Fox News host Tucker Carlson said the 2020 election was “rigged” to favor President-elect Joe Biden in plain sight.
The top-rated cable news figure used his opening monologue on Monday to argue that Democrats orchestrated an expansive scheme to bend the presidential contest in their favor. He started by claiming that electronic voting is unreliable and called for a return to hand-counting paper ballots without the use of machines.
He made the case following a week in which Carlson challenged Sidney Powell, who is involved in the Trump legal fight in battleground states, to show evidence that voting machines are being used to flip votes and a couple hours after the General Services Administration authorized the transition to a Biden administration.
“You’ve heard a lot over the past few days about the security of our electronic voting machines. And this is a real issue, no matter who raises it or who tries to dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory. Electronic voting is not as secure as traditional hand-counting, period. It never will be as secure. Voters can see this because it’s obvious, and it makes them nervous,” Carlson said.
Carlson blamed the country’s leaders for sowing this doubt and claimed other countries avoid electronic voting “because they know it undermines confidence in democracy.”
“Going forward, we need to find out exactly what happened in this month’s presidential election. We need to find out no matter how long it takes the investigation to unfold or how much it costs. And once we get answers from that investigation, we ought to revert immediately to the traditional system of voting, the one that served our democracy for hundreds of years. What we are doing now is not working,” he said.
President Trump and his allies have argued the presidential election was “rigged,” and Trump, who has not conceded the race, is waging legal fights across several battleground states and has requested some recounts.
But evidence of widespread voter fraud has not turned up, and any problems with voting machines have been blamed on human error.
Earlier this month, the Homeland Security Department released a joint statement with some partners and advisers that said that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” The statement also stressed that “the Nov. 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”
Afterward, Trump fired Chris Krebs, who served as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and said the statement was “highly inaccurate.”
Carlson claimed the 2020 election was unfair in several other ways, part of a process that spanned across the entire year.
“On many levels, the system was rigged against one candidate and in favor of another. And it was rigged in ways that were not hidden from view. We all saw it happen. The media openly colluded with the Democratic nominees. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to explain what they would do if they were elected. That’s never happened before in any presidential election in American history. But the media allowed them to do it,” he said.
“At the same time, beginning in the spring, Democrats used our public health emergency for nakedly partisan ends,” he added, referring to the coronavirus pandemic. “They punished Trump supporters for trying to gather, but they exempted their own activists, rioters, and vandals from BLM [Black Lives Matter] and antifa from the COVID lockdowns entirely.”
He said the restrictions Democrats did enforce “crushed” small businesses, which he said are “the heart” of the Republican Party, while their own donors got richer. He named Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and said the world’s wealthiest man saw his net worth jump by more than $70 billion during the pandemic.
“Then, Democrats used the coronavirus to change your system of voting. They vastly increased the number of mail-in ballots because they knew their candidates would benefit from less secure voting, and they were right,” he said.
“They used the courts to neutralize the Republican Party’s single most effective ‘get out the vote’ operation, which, for generations, had been the National Rifle Association,” Carlson continued. “Not enough has been written about this, but anyone on the ground saw it. Thanks to legal harassment from the Left, the NRA played a vastly reduced role in this election, and that made a huge difference in swing states like Pennsylvania and others.”
Carlson said, “Above all” was how Democrats “harnessed the power of Big Tech to win this election,” referring to how news is curated in Google and social media giants Twitter and Facebook deciding to “censor” ideas online.
“They rigged the election in front of all of us, and nobody did anything about it,” he concluded.
Biden is projected to have 306 electoral votes, 36 more than is needed to win the Electoral College, and so far leads Trump by about 6 million in the popular vote, according to the Associated Press. Trump, who needs to flip more than one state to pull off a victory, is running out of time as states certify their votes, and the Electoral College meets in mid-December. Inauguration Day is Jan. 20.