China did not orchestrate voter fraud in the 2020 election

Days before Joe Biden was set to move into the White House, the president-elect’s detractors falsely claimed that China helped put him there.

In a Jan. 18 episode of the conservative Patriotically Correct Radio Show, defamation attorney Lin Wood said election fraud affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election — and a United States adversary is to blame.

"China was behind the interference and the effort to overthrow our government and the election, election fraud," said Wood, a Donald Trump supporter who was banned from Twitter for promoting conspiracy theories about the election.

A video with the audio clip was posted on Rumble, an alternative to YouTube that’s popular with conservatives. From there it made its way to Facebook, where it was flagged as part of the company’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

In the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration at the Capitol, we’ve seen several claims that China interfered in the election. My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, who recently met with Trump at the White House, told Axios that the country used machines from Dominion Voting Systems to do it.

Those claims are not based in fact.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have certified their election results, which Congress finalized on Jan. 7. There is no credible evidence that voter fraud affected Biden’s win. 

Here’s how we know that:

• Election officials in every state have said there was no sign of significant voter fraud during the voting process. 

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its election partners called the 2020 election "the most secure in American history."

• Former Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department uncovered no evidence of widespread fraud.

• Not one of the 62 lawsuits that Trump and his allies filed in state and federal courts proved that voter fraud affected the election outcome.

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In Wood’s interview with the Patriotically Correct Radio Show, during which he also falsely claimed that COVID-19 is akin to the flu and a biological weapon, he cited John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence.

In a Jan. 7 memo, Ratcliffe wrote that a classified assessment recently completed by the intelligence community undersold the extent to which China interfered in the 2020 election The memo cited a report from Barry Zulauf, analytic ombudsman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — a position tasked with upholding the objectivity of reports from the intelligence community. That report described a "widespread perception in the workforce about politicization" of information about foreign election interference.

Ratcliffe wrote that, in his view, intelligence analysts were treating similar actions from Russia and China differently. But he didn’t "confirm" any reports that China orchestrated voter fraud in the U.S., as Wood claimed.

In a rumor control page on its website, CISA said that bad actors would not be able to change election results without being caught. Dominion, a voting technology company that was targeted by disinformation after the election, said on its website that it has no ties to the Chinese government. A statewide audit and hand recount in Georgia, which used Dominion technology, upheld the original machine vote tally.

We reached out to Wood for a comment, but we haven’t heard back.

His claim is inaccurate. We rate it False.

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