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Despite the lack of evidence of widespread irregularities or fraud, President Donald Trump’s legal team used a press conference Thursday to go through a long list of outlandish and completely denied allegations about the 2020 election.
Trump attorney Sidney Powell has told fictional stories of electoral systems reversing votes, German servers storing American voting information, and election software created in Venezuela “under the leadership of Hugo Chavez” – the late Venezuelan president in 2013. She also said Trump beat Democrat Joe Biden “by a landslide,” which he decidedly didn’t – Biden was clearly the winner.
A look at the claims and the reality:
POWELL: “The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software and the software that goes into other computerized voting systems here as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela under the leadership of Hugo Chavez to ensure that he never loses an election after a constitutional referendum went the way he didn’t want it to go.
THE FACTS: No, Dominion has no connection with Venezuela and does not have a partnership with Smartmatic, according to Eddie Perez, a voting technology expert at the OSET Institute, a non-partisan research and development organization in electoral technology.
Smartmatic is an international company incorporated in Florida by Venezuelan founders. The company states on its website that it is not associated with the governments or political parties of any country.
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POWELL: “One of the most characteristic features (of the software) is its ability to reverse votes. He can set and run an algorithm that has probably worked across the country to take a certain percentage of President Trump’s votes and pass them on to President Biden.
THE FACTS: It didn’t happen. There is no evidence that any of the Dominion’s systems reversed the votes for Trump to count as votes for Biden. A statement released by the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, a federal agency that oversees US election security, says there is no truth in claims that votes cast for Trump were switched to count for Biden or suppressed .
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POWELL, on reports that an American voting server is in Germany: “It’s true, it’s kind of related to this, but I don’t know if the good guys got it or the bad guys got it. understood.”
THE FACTS: No, that’s not true. Powell refers to a fictional story that a server hosting evidence of voting irregularities in the November 3 US election was in Germany.
Republican Louie Gohmert of Texas claimed last week that “US Army forces” seized a server from an office in Frankfurt. An army spokesperson called false allegations that the military had recovered servers in Germany.
Two voting software companies that conspiracy theorists said were linked to the German server – Scytl and Dominion – have both issued statements denying the claims.
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POWELL: “President Trump won by a landslide.”
THE FACTS: This is wrong. Biden has a 306-to-232 lead in the Electoral College after the Associated Press declared him the winner in Georgia. That’s the same margin Trump had in 2016. At the time, Trump described it as a “landslide.” Biden also leads the popular vote with nearly 6 million votes.
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Associated Press editors Jude Joffe-Block in Phoenix and Amanda Seitz in Chicago contributed to this report.
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EDITOR’S NOTE – A look at the veracity of the claims of political figures.
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Find the AP Fact Checks at http://apnews.com/APFactCheck
Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck
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