reported that If true — again, this is unproven third-party analysis — it’s illegal in the sense that going 67 in a 65 is illegal, not in the sense that you’re driving a stolen car.
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