By Jorge Legañoa Alonso on November 20, 2020
The outgoing U.S. president’s legal team brought its narrative of electoral fraud to a climax yesterday in the presidential elections at the beginning of the month. As unusual as it may seem to you, during a press conference, Trump’s lawyers claimed to have evidence of a “pattern” of voter fraud in several states.
Attorney Sidney Powell said they are aware of “the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and probably China in the U.S. elections and the interference of these countries that would have helped create software that altered the results”. But it doesn’t stop there. In this new chapter of the U.S. electoral novel, they have included Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, who according to them would be a relevant participant in the alleged operation, seven years after his death.
According to Powell, Chavez had achieved the creation of a voting system from the company Dominion and technology software from Smartmatic to ensure that he would never lose an election; and this technology would have been used during the vote count in this election in the US.
The irrefutable proof of all this, they say is a “solid witness”, who they conveniently did not present, nor did they say his or her name. They pointed out that the “witness” as soon as he saw several states closing the voting on election night, knew that the same thing was happening as it had in Venezuela.
Rudy Giuliani sweated so hard to make this new fraud speech credible that he ended up dripping dye from his hair down his face.
Giuliani claimed that a Venezuelan voting machine was used to count the votes. He said, “If we allow this to happen, we will become Venezuela. This is nothing more than the same McCarthyist rhetoric that Trump employed during the campaign, calling Biden a socialist, when in fact he is not, not by a long shot.
I know that all this I have just told you here you are interpreting it as an absurdity, because it is something so crude, and it would not be a really funny bad joke, if it were not for the serious implications, because the interference of foreign countries in an election is a very sensitive issue and justification for further aggressions and unilateral measures and the strengthening of the blockade.
The reactions were not long in coming. Jorge Arreaza, the Venezuelan Foreign Minister said that there are three levels here: lies, absurdity and ridicule, and that blaming Commander Chávez for Trump’s defeat is extremely ridiculous. The Cuban Foreign Minister also denied Cuba’s alleged interference and called the accusations -without evidence- “pure slander”.
The company Smartmatic published a statement assuring that they have never been owned, financed or supported by any government. And with respect to Dominion’s voting system, it is actually two companies competing for the same market.
Trump’s attorneys exclude the fact that Chávez did lose elections, such as the 2007 constitutional referendum, and Chavismo the 2015 parliamentary elections, always using Smarmatic equipment for voting and counting, and the system was even certified by The Carter Center who had observers at those elections.
In my opinion, all this stuff put together by the Trumpistas seeks to feed the version of fraud at all costs and divert attention from their defeat. They do not present a single piece of evidence, but they resort to the anti-communist narrative that has almost always paid them dividends, in a country that is now dominated by polarization and brutal disinformation.
Trump is leaving the White House, but he is seeking to stay by force of lies in the hearts and minds of the more than 70 million who voted for him; a good part of those followers will believe the story of Chávez, Venezuela, Cuba and China and that they stole the election from him, because they will be bombarded with this narrative until they end up assuming it as their own.
The tale of fraud falls flat, they call for a full-scale criminal investigation, but they ignore the U.S. Agency for Infrastructure Security and Cybersecurity, has already stated that there is no evidence that “any voting system has eliminated, lost or changed votes or been compromised in any way”. Trump has just two months left in the White House, and he seems determined to use this time for ridiculous, but worrisome and dangerous campaigns.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau