Michelle Fischbach repeats baseless election fraud claim on Fox News
Newly elected 7th District congresswoman Michelle Fischbach is among the Republicans who are supporting Donald Trump's unproven claims that the presidential election is being "stolen" by Democrats.
President Trump continues to suggest – without evidence – that an increasingly large number of votes that are going against him in crucial swing states are "illegal," despite it being well established prior to the election that due to the increase in mail voting because of the COVID-19 pandemic, results may take several days to become clear.
Counting continues in most states, not just swing states, as many of them have rules that allow for absentee ballots that arrive in the days after Nov. 3 to be counted, provided they were post-dated before the deadline on Election Day. Many of those still being counted are absentee ballots, which have typically favored Democratic candidates as more Democrats voted by mail this year.
But while the president's campaign called for the end of counts in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada, where Biden looks set to win, the campaign does not have the same complaint about Arizona, where the remaining votes left to be counted tend to favor Trump.
On Friday morning, Fischbach appeared on Fox News and appeared to back the president's conspiracy claim that ballots being counted in the days after Election Day aren't lawful.
"You know, I pray it will be handled correctly and that President Trump will win, because I believe he did win," Fischbach said.
"They [Democrats] did not win the votes of the American people, they are just finding votes at this point."
There is no indication that states such as Pennsylvania are "finding votes." They are counting votes that have been received and there is no evidence presented at this time that suggests they aren't valid.
Fischbach's support for the president's unproven claims is shared by Jennifer Carnahan, the chair of the Minnesota GOP, who has tweeted and retweeted several posts on Friday that call for the counting of all "legal votes," again, without there being any suggestion that the votes being counted aren't legal.
"We need to stand up for the integrity of America's election system and process," she tweeted. "It's important that we do not stand for game playing with vote counting."
Carnahan's husband, the re-elected 1st District Rep. Jim Hagedorn, commented that there's an "eerily exact emerging pattern" in how votes are being counted in "Democrat-run battleground states," citing Wisconsin, Michigan Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina – all of which have GOP-controlled legislatures, while two of them (Georgia, N. Carolina) have GOP governors.
Several other prominent Republicans nationwide have rejected the claims by the president that the vote count is fraudulent, among them Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, who said: "There’s simply no evidence anyone has shown me of any widespread corruption or fraud."
Of the president's widely criticized press conference on Thursday, during which he issued a litany of baseless claims about the election, Toomey added: "I saw the president's speech last night. It was very hard to watch. The president's allegations of large-scale fraud and theft of the election are just not substantiated. I'm not aware of any significant wrongdoing here."
