Reporter thoroughly debunks 'ridiculous' dead voters myth pushed by Trump and his allies

After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to now-President Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes, Trump's allies pushed a variety of bogus voter fraud lies — from "Italygate" (the ludicrous claim that satellites in Italy switched countless from Trump to Biden) to claiming that Dominion Voting Systems' technology was used to swing the election in Biden's favor (Dominion filed defamation lawsuits against Fox News, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, attorney Sidney Powell and others in response). Another false claim is that numerous Biden supporters voted using the names of dead voters — a claim that the Washington Post's Aaron Blake thoroughly debunks in an article published on October 25.

"President Donald Trump and those around him threw a multitude of voter-fraud conspiracy theories at the wall after the 2020 election, and few were as pervasive as the idea that people rose from the dead to help defeat Trump's reelection bid," Blake explains. "Unlike many of the often-nebulous claims, these ones carried the benefit of often having been rather specific — citing actual dead people, by name, who supposedly voted. This made them actually verifiable. Nearly a year later, those specific claims have provided a case study in — and a microcosm of — just how ridiculous this whole exercise was."

That is not to say that no one in the United States used the identity of a dead person to vote in 2020. But as Blake's article explains, it was hardly widespread as Trump and his allies claimed — and when it did occur on rare occasions, those people were mostly Trump voters. Moreover, they got caught, which demonstrates that voter fraud — on the rare occasions when it does occur — is likely to result in criminal charges.

Blake explains, "On New Year's Day, the conservative Daily Signal ran down some of the names that had been cited. The Trump campaign had named four people in Pennsylvania and four in Georgia, including in a series of news releases called 'Victims of Voter Fraud.' The Nevada Republican Party cited another two in that state, calling one of them 'concrete' evidence of irregularities. Fox News' Tucker Carlson then laundered those names…. Of the 11 names cited in all of this, though, none has been shown to involve the identities of dead people used to vote for Biden. Most have been either debunked or pointed in the opposite direction."

Blake notes that in Pennsylvania, for example, some Republican voters are facing charges for voting in their dead wives' names. And these were isolated incidents, not widespread trends.

"Backers of Trump's fraud claims will look at the above and note that some of these instances have resulted in fraud charges," Blake observes. "And that's true! But even if you set aside the fact that the proven instances involve fraud by Republicans and Trump backers, not Democrats, these involve not apparent systemic fraud, but rather, people seeking to exploit unusual circumstances involving recent deaths of their own loved ones. However misguided that is, it doesn't point to anything on a scale that could actually affect any but the closest election results."