Donald Trump may be convinced that the election will be stolen from him by dead voters, but even Fox News is no longer buying it.
Though the network has pushed stories about illegally cast ballots for years and the topic is a pet favorite of anchor Sean Hannity, several Fox personalities have recently acknowledged that voter fraud is not actually a widespread problem.
During a Thursday discussion of Trump’s ongoing allegations of widespread voter fraud, “America’s Newsroom” host Martha MacCallum asked reporter Peter Doocy just how many ballots are “fraudulently cast” in a typical national election.
“Very few of the in-person ballots, which is what Trump and Pence are mostly talking about,” Doocy replied. “But in the last national election, 2012, there were a little more than 129 million total ballots cast, 943,000 and change ended up being rejected. Those were all either provisional or absentee ballots, or ballots coming from from citizens living overseas. And, the number one reason for rejection was the voter either didn’t send their ballot in on time, missed the deadline.”
“The rest mostly have to do with signatures not matching, so there is a system in place to catch inconsistencies, and it has done that hundreds of thousands of times, but Trump is alleging there are far more not being caught, and they’re all against him,” he continued.
As he spoke, a chyron reading “experts say voter fraud is rare” flashed on the screen.
On Wednesday, the hosts of Fox News’ “The Five” said they don’t understand why Trump keeps pushing this claim, noting “it doesn’t bear out in terms of the numbers.”
Trump and his surrogates have so far refused to acknowledge the expert consensus on the statistically insignificant record of legitimate fraud cases, insisting that undocumented immigrants and voters returning to the polls multiple times will tip the election for Hillary Clinton.
On Monday Trump even predicted that “1.8 million deceased individuals” will vote for “somebody else” on Election Day.
h/t Media Matters
