WASHINGTON ― Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has already started laying the foundation for an excuse if he loses to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in November: the election will be rigged.
Although other GOP leaders aren’t joining the chorus, Trump’s enablers in the conservative media are all too happy to foment this kind of paranoid conspiracy talk.
Take Fox News and syndicated radio talker Sean Hannity, who not only allowed Trump to repeat his rigged election theory on television, but who is promoting the notion that voter fraud contributed to GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s loss to President Barack Obama in 2012.
Hannity’s evidence? That no one voted for Romney in 59 districts in Philadelphia.
The fact that most of these locales have a predominately black population and very few registered Republicans live in them, and that a Democratic incumbent and the first African-American president was on the ballot, apparently isn’t explanation enough for why a rich white man didn’t have a ton of fans in Philly.
Enter Ryan Godfrey, an elections inspector in Philadelphia, who is having none of it.
In a series of posts on Twitter Sunday, Godfrey dismantles the argument that a lack of Romney support must mean votes were stolen, and explains how absurd the notion is on a practical level:
For the record, Obama beat Romney by 71.3 percentage points in Philadelphia, compared to his 5.4 percent margin in Pennsylvania and 3.9 percent margin nationwide. Exit polls showed Obama won 93 percent of the black vote in Pennsylvania and across the country.
In the video below, watch CNN media reporter Brian Stelter take Hannity and Fox News host Bill O’Reilly to task Sunday for their “dangerous” and “unpatriotic” talk about rigged elections.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
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