President Donald Trump offered an update on efforts to investigate and fight vote fraud in a sometimes scathing rebuke of the failures exposed during the Nov. 3 election.
“We used to have what was called Election Day,” he said in the sometimes discursive 45-minute speech.
“Now we have election days, weeks and months—and lots of of bad things happen during this ridiculous period of time,” he continued, “especially when you have to prove almost nothing to exercise our greatest privilege: the right to vote.”
Trump opened by saying it could be the most important speech he ever made.
He warned that he had “no higher duty” than to protect the integrity of elections “which is now under coordinated assault and siege.”
The president went in specific detail regarding a “small portion” of the evidence gathered in swing states.
“This is not just about honoring votes of 74 million Americans who voted for me,” he said. “It’s about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections.”
He addressed the mail-in ballot fraud, as well as the allegations that Dominion Voting Systems may have engineered electronic vote-rigging.
“With a turn of a dial, with a change of a chip, you can press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden,” he said. “What kind of a system is this?”
Trump called for a return to paper-only ballots.
“The only secure system is paper,” he said, “not these systems that nobody understands including, unfortunately, the people that run them.”
Much of the information has been well covered in conservative media, although it is unclear whether Trump’s use of the presidential bully pulpit will move the dial in forcing antagonistic mainstream media outlets to cover it.
Most have repeatedly dismissed the evidence as conspiracy theories without substantiating their own claims. Some continue to accuse Trump of wanting to stage a coup, even as they shrug off questions about Democrat Joe Biden’s legitimacy.
“If we are right about the fraud, Joe Biden can’t be president,” he said. “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of votes.”
