The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

There was no Kraken. The claims that Giuliani, Powell, and the others kept throwing out there were far-fetched, ever shifting, and sometimes contradictory. In the days that would follow, Giuliani claimed that more absentee ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than were requested by voters. But he was flat wrong, having apparently contrasted the number of absentee ballots sent out to voters during the lower-turnout spring primary election to the number of absentee ballots returned in the fall election, an apples-to-oranges comparison. The real numbers showed nothing suspicious: 3.1 million absentee ballots were sent out in the fall and 2.6 million were returned. One of Giuliani’s favorite claims was the charge that anywhere between 8,000 and 30,000 dead people voted in Philadelphia. In fact, investigations would show that it was exactly two. Similarly in Georgia, he variously claimed that 800 or 6,000 or 10,515 dead people voted. There, as well, it would eventually be determined that at most it was just four. But that did not deter Giuliani. He also asserted that 65,000 or 165,000 underage people voted in Georgia, when, in fact, the number was zero. In Arizona, he said at different points that “way more than 10,000” or “32,000” or “probably about 250,000” or “a few hundred thousand” undocumented immigrants had voted illegally in the state, but investigators found no evidence that any had.[22] Not hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands, not any.