Donald Trump’s team issued a statement from the former president via email on Sept. 14, alleging that there was “manipulated voting” in the California withdrawal election.
Insider and Decision Desk HQ convened the race by Governor Gavin Newsom at 8:21 pm PT. Newsom survived the withdrawal and defeated 46 more candidates, including controversial main GOP candidate Larry Elder. Insider received the email from Trump’s team less than an hour after the polls closed in California.
“People don’t realize that despite the Rigged vote in California (I call it‘ Swarming Ballots ’), I got 1.5 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016,” Trump wrote in the statement.
There is no evidence of widespread voting apparatus in the California withdrawal election.
Trump went on to admit that Newsom will “probably win,” while limiting himself to controlling the California drought by the governor.
“The place is so fixed, though, that it’s likely to win a guy who can’t even bring water to his state, which I got federal approval for (that’s the hardest part),” Trump continued.
“Billions of gallons of water coming to California from the north are being sent to the sea, instead of being spread across the state. This is to protect the small delta odor, which is now much worse without the water, ”Trump wrote.
California has a history of water flowing into the Pacific Ocean and wasted. And the smell of the delta, a small blue fish that lives only in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, is, as Trump wrote in the statement, in critical condition.
Trump also obtained federal approval to divert water to irrigated farms in 2019, but The New York Times reported that this involved lifting protections for fish like the smell of the delta. In fact, Trump’s actions could have led the fish to extinction, according to a 2019 Guardian report. In October 2018, Trump signed a memorandum calling on federal agencies to reduce water to on Central Valley farms, which could have left the smell without the fresh, cold water they need to survive and thrive.
In the statement, Trump said there are similarities between the California withdrawal election and the 2020 presidential election.
“A lot of people are already complaining that when they’re going to vote they’re told,‘ I’m sorry, you’ve already voted ’(just like in 2020, among many other things),” Trump wrote.
There is no evidence of electoral fraud in the 2020 election, and judges have ruled strongly against the Trump campaign’s demands for electoral fraud in 12 states, including Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
According to the Poynter Institute’s Politifact data checker, there were two cases where voters mistakenly said they had already voted in this year’s California withdrawal election. However, they were allowed to vote provisionally and there is no evidence to indicate that Republican Party voters were objective.