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- President Donald Trump has yet to acknowledge his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
- Instead, he took to Twitter to label the results as illegitimate, using a pollster accused of lying about his college history to bolster his argument.
- The pollster Trump refers to in his tweet is Patrick Basham, who sociology researchers have accused of rigging his college degrees.
- “We have not found any published source claiming that Basham has a PhD from any other university,” scholars wrote of Basham in 2008.
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
In an attempt to defend his claim that the 2020 election results are not legitimate, President Donald Trump quoted a pollster on Sunday accused of lying about his university history.
Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the race, topped 270 electoral votes in overthrowing the state of swing in Pennsylvania on Friday morning, paving the way for a Biden-Harris administration. Business Insider, along with Vox and Decision Desk HQ, called Biden’s victory on Friday. Over the weekend, several media outlets also declared Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump has so far refused to concede or acknowledge the results. Biden’s campaign said Sunday morning on CNN’s “State of the Union” that neither Trump nor any White House official had yet contacted.
But Trump has tweeted claims that the election results are unofficial.
“The simple fact is, this election is far from over,” Trump said in a statement released to news outlets on Saturday.
“Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any state, let alone one of the highly contested contests aimed at mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate winner,” the statement continued.
On Sunday morning, Trump doubled down and brought in what he seemed to believe were expert voices to back up his claim.
“We think these people are thieves. The machines of the big cities are corrupt. It was a stolen election,” Trump wrote in a tweet quoting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Britain’s top pollster wrote this morning that it was clearly a stolen election, that it’s impossible to imagine Biden overtaking Obama in some of those states. Where it mattered, they stole what they had to steal, “the tweet continued.
—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2020
Twitter slapped a warning tag on the post, calling Trump’s election fraud claim “contested.”
The pollster Trump refers to in his tweet is Patrick Basham, who over the weekend referred to “a mountain of evidence, direct and circumstantial, of widespread election fraud.”
Basham is the founding director of the Democracy Institute, a Washington, DC-based public policy think tank that predicted Trump would win by a landslide. Basham is also someone scholars have accused of faking getting his doctorate, which was first reported by The Daily Beast.
Researchers writing in the peer-reviewed British Medical Journal in 2008 said there was no record of Basham getting his doctorate as he claimed.
“In two BMJ blog posts, Basham has been referred to as ‘Dr Basham’. Basham has repeatedly claimed to have a doctorate. For example in 2008: “Mr. Basham obtained his BA, MA and PhD. science from Carleton University, University of Houston and University of Cambridge, respectively. Today, his LinkedIn page lists a “Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Cambridge” under qualifications, “the post read. “We could not find any published source claiming that Basham had a doctorate from any other university.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately return a request for comment. The Biden campaign declined to comment.
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