I mean, I’m not sure what the Donald Trump campaign expected.
They made a hotline to report voter fraud, it got flooded with prank calls, and it had to be shut down. Of course that happened. Ask stupid questions and you get stupid answers.
(Steps on soapbox.)
Because let’s be clear here: Widespread voter fraud does not exist. It’s an idea invented and weaponized by Trump and others in the GOP to invalidate results they don’t like and, importantly, serves as false evidence to suppress voters in future elections.
In short: The election is not getting overturned. President-elect Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump handily, and his margins in key states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin — are almost certainly too wide to be overturned. To win, Trump would need to magically flip multiple states.
(Steps off soapbox.)
Phew, OK, so that’s why the whole voter fraud hotline thing is dumb. It’s a last-gasp effort to call legit results into question, and a convenient direction to point Trump supporters’ anger after their candidate lost.
The Trump team even went as far as to set up a conference room dedicated to the hotline before they had to shut it down on Friday, according to CNN. They mostly got spam and mocking calls. A report from the Washington Post noted the phone line got calls about the Hamburglar, the plot of Diff’rent Strokes, and the profane lyrics of a certain rap by YG. The creator of Gravity Falls got in on the fun. Eventually, the Trump camp made a website to report fraud instead.
“One woman said she met the devil at her Georgia polling place and he challenged her to a fiddle contest, but if she lost, Biden would win.” https://t.co/fBc7Z4ETpu
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 9, 2020
It shouldn’t be a surprise the phone line was flooded with fake calls. And while Eric Trump suggested the Democratic National Committee was somehow behind the pranks, more than 77 million people voted against his father. It makes sense that a fair number of those people are going to mock the effort to gin up evidence of voter fraud.
The @DNC is spamming our voter fraud hotline to bog down the thousands of complaints we are receiving! Wonder what they have to hide.
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) November 7, 2020
Despite a lack of evidence and his phone line being shut down, President Trump was still tweeting angrily (and falsely) about voter fraud on Saturday. Meanwhile, the U.S. raged toward 200,000 daily new cases of coronavirus with precious little federal plan to slow the pandemic’s deadly spread.