The usual suspects in Australia backing Trump's completely baseless fraud accusations:
Joe Hockey and George Christensen back unfounded 'fraud' claims about Biden comeback
Australian conservatives rebuked for ‘making comments that aren’t thought through’
Paul Karp
@Paul_Karp
Thu 5 Nov 2020 13.30 AEDTLast modified on Thu 5 Nov 2020 14.12 AEDT
Joe Hockey at the Australian ambassador’s residence in Washington last year. The former treasurer has questioned Joe Biden’s strong comeback in the presidential election. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
Joe Hockey has lent his voice to disputed claims of voter fraud in the US, using anecdotal evidence consistent with previous elections to raise doubt about the presidential election result.
The former treasurer and ambassador to the US told Sydney’s 2GB radio on Thursday that there were “plenty of good reason” for Donald Trump and the Republican campaign team to challenge results – which are still being counted –
through litigation.
The Labor party leader,
Anthony Albanese, rebuked Hockey, saying it “doesn’t help to have Australians make comments that aren’t thought through” questioning the legitimacy of results.
Hockey is one of a number of conservatives questioning Joe Biden’s strong comeback in the vote count, including the Nationals MP
George Christensen, who on Facebook has been slapped with a warning for misleading claims about “dodgy votes” boosting the former vice president.
Hockey, Australia’s ambassador from 2016 to January 2020, said the US electoral system was “a complete dog’s breakfast, right across, not just Pennsylvania, but right across the country”.
“I mean there are 10,000 different organisations which are responsible for setting the rules for the US presidential election,” he told 2GB.
“In the US, you have every state, and every county and every city. And if there is a strong bias, one way or the other, they do everything they can to suppress the vote, or increase the vote. It’s a mess.”
Asked if electoral fraud were possible in the US system, Hockey replied: “Oh for sure. The question is whether it is enough to change the election outcome and I doubt it is, but absolutely.”
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Hockey attempted to support the unfounded claim by noting that in Washington DC “some people got two ballot papers … and of course, last night, in Washington DC, 93% of the city voted for Joe Biden”.
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He said the margin was “hard to believe” because his best booth in the seat of North Sydney had delivered him 83% of the vote.
In fact, Biden’s win of 93% of the vote is consistent with results in the District of Columbia which strongly backed the Democratic candidate in the 2016 election by 91%, in 2012 (91%) and 2008 (92%).
Albanese told reporters in Sydney that Biden’s results were “pretty consistent” with previous outcomes, rebuking Hockey for saying there was “a question mark over the legitimacy of the Washington DC vote”.
Christensen posted on
Facebook early on Thursday morning that his prediction that Trump would win “didn’t take Democrat vote fraud into account”.
Christensen posted graphs of what he termed “unnatural jumps in tallies in Wisconsin and Michigan” and falsely attributed them to “dodgy extra votes at about 4 in the morning, just like the president [Donald Trump] said”.
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Nationals MP George Christensen falsely claims the change of lead in the US election is the result of ‘dodgy votes’. Photograph: George Christensen Facebook
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Politifact
has explained the spikes were caused by counties releasing results from large batches of votes – which favoured Biden but also included votes for Trump.
Facebook warned users that Christensen’s post was “missing context”, adding a link to the Politifact fact-check concluding that the jumps in votes do not substantiate claims of fraud.
Christensen has also cast doubt on democratic election results by asking “what is going on in the US?” and linking to Trump campaign materials explaining how “they’re [Democrats are] trying to steal the election”.
The One Nation senator
Malcolm Roberts also expressed scepticism by noting on Facebook that Trump had gone “from having a strong lead in the battleground states … to his lead strangely disappearing putting Biden in the lead”. “What is going on?”
Roberts and the Nationals senator Matt Canavan found a silver lining in the fact that as of 4 November the US has officially
quit the Paris climate agreement.
Canavan said “the result of the US election might not be known for a while yet” but he did not cast doubt on the vote count.
In the 2020 campaign social media companies such as Twitter has been
more active in labelling claims by Trump as misleading, including
adding a warning to a tweet on election night falsely claiming that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election.
