Meet Yoel Roth. As Fox News has now revealed, Roth is Twitter’s “Head of Site Integrity.” He has made the news because of his response to this tweet from the President. Which reads:
There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
Roth or someone associated with him inserted this underneath the tweet and next to an exclamation mark:
Get the facts about mail-in ballots
Follow that link and one gets this headline and accompanying message:
Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud
“On Tuesday, President Trump made a series of claims about potential voter fraud after California Governor Gavin Newsom announced an effort to expand mail-in voting in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post, and others. Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.”
The, uh, rather large problems here?
First, mail-in voting fraud is decidedly NOT unsubstantiated. It doesn’t take long to find two separate, quite reputable stories reporting that there is indeed a very real, very substantiated problem with mail-in voting fraud.
Over here at Real Clear Politics just last month Mark Hemingway headlined this:
28 Million Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections
Wrote Hemingway:
“Between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.
States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to these ballots since they were mailed – and the figure of 28 million missing ballots is likely even higher because some areas in the country, notably Chicago, did not respond to the federal agency’s survey questions. This figure does not include ballots that were spoiled, undeliverable, or came back for any reason.
…There’s little doubt that as the number of mail-in ballots increases, so does fraud. A 2012 report in The New York Times noted that voter fraud involving mail-in ballots “is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say. In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time.” According to a Wall Street Journal report on voter exploitation in Hispanic communities in Texas, mail-in ballots have “spawned a mini-industry of consultants who get out the absentee vote, sometimes using questionable techniques.” Poor, elderly, and minority communities are most likely to be preyed upon by so-called ballot ‘brokers.’
Concerns about fraud in mail-in ballots were serious enough that a 2008 report produced by the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project recommended that states ‘restrict or abolish on-demand absentee voting in favor of in-person early voting.’”
Then there was this from The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal:
Reported by-elections analyst Hans von Spakovsky, the headline is:
Potential for Fraud Is Why Mail-In Elections Should Be Dead Letter
Von Spakovsky reports:
“Absentee ballots are the tools of choice of election fraudsters because they are voted outside the supervision of election officials, making it easier to steal, forge, or alter them, as well as to intimidate voters.
Going entirely to by-mail elections would unwisely endanger the security and integrity of the election process, particularly if officials automatically mail absentee ballots to all registered voters without a signed, authenticated request from each voter.
Voter registration rolls are notoriously inaccurate and out of date, containing the names of voters who are deceased, have moved, or otherwise have become ineligible.
Having thousands of ballots arriving in the mail for individuals who no longer reside at a registered address risks those ballots being stolen and voted.”
Exactly.
So in other words? The Twitter “fact check” on the President’s views of the dangers of mail-in voting fraud is literally factually incorrect, depending on virulently anti-Trump news sources that have reported the literal “fake news” that “mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.”
The larger question here is: why in the world could Twitter get this basic fact of fraud problems with mail-in voting so wrong?
Which is exactly where Yoel Roth comes in. Here’s a real fact check. As Fox has now revealed, Twitter’s “Head of Site Integrity” is in fact a virulent Trump hater. To suggest he has a case of far-left bias would understate. Reports Fox:
“…Roth’s own barrage of anti-Trump, politically charged tweets seemingly calls into question whether he should be creating guidelines for the president and other Twitter users, especially when Twitter is under fire for its alleged left-wing bias. Commentators have argued that Trump’s tweets on the risks of mail-in voting were not misleading, and the president accused Twitter of seeking to “interfere” in the upcoming election under the guise of a supposedly neutral “fact-checking” policy.
Roth has previously referred to Trump and his team as “ACTUAL NAZIS,” mocked Trump supporters by saying that “we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason,” and called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a “personality-free bag of farts.” (Last August, Twitter suspended McConnell’s Twitter account, prompting the GOP to threaten to cut off advertising on the site until Twitter relented.)
In September 2016, Roth tweeted, “I’ve never donated to a presidential campaign before, but I just gave $100 to Hillary for America. We can’t fu-k around anymore.”
When Trump won the November 2016 election, Roth dejectedly chalked the development up to “[Bernie] Sanders protest voters, and racism,” before sounding more optimistic notes.
….Also on Jan. 22, 2017, Roth compared senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.”
Got all that? This is the guy who is “fact-checking” the President – and allowing Twitter to post “fact checks” on Trump’s mail-in voting tweet that are themselves wildly, factually untrue.
Way to go, Jack Dorsey. Way to go.
