Former president Donald Trump on Thursday questioned his loss of the 2020 election by pointing to a recount in a small New Hampshire town whose entire population wouldn’t even fill Madison Square Garden.
“Congratulations to the great Patriots of Windham, New Hampshire for their incredible fight to seek out the truth on the massive Election Fraud which took place in New Hampshire and the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump claimed in a statement posted to his website Thursday. “The spirit for transparency and justice is being displayed all over the Country by media outlets which do not represent Fake News. People are watching in droves as these Patriots work tirelessly to reveal the real facts of the most tainted and corrupt Election in American history. Congratulations Windham — look forward to seeing the results.”
In essence, Trump now complains of what he believes to be “massive election fraud” in a state where neither his own legal team nor his high-profile supporters filed lawsuits to challenge the election. New Hampshire wasn’t highlighted in the now-infamous “multiple pathways to victory” poster to which Rudy Giuliani gesticulated while some sort of hair dye ran down his cheeks on November 19, 2020. Nor was New Hampshire the subject of one of attorney Sidney Powell‘s so-called ‘Kraken’ lawsuits which took aim at the election results.
Sidney Powell looks on in the background as Rudy Giuliani points to a map of states whose vote tallies the president and his supporters challenged in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Biden won New Hampshire with 52.7% of the vote (424,937 votes cast) against Trump’s 45.4% (365,660 votes cast), a spread of more than 59,000 ballots.
The Windham recount was requested by a Democratic candidate for state office who missed out on winning a seat by 24 votes. Officials overseeing the recount then uncovered hundreds of votes cast for Republican candidates that had previously gone uncounted. That 24-vote margin ballooned to more than 400. The reason for the discrepancy remains unclear, though the newly found votes did not change the outcome of the elections.
“There is a significant human element in conducting New Hampshire elections, and a simple human error impacting the count one way or the other cannot be ruled out,” the town said in a statement this week. “However, jumping to conclusions of what caused the disparity at this point is mere speculation and conjecture.”
This message apparently did not make it to the former president’s ears, as Trump on Thursday celebrated the mishap as some sort of vindication for his efforts to promote conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud as the reason for his loss in November.
Town and state officials have scheduled a forensic audit, but it appears Trump believes — without any evidence — that the voting disparity in a sparsely populated town in the tenth-smallest state in the U.S. is somehow representative of a massive voter fraud scheme that proves he didn’t lose the election.
“Anyone who’s coming into this looking for fraud and expecting fraud and arguing that parts of the process are inherently fraudulent is already setting themselves up such that they are looking for an end result,” Windham selectman Ross McLeod said Monday.
A Washington Post analysis dated three days before Trump’s statement referred to the president’s sudden interest in the small town, situated just a few minutes up the highway from the Massachusetts state line, as an interesting setting for “Trump’s post-election fantasia.”
“[E]ven if Trump won every single vote in the town, it neither affects the results in New Hampshire nor the presidency overall — nor does it necessarily suggest any systemic problem with vote-counting,” wrote Post correspondent Philip Bump. “It is one weird little glitch in one small town in a small state. But for a movement looking for any glitch anywhere as evidence that the whole system is crumbling, it’ll work.”
[Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images]
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