Fact check: NC’s Madison Cawthorn explains challenge to Biden’s win. Here’s what he got wrong.
The issue: North Carolina’s incoming congressman, Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn, announced that he will vote against accepting the results of the presidential race, in a video filled with misinformation about the 2020 election.
Why we’re checking this: The video was retweeted by President Donald Trump and has been viewed millions of times.
What you need to know: Cawthorn, 25, was sworn in Sunday to represent much of western North Carolina in Congress. In a 6-minute video posted three days earlier, he repeated many of the same debunked claims about the election that Trump has made in his efforts to cling to power.
He plans to join other Republicans in trying to vote to stop Democratic President-elect Joe Biden from taking office.
“My first act as a member of Congress will be to object to the Electoral College certification of the 2020 election,” Cawthorn said.
The New York Times called that effort “futile” because to work it would have to pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House is controlled by Democrats. And even in the Republican-controlled Senate, top Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell has reportedly been telling fellow Republicans not to vote against accepting Biden’s win.
“Every state in the country has certified the election results after verifying their accuracy, many following post-election audits or hand counts,” The New York Times reported. “Judges across the country, and a Supreme Court with a conservative majority, have rejected nearly 60 attempts by Mr. Trump and his allies to challenge the results.”
Cawthorn’s video repeats many of the same claims the Trump campaign has tried and failed to make in court, and Trump retweeted the video Friday night. By Sunday morning the video had over 3.5 million views just on Twitter.
At no point does Cawthorn acknowledge that many issues he’s raising have already been shot down in court dozens of times since the election. An email to Cawthorn’s spokesman asking if he could cite any sources for the claims made in the video, or if Cawthorn knew about those lawsuit results, was not returned Sunday.
Cawthorn did, however, invite people to fact-check the claims he made. Here is a sampling.
Voter fraud is rare
“Voter fraud is common in America,” Cawthorn said, calling it “an irrefutable fact.”
It’s not.
Voter fraud is actually incredibly rare. Even this year — with Trump and numerous Republicans like Cawthorn lobbing vague allegations of fraud and giving the issue a higher profile than it has perhaps ever had — no proof has emerged of any fraud scheme in any state that might have tipped the scales for either Trump or Biden.
Despite that, Cawthorn said that “you are insane if you think this election had none.” He did not cite any examples of it actually happening, though.
In the past, states have declined to certify election results if they even suspect — let alone can prove — significant fraud. In North Carolina, for instance, state officials in 2018 didn’t certify the results of one of the state’s 13 congressional races due to suspicious mail-in voting numbers for the Republican candidate, Mark Harris.
After days of hearings held by state election officials, a new election was ordered and a Bladen County political operative who worked for the Harris campaign, McCrae Dowless, was charged with numerous election-related crimes.
That case made national news, in large part because fraud is so rare.
The state of North Carolina also conducted a wide-reaching audit of voter fraud allegations after the 2016 elections. The audit found two cases of voter impersonation, out of 4.8 million votes that year, and 508 total ballots that might have been ineligible for various other reasons.
State officials have not tracked how many of those cases led to criminal convictions. Regardless, the audit found, no election results would’ve changed even if every single allegation were proven true, since the ballots in question came from voters of all political stripes spread out across the state.
Problems in swing states
Cawthorn listed problems he has with voting rules in several states Trump lost. In Pennsylvania, he said, the results should be overturned because people were “voting days and days after the election,” and that during and after the election “poll watchers were banned from polling places and tabulation rooms.”
Neither claim is true.
Voting ended in Pennsylvania — and every other state in America — on election night. However, some states do allow votes to continue arriving in the mail within a few days of Election Day and be counted as long as they were postmarked on time. North Carolina actually had an even longer grace period than Pennsylvania, although Cawthorn did not say that that should invalidate his or Trump’s victories here.
The claim about poll watchers being banned from places like tabulation rooms, where they’re allowed to watch votes being counted, is also false.
Trump and his allies tried making similar claims in lawsuits in several states he lost, but they were debunked. The New York Times reported that judges in Nevada and Georgia threw out lawsuits making such claims, and in a Pennsylvania lawsuit, one of Trump’s own lawyers admitted that they did have people in the room watching the votes being counted.
Mail-in voting riskier for fraud?
“There is bipartisan agreement from experts that mail-in ballots are wildly susceptible to fraud,” Cawthorn said. “Fraud using mail-in balloting has led to criminal convictions in dozens of states in recent elections. Fact check that.”
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, whose founders include former Republican Sen. Bob Dole and former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle, “the most common myth about absentee voting is that mail-in ballots are more susceptible to voter fraud.”
One relevant example is Oregon, which has conducted its elections entirely by mail since 2000.
And in Oregon, proven mail-in ballot fraud isn’t even a one-in-a-million occurrence: From 2000 to 2019, Oregon officials convicted 38 people for voter fraud. In the same time, voters there cast nearly 61 million ballots. That’s a fraud rate of around 0.00006%, according to a 2020 report from the state legislature there.
And it’s not just Oregon. Nationwide, whether by mail or in person, voter fraud is incredibly rare.
But is Cawthorn right about convictions in dozens of states? Yes, in small numbers. States, both red and blue, do tend to have a few cases per decade.
However, Cawthorn exaggerates the threat of voter fraud.
“Here is a list of thousands — yes, thousands — of recent instances of election fraud that has led to criminal convictions and even the overturning of election results in our country,” he says at one point, while a list quickly scrolls across the screen.
Cawthorn didn’t respond to requests about where he got his data, but The News & Observer found the list that scrolls while he speaks. It’s a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, which has also been posted to the White House website.
Despite Cawthorn’s claim that it shows “thousands” of “recent” convictions for voter fraud, the list contains fewer than 1,000 convictions and stretches back to the 1940s.
The 938 convictions on that list span seven decades, from 1948 to 2017. That means that on average, according to that report’s numbers, states have had roughly one conviction for voter fraud every four years.
Most states hold multiple elections every year, further highlighting how rare fraud is. For instance, North Carolina held 18 elections from 2016 to 2020.
The Heritage Foundation report lists around 50 convictions for voter fraud in North Carolina, nearly all of them stemming from a 1982 vote-buying scandal in far-western North Carolina.
Dead voters, ‘mathematically impossible’ results
Cawthorn said he also doesn’t trust the results of the election due to “corrupted election technology, illegal counting practices, dead voters and mathematically impossible vote irregularities.”
The corrupted election technology line appears to refer to the conspiracy theory, popular in QAnon circles, that voting machine companies rigged the vote count.
The line about illegal vote-counting practices could refer to any number of complaints the various post-election Trump lawsuits have made in swing states that he lost, which have been denied in court. Cawthorn’s claims include an allegation that Georgia is using what he calls “unconstitutional” ballot drop boxes. With Georgia now in the middle of two runoff elections for its U.S. Senate seats, a judge last month threw out a GOP lawsuit trying to limit access to the drop boxes there.
The line about dead people voting is a frequently debunked talking point that nevertheless remains popular in right-wing media. It has been fact-checked in North Carolina as recently as 2017. Similar claims about the 2020 election in states Trump lost have also been disproven recently, including Pennsylvania and Georgia.
As for the “mathematically impossible vote irregularities” Cawthorn mentions, it’s unclear what exactly he’s talking about. However, there is a popular conspiracy theory that some voting precincts in Michigan had a voter turnout of more than 100% or, in other words, there were more votes than there were voters.
Those debunked theories may have stemmed from a lawsuit from Trump allies attempting to overturn the results of the vote in Michigan, which voted for Biden. That lawsuit made false claims about fraud in numerous cities, like saying that Detroit had a 139% voter turnout rate when in reality it had a 51% voter turnout rate, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Despite being easily and quickly debunked, the wild theories spread around social media and then into more formal settings. For instance, when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani attended a recent hearing in Michigan, he tried stopping one of his witnesses when she said, “What about the turnout rate? 120 percent?”
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREOur process
We check claims that are widely shared or published; are about a topic of concern to many of our readers; can be proven or disproven through facts; and could cause people to act or vote in a certain way. This topic met all the criteria.
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Our sources. Here’s where we found information and research on this topic:
“Trump’s election fight includes over 50 lawsuits. It’s not going well.” by NBC News, updated Dec. 10, 2020
“Fact-checking Trump’s election fraud falsehoods in White House remarks” by PolitiFact, Nov. 5, 2020
“Pence Welcomes Futile Bid by G.O.P. Lawmakers to Overturn Election” by The New York Times, Jan. 2, 2021
“QAnon’s Dominion voter fraud conspiracy theory reaches the president” by NBC News, Nov. 13, 2020
“A sampling of election fraud cases from across the country” by The Heritage Foundation, posted on the White House website
“Is Voting by Mail Safe and Reliable? We Asked State and Local Elections Officials” by the Bipartisan Policy Center, June 12, 2020
Oregon report on voter fraud over two decades of mail-in voting, published October 2020, by the Oregon Legislative Fiscal Office
North Carolina audit of voter fraud allegations in 2016 general election, by the N.C. State Board of Elections, April 21, 2017
“508 ineligible voters cast ballots in 2016, according to NC elections agency report” by The News & Observer, April 21, 2017
“Bladen County operative at center of NC election fraud investigation indicted, arrested” by The Charlotte Observer, April 23, 2019
“There’s no evidence to support claims that election observers were blocked from counting rooms.” by The New York Times, Nov. 7, 2020
“Exasperated judges question Trump lawyers on election claims, leading to one ‘nonzero’ admission” by the American Bar Association Journal, Nov. 12, 2020
“Thin Allegations of ‘Dead People’ Voting” by FactCheck.org, Nov. 9, 2020
“No, thousands of dead people are not registered to vote in North Carolina” by PolitiFact North Carolina, May 18, 2017
“Fact check: Evidence undermines Trump campaign’s claims of dead people voting in Georgia” by CNN, Nov. 13, 2020
“Affidavit in Michigan lawsuit makes wildly inaccurate claims about voter turnout in state” by the Detroit Free Press, Dec. 4, 2020
“Fact check: Six Michigan areas did not have voter turnouts of more than 100%” by Reuters, Dec. 17, 2020
“Judge dismisses GOP lawsuit to limit Georgia ballot drop box hours” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dec. 24, 2020
Madison Cawthorn tweet with video and election fraud claims, Dec. 31, 2020
This story was produced by The News & Observer Fact-Checking Project, which shares fact-checks with newsrooms statewide. It was edited by Politics Editor Jordan Schrader and Deputy Metro Editor Mark Schultz. Submit a suggestion for what we should check, or a comment or suggestion about our fact-checking, at bit.ly/nandofactcheck.
This story was originally published January 4, 2021 at 8:28 AM with the headline "Fact check: NC’s Madison Cawthorn explains challenge to Biden’s win. Here’s what he got wrong.."
