Rudy Giuliani backed up Donald Trump’s dogwhistles about the presidential election being “rigged” in a Sunday CNN interview, laying the blame for voter fraud at the feet of Democrats.
“I’ve found very few situations where Republicans cheat,” the former New York City mayor said on “State of the Union.” “They don’t control the inner cities the way Democrats do. Maybe if Republicans controlled the inner cities, they’d do as much cheating as Democrats.”
Giuliani said he would “have to be a moron” to believe “the election in Philadelphia and Chicago will be fair.” Both cities have large African American populations.
CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out that a 2012 investigation into voter fraud in Philly found “nothing irregular.” Groups like New York University law school’s Brennan Center for Justice have determined that voter impersonation is “nearly non-existent.”
Yet Trump and his backers have been loudly banging this drum as his poll numbers sink and November 8 draws closer.
“I’m sorry. Dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans,” Giuliani said on CNN.
“I can’t sit here and tell you that they don’t cheat, and I know because they control the polling places in these areas. There are no Republicans,” he said of some large cities. “Then it’s very hard to get people there who will challenge votes. So what they do is they leave dead people on the rolls and then they pay people to vote [as] those dead people, four, five, six, seven, eight [times].”
Tapper pointed out that Giuliani was laying out “a case for how Democrats steal elections,” which Giuliani did not refute.
There are “a lot of elections experts that would have very, very strong disagreements with you,” the CNN host told him.
Trump has asked his backers to monitor polls on Election Day in “certain areas” in what many electoral observers interpret as calls for voter intimidation. At least some of his supporters have read his message that way. An attendee at a Cincinnati rally told the Boston Globe he’d be looking out for “Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American” in order to “make them a little bit nervous.”
