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Former President Donald Trump and podcaster Joe Rogan. (AP)
In a three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan — a conversation that lasted even longer than one of Donald Trump’s rally speeches — the former president repeated falsehoods about the outcome of the 2020 election.
The conversation came less than two weeks before Election Day and ranged from claims about life on Mars to illegal immigration to his plan to impose tariffs on everyday goods.
Here we’ll fact-check what Trump said about the 2020 election.
"I won that second election" in 2020.
Joe Biden earned his victory by winning more votes in the Electoral College. Biden received 306 electoral votes compared with Trump’s 232. Biden’s path to victory included the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Although the popular vote doesn't determine who wins presidential elections, Biden received about 7 million more votes nationwide than Trump.
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The 2020 election’s outcome was verified in multiple ways: States certified the results. Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits. Congress accepted the results, after Trump supporters’ violent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A group of conservatives, including former federal judges, examined every fraud and miscount claim by Trump and his allies and concluded that they "failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results."
Republicans in Trump’s own administration, including his then-attorney general, Bill Barr, told Trump his statements about the "stolen" election were "bull—-." Republican state election officials, including in Georgia, said that the election was secure and that Biden won.
PolitiFact has documented some examples of voter fraud in 2020, such as people casting votes on dead relatives’ behalf. But these instances were not enough to change the race’s outcome.
States used "COVID to cheat" in the 2020 election.
Many states made voting easier during the pandemic by mailing a ballot or an application to receive a ballot to registered voters. Some states that previously required voters to have an excuse to vote by mail loosened that rule.
Trump is free to disagree with these changes, but he is wrong — and ridiculously so — to characterize them as cheating. These changes were made openly, through executive orders, administrative actions or law. And when a state expanded access to voting by mail, that was available to Republican voters, too.
States "were supposed to get legislative approval to do the things they did," such as changing the rules for mail voting.
Rejecting a Trump argument in lawsuits over the 2020 election results, various courts ruled that states do not have to run every election policy through the legislature; instead, if necessary, state officials can act on their own.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, for instance, sued four battleground states that went for Biden, arguing that their election procedures violated their states’ laws. In a one-page ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the lawsuit, concluding that Texas had no business challenging the way other states conduct elections.
Experts said changing election rules without passing legislation is common.
"It is often the case that there are gaps in election statutes that state and local election officials routinely fill according to their delegated authority," said Rebecca Green, an election law professor at the College of William & Mary. "So to say that all decisions about how elections are run must emanate from the legislature is not consistent with explicit delegated authority to state election officials."
Changes made without formal sign-off by legislatures were made not only in Democratic or battleground states, but also by Republican officials in solidly pro-Trump states.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum issued an order in March 2020 suspending the requirement that each county operate at least one in-person polling place for counties that approved voting by mail.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson issued an executive order allowing concerns about COVID-19 to be a valid excuse to vote by absentee for the November 2020 election.
In Paxton’s state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott added extra days of early voting for the general election, citing challenges posed by the pandemic.
After Hurricane Michael hit north Florida in October 2018, then-Gov. Rick Scott cited emergency laws in his order to lift some rules related to mail ballots and in-person voting.
"If you take a look at Wisconsin, they virtually admitted that the election was rigged, robbed and stolen."
Trump requested recounts in Wisconsin, but those recounts upheld Biden’s victory; Biden gained a net 74 votes when the recount was complete. The state certified Biden’s victory.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit seeking to ban absentee ballot drop boxes, concluding that the issues were not "cleanly presented."
A probe led by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman — who has aligned with Trump and promoted his false claims — turned up no evidence the election was incorrectly called.
The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty also found no evidence of widespread fraud. And state auditors found voting machines worked properly.
PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman contributed to this report.
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