President Donald Trump and those around him threw a multitude of voter-fraud conspiracy theories at the wall after the 2020 election. And few were as pervasive as the idea that people rose from the dead to help defeat Trump’s reelection bid.2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis
Unlike many of the often-nebulous claims, these ones carried the benefit of often having been rather specific — citing actual dead people, by name, who supposedly voted. This made them actually verifiable.
Nearly a year later, those specific claims have provided a case study in — and a microcosm of — just how ridiculous this whole exercise was.
The specific dead people cited by Trump and his allies have, in most cases, proved to not actually have been cases of dead people’s identities used fraudulently to vote. And in several other cases, in which a dead person was actually recorded as voting, the culprit has been identified: not a systemic effort to inflate vote totals for President Biden, but rather a Republican.
On New Year’s Day, the conservative Daily Signal ran down some of the names that had been cited. The Trump campaign had named four people in Pennsylvania and four in Georgia, including in a series of news releases called “Victims of Voter Fraud.” The Nevada Republican Party cited another two in that state, calling one of them “concrete” evidence of irregularities. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson then laundered those names and another in a segment on dead people supposedly voting, saying, “What we’re about to tell you is accurate. It’s not a theory. It happened, and we can prove it.”
Of the 11 names cited in all of this, though, none has been shown to involve the identities of dead people used to vote for Biden. Most have been either debunked or pointed in the opposite direction.
We’ll recap the examples below, with the supposed dead person voting in bold.
The latest example involves a man in Nevada who said someone had voted in the name of his dead wife, Rosemarie Hartle. This was hailed widely on conservative media. It was the case the Nevada GOP said showed the “concrete” evidence of irregularities. We learned late last week that there might have been fraud involved, but the alleged fraud was perpetrated by a Republican with ties to the Trump campaign. The man, Donald Kirk Hartle, has been charged with voting in his dead wife’s name.
The situation was much that same with another name the Trump campaign cited in Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Bartman. Not long after it lifted that case up, Bartman’s son Bruce admitted he had registered and voted in his long-dead mother’s name to help Trump. He pleaded guilty.
Two others follow the pattern. Also in Pennsylvania, registered Republican Francis Fiore Presto was charged with requesting and casting a ballot for his dead wife, Judy Presto. Also in that state, the family of Denise Ondick said her ballot was filled out shortly before she died close to the election. A family member said their mother intended to vote for Trump.
Last week the Texas Lieutenant Governor finally paid out a reward to someone who found voter fraud. Much to his chagrin it was to someone who uncovered a Republican who voted twice. Of course.
It’s all projection.