By Yoichiro Tateiwa

While national media reported Biden’s victory on November 7, President Trump refused to concede Biden’s victory, claiming the election was rigged.

Meanwhile, this talk of Biden’s election fraud circulating in the United States has also been translated into Japanese and spread throughout Japan.

A tweet reading “The U.S. Public Interest Law Firm filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that the mail ballots of the names of 21,000 people in Pennsylvania are those who have already died.” received nearly 7,000 likes and was retweeted more than 2,000 times on social media, and was even posted and distributed on a curated website.

But this is misleading.

According to FactCheck.org, on October 15, about two weeks before the 2020 US Election Day, a conservative organization called the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) claimed that more than 21,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania were dead and asked the court to order the state to remove them from the registration before the election. However, the court dismissed that appeal as baseless.

According to Charles Stewart, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in elections, while some claims about votes registered to deceased people being counted are not entirely false, they are not enough to affect the outcome of the election.

These assertions are thus misleading because they do not mention that the appeal was dismissed by the court, even if the lawsuit filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation did indeed happen.

 

The original fact-checking report in Japanese is here.

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