Published 14:03 IST, November 26th 2020
Donald Trump shares baseless claim about 6,000 'fake' Biden votes in Arizona
On November 24, Trump reposted a tweet labelled ‘disputed’ by the website, of a user falsely claiming that “fake Biden votes” were uncovered in Arizona.
Even though the Trump administration has initiated the formal process of transition of power to president-elect Joe Biden, incumbent Donald Trump has continued to post baseless claims about voter fraud on Twitter. Recently on November 24, Trump reposted a tweet labelled ‘disputed’ by the website, of a user falsely claiming that 6,000 “fake Biden votes” were uncovered in Arizona. Meanwhile, several key states have certified the election results indicating the same results as major American networks had projected that Biden will be the 46th US President.
However, Trump supporters have been running a baseless campaign on the microblogging website, with internet users posting untrue claims of fraud during vote counting. The Twitter user had posted, “Report: 6K fake Biden votes found in Arizona ‘lead’ drops to 4K” and even posted a screenshot a pro-Trump media outlet with the same “report” in the text running on the screen. But the report quoted by the user and that was also retweeted by Trump is false.
However, the 'bunk' news appeared to refer to a temporary tally change that had occurred during the unofficial election results due to an error during uploading with one of the county’s results. Even hours before the claim was posted on social media, the claim was clarified from Arizona’s Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Taking to Twitter, Hobbs said that the numbers were displayed incorrectly because of a glitch while uploading.
A data analyst for ABC15 in Arizona, Garrett Archer also acknowledged the error and said that such things happen “time to time” but the results did not change. But Archer’s single tweet in which he flagged the issue has been used incorrectly by Trump supporters. Arizona will be certifying the election results on November 30 and Joe Biden is currently leading with a slim margin of over 10,000 votes.
First Presidential candidate to get 80 mn votes
US President-elect Joe Biden has become the first presidential candidate in the nation to win over 80 million votes, with his record-breaking number of popular votes still expected to increase in the upcoming days as the ballots are still being counted across the United States. According to reports, as of November 24, Biden has won 80,011,000 votes while incumbent Donald Trump had over 73,800,000 votes. The President-elect’s votes are set to make him the candidate to win the second-highest number of popular votes in American history.
Updated 14:01 IST, November 26th 2020