While expressing support for the Trump administration’s plans to investigate potential voter fraud in the 2016 election, an Alabama congressman offered a stunning claim: Democrats rigged 11 of 45 voting machine in his first election to the state legislature in 1982. That’s a significant charge, especially since it’s pretty tough to rig an election. So we set out to find out whether facts supported Brooks’s claim. Brooks’s comment, made during congressional Republicans’ meeting with Vice President Pence, became public via a leaked audio recording of the private meeting. His office corroborated the statement but did not offer much evidence to support it. His office provided newspaper clippings showing there were complaints about malfunctioning voting machines in Brooks’s legislative district in Huntsville, Ala. During the afternoon on Election Day, Brooks announced that he planned on challenging election results and charged that 11 voting machines “at one time or another during the day would not register Mo Brooks’ votes.” Brooks changed his mind after he won the election. “I’m not going to contest it,” Brooks said at his victory party on election night. “But I hope there’ll be an investigation.”
A month later, the county requested the FBI to investigate Election Day irregularities in Brooks’s district. But there is no evidence the FBI conducted an investigation or, if it did, whether it found that anyone (Democrat or otherwise) had tampered with the machines. Brooks’s office did not respond to our repeated requests for more evidence.
State investigative agencies and the U.S. attorney’s office had no record of this investigation or its findings. News clippings from 1982 and 1983 reviewed by the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library and the Alabama Department of Archives and History had no reference to any investigative findings, either.
Full Article: Alabama congressman’s unsupported claim that Democrats rigged voting machines in his election – The Washington Post.