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    'Can we have America back?' Fox News video echoes Trump election claims

    Fox News has come in for criticism over a promotional video in which opinion hosts echo Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden but which he refuses to concede.
    “Oh my god,” Andrew Laurence of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, wrote on Twitter. “Fox is running a promo of their ‘opinion’ hosts casting doubt on the election results and I guess trying to keep their rabid viewers sated.”
    Oliver Darcy, a media reporter for CNN, said the video showed executives at the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel “really have no shame”.
    In the short video, an announcer introduces a montage of “the voices America trusts”. Laura Ingraham is shown first, saying: “These legal efforts are critical.”
    That is a reference to cases Trump has mounted in key battleground states, alleging without evidence that voter fraud and ballot irregularities occurred, and seeking to overturn results via recounts.

    Such quixotic efforts have met with little success and experts say they are almost guaranteed to fail. More than 5m votes down in the popular vote, Trump lost the electoral college to Biden by 306-232, the score by which he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 in what he claimed was a landslide.
    On the Fox News video, Tucker Carlson appears next, saying: “There are apparent irregularities.”
    “The media mob, and the Democrats, they lie,” says Sean Hannity.
    “Speaking up for you, and the issues that matter most to the people,” says the announcer.
    “They thought there would be a blue wave, not the case,” says Steve Doocy of Fox & Friends, a morning show favoured by Trump. In fact Doocy’s comment points to an electoral truth: that Trump attracted the most votes of any sitting president, staving off an expected landslide defeat, and that Republicans made gains at state level and in the US House and look set to retain control of the Senate.
    “You’re gonna see something even bigger than Trump in 2022 and 2024,” says Greg Gutfeld, referring to the next two election years.
    “The truth does need to come out,” says Ingraham.
    “Can we speak freely, again, can we have America back?” asks Carlson.
    “We the people deserve better,” says Hannity.
    “Fox News,” the announcer says. “America is watching.”
    Trump has attacked Fox News since the election, in which it was quick to call Arizona, a key state, for Biden, then joined other media organisations in calling the whole race for the Democrat last Saturday.
    “Fox News daytime ratings have completely collapsed,” Trump tweeted on Thursday. “Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was Fox News!”
    Darcy, of CNN, wrote that the Fox News video “appears to be part of a bid to hold on to its bleeding audience – an audience that refuses to believe reality, in large part because Fox has primed millions to distrust credible news sources”.
    Fox News has countered that its ratings remain strong, saying in a recent release it “finished the month of October as the most-watched cable network in both total day and primetime total viewers … notching 52 months in a row in the top spot”.
    According to Media Matters, Trump’s conspiracy theories have crossed into Fox News’ “straight” news operation.
    In the four days after the result was called, the watchdog said, Fox News “cast doubt on or pushed conspiracy theories about the election results at least 255 times. A review by Media Matters found 111 such claims on Fox’s ‘straight news’ shows and 144 claims on the network’s opinion shows”.
    “Where are the adults at Fox?” Darcy asked. “Why aren’t they getting their talent under control? Well, this ad makes it clear: The executives approve their talent behaving the way they have. In fact, they’re so proud of the undemocratic commentary, they’re happy to showcase it in an ad. They really have no shame.”
    Fox News did not offer comment on its promotional video. More

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    Donald Trump attacks Fox News: 'They forgot the golden goose'

    Donald Trump has unleashed a torrent of tweets denouncing Fox News, accusing the network of having forgotten “what made them successful, what got them there”.
    “They forgot the Golden Goose,” Trump wrote in a tweet posted at midday on Thursday:

    Donald J. Trump
    (@realDonaldTrump)
    .@FoxNews daytime ratings have completely collapsed. Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!

    November 12, 2020

    The tirade was posted after the president, who has refused to acknowledge his election loss to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, retweeted multiple comments from supporters, many of which expressed the view that they would instead be relying on right-wing cable channel and website Newsmax.
    Late on Thursday, the top story on Newsmax.com was headlined “Sen. Ted Cruz to Newsmax TV: ‘Media Don’t Get to Decide Presidency’.”
    Among Trump’s retweets was one by a user called “Appalachian Christian”, who said: “Suit yourself Left Fox 4 NewsMaxxxxx.”
    Fox was one of the first news organisations to call the state of Arizona for Biden and has warned its readers that Trump’s claims of victory are false.
    On Monday night, Fox host Neil Cavuto cut away from a campaign event hosted by the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the Republican National Committee headquarters when McEnany said that Trump’s campaign team “wanted every legal vote to be counted”.
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa – I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said from the studio.
    Trump on Monday claimed without evidence that the network’s “ratings have completely collapsed.”
    Trump’s embrace of Newsmax has however translated into a ratings boost, with viewership jumping from an average of 65,000 people before the election to 800,000 viewers of its prime time shows this week, according to Nielsen data quoted in the New York Times, which reports that the NewsMax app was the fourth most popular on the Apple App Store on Thursday.
    Later on Thursday, however, Trump tweeted his praise for two Fox hosts, both long-time Trump loyalists, touting a “must see” segment by commentator Sean Hannity and a “confirming and powerful piece” by Fox Business Network anchor Lou Dobbs. More

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    Is this the death of Fox News's love affair with Donald Trump? | Arwa Mahdawi

    Poor Donald Trump. Not only has he lost the election, it looks as if he has lost the love of his life. I’m not talking about Melania – although some rumours have it that she is “counting the minutes” until she can get a divorce (which she has denied). I’m talking about Fox News.For years, Trump and Fox News have been in a committed, loving relationship. Recently, however, there has been trouble in paradise, with Trump complaining the network is a “much different place than it used to be”. The relationship might have been salvaged, but then Fox News did something unforgivable: it flirted with real journalism. On election day, it was the first major outlet to declare Joe Biden would win Arizona, sending the Trump administration into a meltdown. Since then, Fox News has continued to infuriate the White House by refusing to encourage Trump’s delusion that he won the election. On Monday, for example, it cut away from the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, when she claimed that the Democrats had encouraged voter fraud. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the Fox News anchor said to the viewers. “I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.”Trump’s supporters are outraged their leader’s once-beloved network is treating him this way. Some believe Fox News has gone “full lefty” and have started labelling it “fake news”. Which begs the question: where’s the real news? If you can’t even trust Fox News to fuel your deranged conspiracy theories these days, who can you trust? The internet, obviously. Parler, a rightwing version of Twitter, was downloaded almost 1m times between 3 November (election day) and 8 November – making it the most downloaded free app in the US over the weekend. While Parler, a safe space for those who don’t want their hate speech heavily moderated or their unfounded ideas factchecked, may be experiencing a spike in popularity, I’m not sure it will be long-lived. The interface feels as though it was designed by an extremely angry three-year-old and is difficult to navigate. Parler is not going to take down Fox News any time soon.You know what might replace Fox News, though? Trump News. According to one school of thought, Trump never intended on winning the 2016 election; the campaign was just a publicity stunt to kickstart his own media network. Now that he has been relieved of his political duties, it’s widely expected he will launch Trump TV. But who knows, perhaps Trump will surprise us all and actually follow through on his campaign promises. “If I lose to [Biden] … I will never speak to you again,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina rally in September. “You’ll never see me again.” I really hope that is not fake news.• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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    The misinformation media machine amplifying Trump's election lies

    The networks have made their calls, world leaders have begun paying their respects, and even Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s other media outlets appear to have given up on a second term for Donald Trump. But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claims casting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
    “I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”
    [embedded content]
    The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.
    Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
    Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. Of those, 13 are posts by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Trump published by Fox News, one is by the rightwing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham, and the last is the Newsmax Higbie video.
    The four posts that do not include misinformation are congratulatory messages by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for Biden and Kamala Harris and two posts by Graham, including a request for prayers for Trump and a remembrance by Graham of his father, the televangelist Billy Graham.
    On YouTube, hosts such as Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber with more than 5 million followers, have also been pushing out content questioning the election results. A video from Crowder called Live Updates: Democrats Try to Steal the Election was viewed 5m times, and a nearly two-hour video headlined Fox News is NOT your friend has already racked up more than a million views. More

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    'Whoa' – Fox News cuts off Kayleigh McEnany for 'illegal votes' spiel

    Fox News has cut away from a briefing held by the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, during which she repeated Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the presidential election and doubled down on allegations of voter fraud, for which there is scant if any evidence.
    Speaking to media on Monday night in her “personal capacity” during what she said was a campaign event at the Republican National Committee headquarters, McEnany said Republicans want “every legal vote to be counted, and every illegal vote to be discarded”, prompting the conservative Fox News network to stop broadcasting the briefing.
    From the studio, host Neil Cavuto said: “Whoa, whoa, whoa – I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this.”
    He added: “I want to make sure that maybe they do have something to back that up, but that’s an explosive charge to make, that the other side is effectively rigging and cheating. If she does bring proof of that, of course we’ll take you back. So far she has started saying, right at the outset – ‘welcoming fraud, welcoming illegal voting’. Not so fast.”
    The decision to cut away was Cavuto’s, the Washington Post reported, citing people familiar with the show.
    Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News has shifted away from its loyalty to Trump over the past week, instead seeming in what appears to be closely co-ordinated messaging to warn its readers that Trump has lost the election despite his claims to the contrary.
    Fox was one of the first news organisations to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden.
    Some senior Republican lawmakers have continued to refuse to recognise Biden as the election winner. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said on Monday that Trump was fully within his rights to look into alleged voting irregularities, and in a Senate speech did not acknowledge Biden as president-elect.

    Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting system lacked the oversight and verification applied to in-person voting and seeking an emergency injunction to stop state officials from certifying Biden’s victory in the state.
    The Trump campaign and Republicans have brought numerous lawsuits alleging election irregularities. Judges have already tossed out cases in Georgia and Michigan. More

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    From the editor of Guardian US: a fresh start for America | John Mulholland

    Joe Biden is the next president of the United States – and Kamala Harris has made history, becoming the first woman, and the first woman of color, to be elected vice-president. The pair shattered previous records, winning more votes in the presidential race than any candidates in American history.
    The American people have disavowed four years of a thuggish presidency. They have chosen decency over dysfunction, fact over fiction, truth over lies and empathy over cruelty. They have rejected the last four years of ugliness, divisiveness, racism and sustained assaults on constitutional democracy. And even as Trump makes baseless and dangerous claims of fraud and plots legal challenges, it is clear that 75 million Americans are moving on.
    But now, the real work begins.
    Removing Trump from the White House is one thing – fixing America is quite another. There is a danger that progressives and liberals invest too much faith in Trump’s departure and too little in what will be needed to address the deep-rooted problems that will remain in place once he leaves Pennsylvania Avenue. Once the celebrations – spontaneous, glorious and moving – die down, there will need to be a recognition that America was broken long before it elected Trump, and his departure is no guarantee that the country will mend. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the US predate Trump.
    Two eight-year Democratic presidencies over the last 30 years have not significantly tackled these problems: a stark racial wealth gap, worsening school segregation, corrosive inequality, a climate crisis and a democratic deficit at the heart of America’s electoral college are but some of the systemic issues that confront the new president.

    And while the election may have delivered defeat for Donald Trump, it did not deliver a resounding blow to Trumpism. And possibly not even Trump. About 70 million Americans took a good look at the last four years of racism, mendacity and cruelty – and voted for another four. He recorded the highest ever vote by a Republican presidential candidate.
    Biden fought this campaign on a pledge to save the soul of the nation and return the country to normalcy. His bet was that Americans would look back at four years when the country was roiled, stressed, bruised and sometimes, literally, beaten – and would decide to course-correct. That did not happen. Seventy million Americans wanted it all over again.
    In the months leading to the election there was a hope that the last four years were an aberration, a passing nightmare from which the country would awake and from which they would return to normalcy. The result of the election makes that seem unlikely. As the writer Fintan O’Toole said last week in a brilliant essay in the New York Review of Books:

    The Trump presidency has been no nightmare. It has been daylight delinquency, its transgressions of democratic values on lurid display in all their corruption and cruelty and deadly incompetence. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all of this.
    They saw it all and let it happen. In electoral terms, moreover, it turns out that they were broadly right. There was no revulsion among the party base. The faithful not only witnessed his behavior, they heard Trump say, repeatedly, that he would not accept the result of the vote. They embraced that authoritarianism with renewed enthusiasm. The assault on democracy now has a genuine, highly engaged, democratic movement behind it.

    And, despite the Biden victory, the Democrats failed to get control of state legislatures across the country. Every 10 years, following a census, the outcome of state races dictate the shape of redistricting lines for congressional districts. The Republicans successfully targeted a wealth of states in 2010 after Obama’s victory and managed to draw up outrageously gerrymandered states.
    This was no secret. The conservative political strategist Karl Rove outlined in the Wall Street Journal the plan to win majorities in state legislatures. “He who controls redistricting can control Congress,” read the subhead to Rove’s column. And they did.
    This year the Democrats fought back – and lost. They targeted both chambers in Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. In Iowa and Michigan they targeted the state houses and in Minnesota the senate. Unless late votes in Arizona change the Republican lead in the race for both legislatures (highly unlikely) then the Democrats will not have flipped a single state chamber.
    And then there’s the US Senate.
    The re-election of Trump’s allies, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, suggest that the Republican leadership that enabled Trump during his presidency was rewarded, not punished, for their loyalty. While the balance of power in the Senate won’t be determined until January, by two runoff elections in Georgia in races that were too close to call, the threat of a divided Congress means a Biden administration could face gridlock that weakens its ability to make progressive change.
    Despite those electoral shortcomings, we welcome the opportunity to refocus our journalism on the opportunities that lie ahead for America: the opportunity to fix a broken healthcare system, to restore role of science in government, to repair global alliances, and to address the corrosive racial bias in our schools, criminal justice system, housing and other institutions.

    We will continue to highlight corrosive inequality, and we will interrogate why America’s racial wealth gap continues to get worse. In 2016, Pew estimated the median wealth for black households was $17,100, 10 times worse than that for white households. We will report on the economic transition needed to stem climate change, and illustrate how it affects communities of color first, and hardest. And we will continue to question the unchecked power of corporations and big tech.
    But we can’t do this on our own. We need your support to carry on this essential work. We rely to an ever greater extent on our readers, both for the moral force to continue doing journalism at a time like this, and for the financial strength to facilitate that reporting.
    We’re all in this together. We are driven by your incredible support, and are animated by your passions and interests. We would love it if you can continue to be part of that. You can contribute to the Guardian from as little as $1. It may not seem like much but it means an enormous amount to us. Thank you. More

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    Donald Trump refuses to concede defeat as recriminations begin

    Donald Trump refused to formally concede the US election on Saturday, even as senior Republicans began to distance themselves from him, and as recriminations were reported among aides to a man doomed to go down as an impeached, one-term president.
    Before the race was called, Trump continued to tweet his defiance and to attract censure for making baseless claims about voter fraud and his supposed victory. He also went to his course in Virginia to play golf. While he played, a defiant statement was issued in his name.
    “The simple fact is this election is far from over,” Trump insisted. “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.”
    The statement was of a piece with previous tweets and statements since the election on Tuesday – angry, refusing to admit defeat and alleging improprieties by his opponent without providing evidence.
    “The American people are entitled to an honest election,” Trump said. “That means counting all legal ballots, and not counting any illegal ballots. This is the only way to ensure the public has full confidence in our election.
    “It remains shocking that the Biden campaign refuses to agree with this basic principle and wants ballots counted even if they are fraudulent, manufactured or cast by ineligible or deceased voters. Only a party engaged in wrongdoing would unlawfully keep observers out of the count room – and then fight in court to block their access.”
    None of what Trump alleged has been proved to be true. Nonetheless, Republican legal challenges in key states are set to continue. Leading the effort to marshal a legal force like that which led the party to victory in the 2000 Florida recount were Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr and his younger brother Eric Trump, and Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor recently seen apparently trying to seduce a young actor posing as a reporter in Sacha Baron Cohen’s second Borat movie.

    “Beginning Monday,” Trump added, “our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated. So what is Biden hiding? I will not rest until the American people have the honest vote count they deserve and that Democracy demands.”
    Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, has largely stayed quiet. Nowhere to be seen is an army of lawyers of the size – and skill – Trump will need. The failure to assemble a coherent legal team, and to raise as much as $60m to fund attempts to stop vote counts in some swing states and continue them in others, was in many ways a reflection of previous failures among the small circle of mostly family advisers Trump has kept around him.
    “What a campaign needs to do to staff one statewide recount, let alone multiple recounts, is overwhelming,” Benjamin Ginsberg, a top Republican lawyer who was national counsel to George W Bush in 2000 and 2004, told CNN.
    “Bush v Gore was one state [Florida]. We put out a call and hundreds of lawyers, political operatives and many others responded. Even with that, it taxed the party to its limits to do just one state. It is at best unproven that the Trump campaign can command the sort of infrastructure they would really need to pull this off.”
    The legal challenge to Biden’s victory was placed in the hands of Jay Sekulow, who defended the president during the Mueller investigation and the impeachment process, and Giuliani, who went to Philadelphia to publicly demand Republican operatives be granted greater oversight over the Pennsylvania count.

    Among experts dismissing Trump’s legal moves was James Baker, who led the effort for Bush in Florida which wrested the White House from Al Gore.
    It was reported this week that Kushner was placing calls from the Trump war room, in search of his own version of Baker, a former chief of staff, treasury secretary and secretary of state. Baker has backed Trump. But he told the New York Times that 20 years ago, “We never said don’t count the votes. That’s a very hard decision to defend in a democracy.”
    Trump advisers have reportedly raised the prospect of defeat. According to the Washington Post, some have advocated that the president offer public remarks committing to a peaceful transfer of power. One senior aide, however, said there had been no discussion of a formal concession.
    Some supporters in the media have begun to back away. Late on Friday, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, an ardent loyalist, advised the president to “accept defeat”, should it come, with “grace and composure”. Ingraham also railed at “failed” consultants and campaign officials who “blew through hundreds of millions of dollars without the legal apparatus in place to challenge what we all knew was coming.
    “Why aren’t the best lawyers in America on television night after night explaining the president’s legal claims?” she asked. More

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    Steve Bannon banned by Twitter for calling for Fauci beheading

    Twitter has banned the account of the former Donald Trump adviser and surrogate Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the posting of their heads outside the White House as a “warning”.
    Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
    “Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,” Bannon said.
    “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.”
    Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
    The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
    Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.
    There has been mounting concern over the risk of violence following this week’s US elections, amid highly inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his allies, who have falsely said Democrats are trying to “steal the election”.
    Philadelphia police arrested two men allegedly involved in a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night. Police were tipped off, possibly from a concerned family member of one of the men, who had driven 300 miles from Virginia.
    The moves against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group involved in organising protests this weekend throughout the US against the presidential vote count.
    One post, shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, declared: “Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.”
    The increasingly heated language around the election has also included interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in Pennsylvania to be arrested.
    [embedded content]
    Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich amplified Trump’s false complaints of election rigging and mused about what he believed was the solution.
    “My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”
    “First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.” More