Former President Donald Trump is once again spreading falsehoods about American elections and CNN fact checkers Daniel Dale and Marshall Cohen on Monday ripped them to pieces in a thorough piece debunking what they describe as Trump's "12 election lies."
The Trump lies in question range from the obviously false -- such as claiming Vice President Kamala Harris can only win the election if she cheats and claiming that he actually won Minnesota in 2020 despite losing it by seven points -- to claims that require some effort to debunk.
In one case, the fact checkers pick apart a Trump claim that a large percentage of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent.
"There is no valid basis for the claim that 20% of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania — or any other state — are fraudulent," they write. "This claim appears to be based on a flawed 2023 poll by a right-wing pollster, not the discovery of any actual problems with ballots in Pennsylvania or anywhere else from 2020, 2022 or this year."
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The fact checkers also tear down Trump's claims about undocumented immigrants voting in American elections.
"Both liberal and conservative think tanks have found only a tiny number of examples of non-citizens voting in elections where they are ineligible," they write. "The right-wing Heritage Foundation’s database of confirmed fraud cases lists less than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than one billion lawfully cast ballots. Further, nonpartisan experts on election law say such cases are almost always caught, thanks to layers of identity verification built into the registration and voting process."
