Trump in overnight meltdown makes eight false election claims in just four tweets

US president continues to refuse to concede despite comfortable Biden victory

Donald Trump made eight false or misleading claims about the US election in a series of overnight tweets, culminating in a 1am lie that he “WON THE ELECTION!”

The president’s baseless assertions came just hours after he briefly raised hopes he would concede to Joe Biden when he tweeted that the President-elect “won” - although that was part of a false claim that the election was “rigged”.

“Why does the Fake News Media continuously assume that Joe Biden will ascend to the Presidency, not even allowing our side to show, which we are just getting ready to do, how badly shattered and violated our great Constitution has been in the 2020 Election,” Mr Trump initially tweeted shortly before 10pm on Sunday.

“It was attacked, perhaps like never before! From large numbers of Poll Watchers that were thrown out of vote counting rooms in many of our States, to millions of ballots that have been altered by Democrats, only for Democrats, to voting after the Election was over, to using Radical Left owned Dominion Voting Systems, turned down by Texas and many others because it was not good or secure, those responsible for the safeguarding of our Constitution cannot allow the Fake results of the 2020 Mail-In Election to stand.”

There is no evidence to suggest the election in any way violated the US constitution, nor that it was “attacked”. The Trump administration’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in fact hailed it as “the most secure in American history”.

Mr Trump’s claim Republican poll watchers were wrongly “thrown out” of counting rooms is also baseless. There have been no credible reports suggesting this happened, and the Trump campaign has failed to back up this allegation in court.

Ahead of a Tuesday hearing into a lawsuit seeking to stop the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania, which Mr Biden narrowly won, the Trump campaign is now dropping the allegation that hundreds of thousands of ballots were illegally processed without its representatives watching.

Similarly, there is no evidence of Democrats systematically altering ballots, let alone doing so in the millions, nor of illegally voting once polling stations closed.

The claim that Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that supplies software to local governments, is politically biased stems from a conspiracy theory that emerged when a human error briefly led to false election results in one Michigan county.

The glitch, which was soon corrected, spawned a theory touted by Mr Trump and his allies that Dominion “deleted” millions of votes for Mr Trump. 

While one county in Georgia delayed its reporting due to an apparent problem with the firm’s software, other isolated issues blamed on Dominion were actually connected to a separate company’s software, or just due to simple human error.

“No credible reports or evidence of any software issues exist,” Dominion itself said in a statement last week. “While no election is without isolated issues, Dominion Voting Systems are reliably and accurately counting ballots. State and local election authorities have publicly confirmed the integrity of the process.”

Mr Trump’s conclusion that the results were “fake” is therefore backed up by none of his previous claims, and his campaign’s legal attempts to challenge the election results have been largely found to be lacking adequate evidence.

At just before 1am on Monday morning, Mr Trump tweeted: “I WON THE ELECTION!”.

This claim is a lie. Mr Biden, the Democratic nominee, won the contest, finishing with 306 electoral college votes, which is the same number received by Mr Trump when he won the 2016 election. Mr Biden also won the popular vote by more than 5 million votes.

In its attempts to challenge election misinformation, Twitter slapped warning labels on three of Mr Trump’s four tweets.