The editorial board of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has rebutted the most recent 2020 election conspiracy theory that’s been making the rounds in the right-wing media ecosystem, calling it just another effort to indulge President Donald Trump’s “nonsense.”
Five years after Joe Biden narrowly defeated Trump in Georgia, prompting Trump to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the 11,779 votes he lost by, an attorney representing the Fulton County Elections Board admitted that there was a clerical error in tabulating the county’s votes.
“I have not seen the tapes myself, but we do not dispute that the tapes were not signed,” the lawyer said during a December hearing. “It was a violation of the rule. Since 2020, again, we have new leadership, and a new building, and a new board, and new standard operating procedures, and since then the training has been enhanced.”
The admission that poll workers had failed to sign tabulator tapes for the county’s early voting ballots quickly rocketed across the MAGA universe, with countless pro-Trump pundits and influencers crowing that this proved Trump was right that the election was “stolen” from him since 315,000 votes were “illegally” counted.
“Massive scandal: Fulton County admits they ‘violated’ the rules in 2020 when they certified ≈315K early votes that lacked poll workers' signatures. ‘We don't dispute the allegation.’ The SOS also found FC ‘violated Official Election... Processes,’” The Federalist’s Brianna Lyman exclaimed on X earlier this month.
“That Thing We Were Told Didn't Happen During the 2020 Election Happened After All,” a Townhall headline blared, adding that the “story is so damning and alarming” because Georgia “accepted more than 300,000 early ballots that lacked poll worker signatures.”
With other conservatives claiming Trump had been “vindicated” in his insistence that he actually beat Biden, the Wall Street Journal’s board poured cold water on the latest MAGA attempt to validate the president’s election denialism.
“Yet Georgia’s ballots in 2020 were counted three times, twice by scanner and once by hand, five million of them,” the conservative paper’s editors noted.
“Unsigned tabulator tapes are a problem, and that this mistake was so apparently widespread during early voting in Fulton County is an indicator that its election office deserved an overhaul,” the board added. “Yet an error by poll workers isn’t a reason to throw out tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by Georgians who did nothing wrong.”
In his own statement over the lack of poll workers’ signatures, Raffensperger declared: “Georgia has the most secure elections in the country and all voters were verified with photo ID and lawfully cast their ballots. A clerical error at the end of the day does not erase valid legal votes.”
In an additional statement, a spokesperson for Raffensperger said that the signature requirement “wasn’t even part of the election code—it was a procedural rule,” and that while “there was sloppiness that needed improvement” in the process, “outright fraud was not a concern.”
According to the WSJ board, this “is all getting more attention than it deserves because Mr. Raffensperger is running for Governor, and his GOP primary opponents are using the Fulton County mistake against him.” At the same time, the board explained that Raffensperger’s opponents have offered no evidence to show that the ballots were fraudulent.
“Elections are supposed to run by the book, and Fulton County’s blunder is bad for public confidence,” the board wrote. “Yet so are Mr. Trump’s constantly shifting claims that the 2020 election was stolen, with every irregularity claimed as supposedly proving history’s biggest fraud.”
Noting that “the evidence says no” whether this “particular goof” would have swung Georgia for Trump, the editors concluded by chastising Republicans for endorsing the president’s endless election fraud conspiracies.
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“Mr. Trump will never admit his 2020 claims were partisan nonsense. But Republicans who care about the future could do their man a favor by refusing to keep indulging them,” the board pointed out.
While the Wall Street Journal is owned by Murdoch – who launched Fox News – and generally skews to the right on its opinion pages, the editorial board has been largely critical of the media-bashing president since his return to the White House.
Of course, Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the WSJ in recent months, even if it is run by his longtime ally. Weeks after kicking off his second term, Trump fumed at Murdoch over the WSJ’s coverage – with the conservative media mogul sitting next to him in the Oval Office.
Months later, after the WSJ published a bombshell report revealing that the president had allegedly signed a “bawdy” birthday letter to the late sex predator Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against Murdoch and the paper and denied the claims.
Still, even as lawyers for the publication have fired back at Trump and called for the lawsuit to be dismissed as “the article is true” and the president’s complaint is an “affront to the First Amendment’,” Murdoch has tried to remain friendly with the commander-in-chief. In October, Murdoch and several of his key lieutenants dined at the White House with Trump.
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