Newt Gingrich popped on to “Hannity” on Tuesday night and did what so many Republicans are spending their days doing this month: spreading false conspiracy theories about the validity of Joe Biden’s election victory over Donald Trump, and sowing irrational fear about the validity of future votes.
Gingrich, as you may recall, was actually Speaker of the House a couple decades ago before he had to resign because he’d committed numerous ethical violations and had cheated on his wives so many times. Newt came out firing from the get-go, and made very few true statements during the discussion with Sean Hannity.
“Start with the fact you have a secretary of state who is totally in the pocket of Stacey Abrams, who has agreed to some rules that are crazy. So that for example, you can’t go back out and revalidate absentee ballots. In 2018, they had 3.5 percent rejection rate on absentee ballots. With four times as many ballots this year, it’s 0.3. That is they have over ten times as many ballots rejected, but difference to be about 39,000,” said Gingrich, who appears to actually comparing the 2020 numbers to 2016, not 2018.
Newt’s math, also, is way off. That 39,000 figure is actually the number of absentee ballots that would have been rejected this year if the ballots were rejected at the same rate as they were in 2016. And since more than 6,000 ballots were rejected this time, the 2016 rejection rate would not have been anywhere close to ten times more rejections.
“That’s all a deal that the Secretary of State cut with Stacey Abrams back in the spring. You go through item after item, shows you the difference in the two parties. She’s not worried about buying TV ads. She’s worried about mobilizing 600,000 voters without any regard to what the campaign is like unless the Republicans fix the flawed election system,” Newt rambled aimlessly.
“They stand a very real chance of losing the election even if they win the campaign because the Democrats will simply manufacture as many votes as they need.”
Newt kept going like this for a while.
“So I’m very concerned that, even though I think Warnock is a extraordinarily radical candidate and that essentially Ossoff is a product of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, nonetheless, even if we win the campaign, if we don’t fix this election system, and the governor and the Secretary of State have been absolutely useless in trying to get this thing fixed,” Newt said. And no, that is not a complete sentence.
“We have the House, we have the Senate. The Georgia legislature could come in next Monday, they could fix a fair amount of this. They could also demand an accurate recount and simply note that the agreement the Secretary of State signed back in the spring changed Georgia law even though he doesn’t have the power to do that,” Gingrich continued, citing a completely made-up conspiracy that has no basis in reality.
“So, I’m I just want you to know I’m extremely concerned that this will be stolen, no matter how good the campaign is.”
Should you want to watch Newt Gingrich’s conspiracy fueled conversation with Hannity, you can check out the video embedded up at the top of this article.