In a nearly two hour rambling press conference outlining their accusations of election fraud, the self-described “elite strike force team” of Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Joe DiGenova and Jenna Ellis failed to coherently demonstrate that their claims make sense, let alone hold water.

With hair dye running down the side of his face, Giuliani led his team as they described an election scene where the creator of the voting systems used by 26 states, local election officials, and state and national Democratic leaders manipulated votes by using a combination of logarithms, trashing computer files, submitting fraudulent ballots and destroying ballots for Trump to propel Democratic President-elect Joe Biden to victory.

At various times, Giuliani claimed to have thousands of witnesses, at least 400 affidavits and/or 280 affidavits by poll watchers, vote counters and others.  Giuliani, however, claimed he could only publicly release eight of those affidavits out of fear for the safety of the people who swore them out. 

Giuliani, however, failed to mention that his legal team withdrew a Michigan lawsuit to which many of the affidavits were applied, meaning that those statements will play no role in a legal proceeding in the state.  He also failed to recognize that the Trump legal team stated in court, with Giuliani present, that they are not making any claims of fraud in the election during a Pennsylvania hearing earlier this week.

Fox News legal contributor Sidney Powell claimed that the votes taken using Dominion voting systems were being tallied in Germany and Spain, a claim that has widely been debunked.  She claimed that there was a plot by China, Cuba and Venezuela to undermine US democracy.

Powell alleged that the software used to count the votes would count a vote for Biden as 1.25 votes, but it would show a vote for Trump as only 0.75 votes.  She also claimed that an algorithm embedded in the software would automatically adjust totals to widen Biden’s lead in precincts.  Election workers, she claimed, would intentionally delete computer files that held ballot tallies that were favorable to Trump.  And she claimed that outside actors, who were perhaps domestic or foreign, would hack into systems and change vote totals.

There is no evidence to support any of those claims.

Giuliani claimed that there were 150%, 200% or 300% overvotes in certain precincts or counties that were favorable to Biden, to which Giuliani says there were that many more people voted than were on voter rolls.  (This is a claim made in virtually every election by people who don’t understand how certain counties define “ballot”, where vote tallies count each side of paper as a separate ballot; a two sheet ballot, where you vote on four sides of paper, would therefore count as four ballots.)

Giuliani claimed that from one location in Philadelphia, sixty witnesses came forward to describe a scene were a van showed up at 4 a.m. with ballots in garbage cans, bags, boxes and bins that were all Biden votes.  This appears to be a re-imaging of a claim from an anonymous person who appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, in which a woman–in silhouette and with her voice electronically altered–claimed that poll workers in Philly rushed out to a van that arrived in a polling place early in the morning, which she assumed was delivery breakfast.  She claimed the van, with a “Biden-Harris” logo on the side, instead contained tens of thousands of ballots which a few people filled out on the loading dock of the Philadelphia Convention Center before delivering them inside.

Giuliani also claimed that an affidavit by a Detroit poll worker, Jessy Jacob, described being instructed by her supervisors to not look at identification for voters; Michigan required photo ID to vote.  She claimed that she watched poll workers instruct voters on how to vote for Joe Biden; Michigan allows poll workers to walk voters through how to use a voting machine.  She described watching vote counters run ballots through scanning machines two or three times; once a ballot is successfully scanned, it is deposited into a self-contained stack in the machine, making it impossible to run through multiple times.

Giuliani also said that people witnessed people getting provisional ballots or being allowed to vote again after election registries had them previously voting by mail; many states allow in-person voters to void, or “spoil,” mailed in votes by voting on Election Day after signing an affidavit.

Describing the group of alleged lawyers as an “elite strike force team,” Jenna Ellis stated that these was just preliminary accusations of corruption and election tampering designed to win the court of public opinion, and that actually legal suits would be brought later.  She warned that this was “not ‘Law & Order'” and that people shouldn’t expect all these claims would not be wrapped up in an hour.