Tag: conspiracy theory

Spicer: Trump didn’t mean wiretapping when he tweeted about wiretapping

The White House on Monday walked back a key point of President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegation that President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones in Trump Tower during the 2016 election.

Namely, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump wasn’t referring to wiretapping when he tweeted about wiretapping.

“I think there’s no question that the Obama administration, that there were actions about surveillance and other activities that occurred in the 2016 election,” Spicer said. “The President used the word wiretaps in quotes to mean, broadly, surveillance and other activities.”

Wiretapping is a narrowly defined surveillance activity that involves tapping into “a telephone or telegram wire in order to get information,” according to Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Spicer also said that Trump was referring to the Obama administration broadly — and not accusing Obama of personal involvement — when he tweeted that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” and accused Obama of being a “bad” or “sick guy.”

Spicer’s comments came on the same say as the deadline for the Justice Department to provide evidence to the House Intelligence Committee to back up Trump’s claim. The White House has so far refused to provide any evidence, and numerous former officials have denied the existence of any warrant to wiretap Trump Tower.

A week earlier, Spicer said Trump’s tweet “speaks for itself” and declined to provide any further explanation.

But Monday, Spicer was open to providing an interpretation for Trump’s tweet, saying the President told Spicer he was referring to means of surveillance beyond wiretapping in his tweets accusing Obama of doing just that.

But in each of the four tweets Trump fired off leveling the accusation, Trump referred specifically to phone tapping — and only used quotation marks in two of those.

“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory,” Trump said in his first tweet.

“Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president?” he asked in the next.

Then, Trump tweeted that Obama “was tapping my phones in October” and had stooped low “to tapp (sic) my phones during the very sacred election process.”

But Spicer was not the only White House official to provide an alternative definition of the word “wiretap” despite Trump’s clear language.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway also addressed the wiretapping claims in an interview Sunday with the Bergen County Record, suggesting that other covert surveillance methods used by the CIA — as revealed by Wikileaks last week — could have been used in Trump Tower by the Obama administration.

“Do you know whether Trump Tower was wiretapped?” Bergen County Record columnist Mike Kelly asked Conway on Sunday.

“What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other,” Conway said, before suggesting that surveillance could take place through phones, TVs or “microwaves that turn into cameras.”

(h/t CNN)

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj98PnKz-xY

 

Following Embarrassingly Bad Conway Interviews, Trump Slams ‘Rude’ Media

President Donald Trump complained Monday morning that members of the media have treated officials from his administration rudely and advised the media that “you will do much better” if his officials are treated nicely.

Trump’s tweet, which did not reference any specific interactions between his administration and the media, followed interviews with counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway on four networks.

“It is amazing how rude much of the media is to my very hard working representatives. Be nice, you will do much better!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” anchor George Stephanopoulos challenged Conway to explain an interview she gave to the Bergen (N.J.) Record, in which she seemingly suggested that former President Barack Obama had used household electronics such as televisions, computers and smart phones inside Trump’s Manhattan skyscraper to spy on him.

Asked for evidence to support such a claim, Conway said she had none and insisted that she had been speaking about surveillance broadly and not leveling a specific allegation against Obama.

In response to a similar line of questioning on CNN’s “New Day,” a program Conway and other White House officials have largely avoided in recent weeks, the counselor to the president said it was not her responsibility to provide evidence for an allegation.

“I’m not Inspector Gadget. I don’t believe people are using the microwave to spy on the Trump campaign,” she said. “However, I’m not in the job of having evidence. That’s what investigations are for.”

CNN host Chris Cuomo pushed Conway on the issue, asking her why she even raised the use of household gadgets for surveillance purposes if it were not her intention to imply that Obama had done just that inside Trump Tower. “The question is why were you doing that?” Cuomo said. “Because this goes to personal integrity.”

“I’m allowed to talk about things that are in the news without you questioning anybody’s personal integrity,” Conway replied. Accusations that she intentionally leveled an allegation against Obama without evidence have come from at least in part from “other people who don’t necessarily want Donald Trump to be the president,” she said.

And on NBC’s “Today,” Conway struggled to offer an explanation as to why the White House trumpeted a positive jobs report last week as an early success of the Trump administration when the president regularly derided similarly positive reports as phony and inaccurate when they were released during the Obama administration.

Conway’s justification for the discrepancy, under repeated questioning from “Today” hosts Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie, was to say that “there’s a lot of fakery going on for people who were promised something that never came to be,” during the Obama administration, pointing to broken promises on health care as an example.

Lauer and Guthrie also sought answers from Conway about her Trump Tower surveillance remarks over the weekend, questions that prompted the counselor to the president to criticize the media for talking too much about Trump’s wiretapping claim.

“Can I stop you right there? The media did not bring up this topic. President Trump did,” Guthrie interjected as Conway sought to steer the conversation away from the president’s claim that Obama tapped his phones during the election. Conway replied that the media has focused too much on the wiretapping allegation and not enough on health care and other issues “that the American people also want to hear about.”

“All the more reason to question why it is that he would bring that up and then therefore throw the discussion” away from the White House’s preferred topics, Guthrie replied. “I mean, it isn’t like something a blogger wrote. It’s something the president of the United States accused his predecessor of tapping his phone.”

(h/t Politico)

Kellyanne Conway Suggests Even Wider Surveillance of Trump Campaign

The White House is offering yet another wrinkle in its attempt to support President Trump’s allegation — unfounded, so far — that his campaign headquarters in Manhattan was wiretapped by the Obama administration. The latest comes from Trump’s senior counselor Kellyanne Conway.

She says the “surveillance” may be broader than even Trump suggested.

In a wide-ranging interview Sunday at her home in Alpine, where she lives with her husband — who was a possible nominee for U.S. solicitor general — and their four children, Conway, who managed Trump’s presidential campaign before taking the job as one of the president’s closest advisers, suggested that the alleged monitoring of activities at Trump’s campaign headquarters at Trump Tower in Manhattan may have involved far more than wiretapping.

“What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other,” Conway said as the Trump presidency marked its 50th day in office during the weekend. “You can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets — any number of ways.”

Conway went on to say that the monitoring could be done with “microwaves that turn into cameras,” adding: “We know this is a fact of modern life.”

Conway did not offer any evidence to back up her claim. But her remarks are significant — and potentially explosive — because they come amid a request by the House Intelligence Committee for the White House to turn over any evidence by Monday that the phones at Trump Tower were tapped as part of what the president claims to be a secret plot by the Obama administration to monitor his campaign.

The White House has not said whether it will provide any corroborative support to back up the president’s claim of the alleged wiretapping. The allegation came to light nine days ago when Trump wrote in an early-morning Twitter message that he “just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.”

Trump did not offer any evidence in his original Twitter message. And while criticism mounted in the following days that Trump may have overreached, neither he nor the White House provided any means to verify the claim. Indeed, the wiretapping claims have dominated much of the discourse in Washington, often overshadowing the president’s attempt to promote changes in the Affordable Care Act and institute new immigration regulations.

Now comes Conway’s insinuation of a much broader surveillance plan against Trump. Her suggestion, while further stirring up the debate, appears to indicate that the White House does not plan to back down from Trump’s original Twitter claim in spite of strong assertions that it is not true from the U.S. intelligence community as well as from former president Barack Obama himself and members of his inner circle.

In the interview, Conway reiterated the request by the White House that the allegations of wiretapping  — and what she hinted might be other forms of surveillance — should be wrapped into a Congressional investigation into whether Russian intelligence operatives tried to influence the outcome of last November’s election.“What the president has asked is for the investigation into surveillance to be included into the ongoing intelligence investigations in the House and Senate,” she said.

The strategy of dueling inquiries — along with Conway’s suggestion of even broader surveillance by the Obama administration besides wiretapping — certainly complicates any investigation that involves Russia. But it may also confuse the issue.

While Conway seemed to call for a closer look into the so-far unfounded allegations of wiretapping by so-far unnamed members of the Obama administration, she also was dismissive of the extent and impact of the alleged Russian scheme. The Russian attempt to hack into computers within the Republican and Democratic campaign organizations is largely not disputed within the U.S. intelligence community.  What is disputed is whether the Russian scheme had any impact on the outcome of the election.

Conway’s remarks, however, may complicate the matter in other unforeseen ways.

She claimed in the interview that Democrats who called for a deeper investigation of the alleged Russian links – while also ignoring Trump’s claim of wiretapping by Obama — were really trying to undermine the Trump presidency. “The investigation is about a bunch of people who can’t believe that Hillary Clinton lost the election,” Conway said, her voice rising when asked about the possibility that Russian operatives may have helped to defeat Clinton and insure that Trump won.

“I was the campaign manager,” Conway added. “I was there every day and every night. I talked to people in Macomb County, Michigan, not in Moscow.”

She said that “this whole conspiracy” is a “waste of people’s oxygen, and air and resources and time when we could be helping those who are hungry, who need health care, who are in poverty, who need tax relief, entrepreneurs who want to get off the ground.”

In the interview, Conway addressed a variety of topics, including Trump’s efforts to assemble a coalition of support for his plan to revamp the Affordable Care Act, and her belief that Gov. Chris Christie may eventually join the Trump administration in some capacity, perhaps not for several more years, however. Conway even noted that Christie had come to her home recently to discuss his effort to improve services for drug addicts.

“The president likes Governor Christie a lot,” Conway said. “They talk all the time.”

But at various points, she continued to return to a seeming favorite topic — that Democratic critics of Trump are incapable of accepting the fact that he was able to defeat Hillary Clinton.

“They haven’t gotten over it,” Conway said, noting that she found many Democrats still working through “the stages of grief,” which range from anger to disbelief and, finally, acceptance of a loss.

“I know they’re not in acceptance,” Conway said. “That’s too bad for the country. The campaign is over. Now it’s time to govern.”

It’s an understandable — even laudable — suggestion that the opposing sides in Washington should stop fighting. But as Conway concedes, governing and the more difficult task of finding common ground among political adversaries is difficult amid allegations of a complicated plot involving Russia.

“It’s a big agenda,” Conway said of Trump’s first 50 days in the White House. “It’s very ambitious. And it’s very Trumpian.”

But that agenda still seems to keeps tripping over the election itself — and the questions about it.

(h/t USA Today)

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hJX1lSK_Uc

White House Rejects FBI’s Denial Of Trump’s Wiretapping Claims

President Donald Trump’s administration continues to insist that former President Barack Obama ordered Trump Tower to be wiretapped during the presidential campaign, rejecting FBI Director James Comey’s denial of such activity despite not providing evidence to back up its claims.

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday whether Trump accepts Comey’s reported request for the Department of Justice to “publicly reject” the president’s unfounded statement.

“No, I don’t think he does,” she replied.

Although he didn’t provide any evidence, Trump claimed over the weekend that Obama ordered wiretapping of his communications last year during his presidential campaign. On Sunday, Sanders even called for an investigation into the matter.

Obama, as well as numerous U.S. intelligence officials, have denied the allegation. James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, said Sunday that “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect, at the time, as a candidate or against his campaign.” He also denied that the FBI obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court warrant to investigate the Trump campaign’s alleged contact with Russian officials.

Later that day, The New York Times and other outlets confirmed that Comey told DOJ officials to “publicly reject” Trump’s claim, reportedly saying it was “false and must be corrected.”

The only evidence that the Trump administration has offered are reports from right-wing news sites, maintaining a pattern of spreading unfounded conspiracy theories.

Yet Trump’s team continued to dig into the claims on Monday, while still providing no definitive proof.

“This is a storyline that has been reported by quite a few outlets,” Sanders said Monday, citing mainstream outlets that have reported on the claims but have found no evidence to support them.

Stephanopoulos repeatedly pressed her for evidence, but she had none.
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, insisted on Fox News that Trump has “information and intelligence” to back up his claims.

“He’s the president of the United States,” she said. “He has information and intelligence that the rest of us do not, and that’s the way it should be.”

(h/t Huffington Post)

Media

Trump Wants Congressional Probe of Evidence-Free Claims About Obama

President Trump called Sunday for a congressional investigation of his claims that predecessor Barack Obama had him wiretapped during last year’s election  —  while critics accused Trump of trying to distract people from an investigation into his own relationship with Russia.

“Reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations immediately ahead of the 2016 election are very troubling,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said in a statement a day after Trump accused Obama — without evidence — of having Trump Tower in New York wiretapped in connection with an investigation of Russia.

Trump is “requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016,” Spicer said.

While Trump repeatedly tweeted about Obama during the weekend, Spicer’s statement said “neither the White House nor the President will comment further until such oversight is conducted.”

A spokesman for Obama said Trump’s claim is false, and noted that presidents do not have the legal authority to authorize wiretaps in any case.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Trump is making false claims against Obama in order to distract attention from investigations into possible contacts among Trump, his associates, and Russians involved in a plan to hack Democratic officials during last year’s election.

Again calling for an outside investigation into Trump and Russia, Pelosi told CNN’s State of the Union: “What do the Russians have on Donald Trump?”

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said it “will make inquiries into whether the government was conducting surveillance activities on any political party’s campaign officials or surrogates” as part of its overall probe into Russian intelligence activities. Nunes said, “we will continue to investigate this issue if the evidence warrants it.”

There is no evidence Trump or his aides were the subjects of surveillance during last year’s election,

Any kind of wiretap in connection with an investigation of Russia would have to be approved by a special court acting under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That law, passed in 1978 to reform the excesses of intelligence surveillance during the Richard Nixon administration and earlier presidencies, requires law enforcement to obtain an order from a special court of federal judges before they conduct telephone surveillance on people in the United States.

James Clapper, who was director of national intelligence last year, told NBC’s Meet The Press that to his knowledge there was no FISA court order regarding Trump Tower.

Clapper also said he saw no evidence of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.

Hours before the White House call for a congressional investigation, Trump continued his extraordinary and unprecedented public attack on his predecessor, tweeting about Obama’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Who was it that secretly said to Russian President, “Tell Vladimir that after the election I’ll have more flexibility?” Trump said.

Obama, who denied authorizing wiretaps on anybody and would be prevented by law from doing so in any case, did make the “flexibility” comment during a discussion with then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ahead of the 2012 election. It came in connection with talks over a proposed missile defense system.

The attacks on Obama come amid investigations of any contacts between Trump, his associates and Russians who may have been involved in efforts to influence last year’s presidential election.

In addition to the crack at Obama, Trump criticized the investigation into the hacking of Democratic National Committee officials involved in the 2016 election. “Is it true the DNC would not allow the FBI access to check server or other equipment after learning it was hacked?” Trump said. “Can that be possible?”

During his Saturday tweet storm, Trump said of the previous president: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

McCarthyism is a reference to the anti-communist crusades of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican who led a series of investigations about alleged communist influence in the U.S. government. He was eventually censured by the Senate in 1954 and died from alcoholism-related problems in 1957.

Trump spokeswoman Sarah Sanders, speaking on ABC’s This Week, said the president believes an investigation of his predecessor’s actions is warranted. “All we’re saying is let’s take a closer look,” Sanders said. “Let’s look into this.”

Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said the last administration had a “cardinal rule” that “no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice.”

As a result, Lewis said, “neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

Trump’s claims about wiretapping inspired more calls for a special prosecutor investigation of Russian involvement in last year’s election,  one that would include the president and campaign associates.

The FBI and various congressional committees are already looking into the Russians’ election role.

As investigations proceed and revelations mount, expect Trump to continue to make unfounded allegations about his opponents, some Democrats said. “As the Russia investigation gets closer and closer to Trump, he’s going to promote more conspiracy theories, not less,” said Democratic political strategist Jesse Ferguson.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, stung by disclosures he met with the Russian ambassador to the United States last year, announced last week he would recuse himself from any investigation involving the Trump campaign in which he worked.

Trump criticized Sessions’ decision, and said his critics are engaged in a “witch hunt” over Russia — a group in which he presumably includes Obama.

Certainly presidents have had disputes with each other throughout American history, from John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. But the public nature of Trump’s accusations against Obama may well be unprecedented.

Historian Joshua Zeitz said Trump appears to be engaged in a “somewhat calculated play” to keep his Republican base behind him, but that can be “a dangerous game.”

In previous presidential rivalries, Zeitz said, “the new president was wildly more popular than the former president” and that is “not the case today. In fact, quite the opposite.”

(h/t USA Today)

Trump Accuses Obama of Having Ties to Russia

President Trump launched new attacks on his predecessor and Democrats on Sunday, suggesting Barack Obama also has shady Russian ties.

At 6:40 a.m., Trump insinuated that Obama acted improperly in March 2012 when the then-president told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that the US would have more “more flexibility” in talks about a missile defense treaty after November elections.

The “more flexibility” remark was picked up on a hot mic that Obama and Medvedev apparently did not know was on.

“Who was it that secretly said to Russian President, `Tell Vladimir that after the election I’ll have more flexibility,’” tweeted Trump, under fire for his administration’s ties to Moscow.

That tweet came after a 6:32 a.m. missive that suggested Democrats didn’t want to help the FBI investigate cyberattacks now linked to Russia.

“Is it true the DNC would not allow the FBI access to check server or other equipment after learning it was hacked? Can that be possible?” Trump tweeted.

The president’s Sunday morning tweets came 23 ½ hours after he made sensational – and uncorroborated – claims that Obama had his phones at Trump Tower tapped during the 2016 campaign.

Obama’s spokesman denied the former president ordered any such covert action against Trump.

Democrats and some Republicans roundly criticized Trump for making such a wild, unsubstantiated claim.

Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) comically took Trump’s side and said maybe he was put under surveillance – for good reason.

“Mr. President: If there was a wiretap at Trump Tower, that means a fed judge found probable cause of crime which means you are in deep sh–,” Lieu tweeted.

(h/t New York Post)

Trump: ‘I Won the Popular Vote If You Deduct’ Illegal Votes

Twitter

President-elect Donald Trump declared Sunday he would have won the popular vote if “illegal” votes were discounted.

“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

The president-elect also tweeted that he would have won more easily if he had based his campaign strategy on winning the popular vote, instead of visiting states with a larger number of Electoral College votes.

Trump’s second series of tweets Sunday comes as Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s campaign has said it will file for a recount in Michigan, and Pennsylvania, after making an effort in Wisconsin official. All three states are traditionally blue states that Trump won in the presidential election.

Earlier on Sunday, Trump predicted that the recount effort in three states will not change the results of the election.

“Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the victory speech and after the results were in. Nothing will change,” he tweeted.

Clinton’s campaign is participating in the Wisconsin recount, which is already set to begin this week.

Clinton is currently leading Trump by more than 2 million in the popular vote. Politicians, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have called for an examination of using the Electoral College to decide who wins the presidency, rather than the popular vote.

Trump warned during his campaign that the election could be rigged, though election officials scoffed at the claims, noting the country’s use of a decentralized system in which ballots are counted by thousands of Democratic and Republican officials across the country.

The group of election lawyers and computer scientists pushing the recount effort says election results in the three states could have been manipulated or hacked.

However, there is no evidence of millions of people voting illegally, as Trump suggested on Twitter.

(h/t The Hill)

Reality

No one candidate has done so much damage to the integrity of the democratic process as Donald Trump, constantly putting into question a fair and valid election, often calling it “rigged.”

Yet he is not above calling a recount of voting in several states a “scam.”

A Distraction From

Trump Wrongly Tweets Social Media is Burying FBI Letter

Sunday Morning Donald Trump sent out a tweet implying that major social media sites, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are trying to suppress information regarding a letter FBI Directory James Comey sent to congress about emails found on an device belonging to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her soon-to-be ex husband Anthony Weiner.

Reality

Donald Trump received this information in an article from the conspiracy theory website Zero Hedge which is known to produce disingenuous content.

For their only evidence they showed screen grabs of we assume their own social media feeds.

However all social media sites have their own independent algorithms, and for this claim to be true Trump and his unreliable source would need to provide evidence of a level of collusion between competing social media companies.

There are a few things to consider when looking at trending topics. First, they are all algorithm-based, meaning some computer code was written to determine what topics are most important, and second, part of that algorithm factors in the things that you like.

But a simple  review of each social media site shows, in most cases, the James Comey letter is indeed in the top trending stories.

Trump has a social media team who should be able to debunk this for him.

Google

Google Trend searches for “Clinton FBI” and “FBI investigation Clinton” both showed a 100% interest value at the time of Trump’s tweet.

And news about James Comey’s letter was the top story to a logged out user.

trump-tweet-clinton-fbi-google

Facebook

Top story on Facebook.

trump-tweet-clinton-fbi-facebook

Twitter

Top of the Twitter news for a logged out user.

trump-tweet-clinton-fbi-twitter

 

 

 

Trump Questions Veracity of Ballot Counting in Colorado

Donald J. Trump has found a new reason to question the legitimacy of the 2016 election — ballots — and he wasted little time here on Saturday before taking issue with the voting system in this largely vote-by-mail state.

“I have real problems with ballots being sent,” Mr. Trump said, pantomiming a ballot collector sifting envelops and tossing some over his shoulder while counting others.

“If you don’t have a ballot, they give you another one and they void your one at home,” he told the crowd at an afternoon rally. “And then, of course, the other side would send that one in too, but, you know, we don’t do that stuff. We don’t do that stuff.”

Mr. Trump’s repetitive accusations of a “rigged” election and a slanted electoral system are grounded in the belief that fraudulent behavior would only help his opponent.

Yet it was a Trump supporter in Des Moines who was charged on Thursday with a Class D felony in Iowa, having sent in two absentee ballots, both supporting Mr. Trump.

The voter, Terri Rote, told Iowa Public Radio that she had not planned to send in two ballots, but made a “spur of the moment” decision.

“The polls are rigged,” she added, repeating a line often said by Mr. Trump.

The Polk County attorney, John P. Sarcone, told Iowa Public Radio that it was one of the very few instances of voter fraud that he had come across in his more than three decades of service. And nationally, voter fraud is rare, despite Mr. Trump’s insistence.

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump seemed undeterred in his wariness of the security of ballots, despite the same process having been in place when Cory Gardner, a Republican, defeated the incumbent Democratic senator, Mark Udall, in 2014. Mr. Trump closed his rally by encouraging his supporters to “follow their ballots” to make sure they are registered and counted.

“You can follow your ballot, make sure that ballot is registered, make sure that ballot is counted,” he said, later adding, “So follow your ballot, and if you do I, really think were gonna win Colorado and maybe win it big.”

The most recent polling out of Colorado, a Quinnipiac poll from two weeks ago, found Mrs. Clinton had a lead of eight points in the state.

(h/t New York Times)

A Single Facebook Post is All the Proof Trump Needs For Widespread Voter Fraud

A single social media post about ballot confusion in Texas has Donald Trump stoking claims of electoral corruption, but local officials say there’s not foundation for concern as it was just human error.

Some voters in Texas, which began its early voting period this week, have experienced problems casting their ballots. A Randall County voter recalled her own mishap in a Facebook post on Monday, saying that she tried to cast a straight Republican ballot — including a vote for Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence — but wound up inadvertently selecting the Democratic ticket of Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine.

As of Thursday morning, the woman’s post has been shared nearly 10,000 times and has generated hundreds of comments.

The Republican presidential nominee took to Twitter to suggest Thursday there have been widespread cases of “vote flipping,” the act of casting a vote for one candidate only to see it awarded to the opponent instead.

“A lot of call-ins about vote flipping at the voting booths in Texas,” Trump tweeted. “People are not happy. BIG lines. What is going on?”

A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. Trump’s tweet was a continuation of his oft-invoked claims of a “rigged” election, which has emerged as his central campaign message amid eroding poll numbers.

But Shannon Lackey, the elections administrator at Randall County, said there’s no reason for concern.

“Absolutely not … It is not happening in any way, shape or form,” Lackey told CNN on Thursday. “I stand 100% behind what I do. I stand behind my machines, my staff.”

The ballot complaints have surfaced elsewhere in Texas. Another woman said Monday on Facebook that a family member in Arlington, Texas, had her Republican vote changed to Clinton, a post that has been shared more than 200,000 times.

Potter County, which borders Randall County, has encountered similar problems. In each case, officials have attributed the problems to human error.

“There is nothing wrong with any of the machines we use for voting,” Potter County Judge Nancy Tanner said in a statement this week. “They do not flip your vote. They do not flip parties. Humans do that.”

Frank Phillips, the elections administrator in Arlington’s Tarrant County, said that his investigation “indicated that the voter did not follow the directions for straight-party voting.”

Randall County uses the Hart Intercivic eSlate for its elections, an electronic system that allows voters to turn a wheel and push a button to indicate preferences, and Lackey said those machines “work exactly as intended.”

Moreover, voters are dealt a summary screen at the end of each ballot, which allows them to confirm their choices before casting.

Lackey said she is confronted with such confusion most election cycles, and this year has been no exception. Her personal hypothesis is that voters, so accustomed to touch screens in their everyday lives, hit the machine’s button after indicating their choices, inadvertently “deselecting” their preferred vote.

Lackey also pointed out that the Randall County woman behind the viral Facebook post never alleged corruption, and she made it clear that she was able to correct her vote before officially casting the ballot.

“She didn’t use ‘flipping’ or anything like that in her original post,” Lackey said. “I believe that her intention in putting this on Facebook was to say, ‘Hey everyone, pay attention.'”

(h/t CNN)

1 … 6 7 8 9 10 11