Page:Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/253

 Detroit were "incorrect and not credible" and "rife with speculation and guess-work about sinister motives."

Many of the fake ballot claims were publicly raised and repeated by President Trump, but never included in any lawsuit. For example, a truck driver for the U.S. Postal Service claimed that he delivered hundreds of thousands of completed ballots from Bethpage, New York to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. President Trump repeated this allegation numerous times. The DOJ and FBI interviewed the relevant witnesses, including the truck driver, and reviewed the loading manifests. They determined that the allegation was not true. Both Attorney General Barr and his successor, Jeffrey Rosen, told President Trump this claim was false. But that didn't stop the President from repeating it.

Another alleged "truckload of ballots" was supposedly delivered to the Detroit counting center at 4:30 a.m. on election night. This truck allegedly carried 100,000 ballots in garbage cans, wastepaper bins, cardboard boxes, and shopping baskets. A widely circulated video purportedly showed an unmarked van dropping off ballots, which were then wheeled into the counting center on a wagon. In fact, the only ballot delivery in Detroit after midnight on election night was an official delivery of 16,000 ballots, stacked in 45 well-organized trays of approximately 350 ballots each. The wagon depicted in the video contained camera equipment being pulled by a reporter. The claim of 100,000 fake ballots being smuggled into the counting center in the middle of the night is even more ridiculous in light of the fact that only 174,384 absent voter ballots were recorded in the City of Detroit in the 2020 election. The addition of 100,000 fake ballots to approximately 74,000 legitimate ballots would certainly have been obvious to election officials.

President Trump also repeatedly claimed that more votes were cast than there were registered voters in certain States, cities, or precincts. It was easy to fact-check these allegations and demonstrate they were false.

For example, in Pennsylvania, approximately nine million people were registered to vote and approximately 6.8 million votes were cast in the 2020 presidential election. Nevertheless, President Trump and his allies made numerous "more votes than voters" claims in Pennsylvania. Citing 2020 mail-in voting data tweeted by Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano, President Trump claimed that 1.1 million ballots had been "created" and counted improperly. In fact, there was no discrepancy in the actual numbers—Mastriano erroneously compared the 2.6 million mail-in ballots cast in the November general election to the 1.5 million ballots that were returned in the June primary election.