Fox News host Tucker Carlson apologized Friday after he falsely claimed a dead individual illegally voted in Georgia.
“We’ve got some good news tonight, and an apology — one of the people who voted in last week’s election isn’t dead,” he said. “James Blalock is still dead, we told you about him, but it was his wife who voted. She voted as Mrs. James Blalock — it was old-fashioned and we missed it.”
He didn’t back down on his claims of voter fraud in general, though, and asserted he was correct about another report that also has been debunked.
“A whole bunch of dead people did vote, we showed you their names, we proved it, but James Blalock wasn’t among them. It was Mrs. James Blalock. So apologies for that, of course, we are always going to correct when we’re wrong, and we were.”
On Thursday evening’s segment of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Carlson said that someone had voted on behalf of James Blalock of Covington, Georgia, who had died in 2006. This came after the Trump campaign used the World War II veteran as an example of dead voters who illegally voted in Georgia.
However, Newton County officials in a statement on Thursday said that Blalock did not vote — instead, the vote was cast by Blalock’s widow, who registered under his name as “Mrs. James E. Blalock, Jr.”
Carlson also mentioned Blalock in his opinion column published on Thursday, writing: “It’s an inspiring story, the triumph of voting over death. And no one quite embodies that story like James Blalock of Covington, Ga. Mr. Blalock was a mailman for 33 years until he passed away in 2006. Fourteen years later, according to state records, he was still mailing things. James Blalock cast a ballot in last week’s election. How did he do that? Maybe he was just one of those extraordinary mail carriers; neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night nor even death itself could keep him from the mail. In his case, maybe voting from the grave wasn’t really fraud, it was just commitment.”
NBC’s Atlanta affiliate station 11Alive called out Carlson for making the false claim, even after it was disputed by county officials. The outlet even spoke to Blalock’s widow, Agnes, who said, “He’s not voting. He didn’t vote. It was me.”
Linda Kesler is another person accused of voting in Georgia. “Mrs. Linda Kesler of Nicholson, Georgia voted in the election,” a tweet from the Trump campaign said. “The only problem, she passed away 17 years ago, in 2003.” According to 11Alive, the Jackson County Board of Elections, this is false and that she did not vote.
In general, Carlson has continued to back Trump’s election fraud claims. Tucker started out the Monday episode of his Fox News show with a 23-minute rant about how we have to take every baseless and bad-faith claim of voter fraud seriously and investigate everything related to the election that any Republican might dream up.
Watch the video above.