President Donald Trump warned Republicans to “keep an eye on those vote tallies” as he suggested that votes were being tampered with in the 2018 midterms that saw Republicans lose 40 seats in the House of Representatives.
"We’re going to take the House back. We are. I feel totally confident," Trump said during a speech at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual spring dinner.
He went on to complain that Democrats won seats during the midterms days after Election Day because many states were still counting mail-in ballots.
“We have to watch those vote tallies,” he said. “Something is going on.”
"You gotta be a little bit more paranoid than you are," he said. "We have to be a little bit careful, because I don't like the way the votes are being tallied. I don’t like it and you don’t like it either. You just don’t want to say it because you’re afraid of the press.”
Trump continues to lie about nonexistent voter fraud:
Trump’s remarks came after he lambasted Florida and Arizona election officials last year when key races in those states took weeks to be resolved.
"His claims at the time were debunked," CNN reported. "Trump's call for fellow Republicans to join him in paranoia about vote counts likewise echoed his debunked claims about widespread voter fraud in the US. He claimed multiple times after the 2016 election that millions of illegal votes in California had cost him the popular vote and that voters were bused into New Hampshire from Massachusetts. As President, Trump has continued to claim that there is widespread voter fraud. He established a commission on the issue, only to dissolve it amid repeated controversy."
There was election fraud in 2018 -- by Republicans:
The only case of widespread election fraud that has been reported in the 2018 election was in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, where a special election will be held after the midterm election results were invalidated by the state’s bipartisan elections board.
In that case, Leslie McCrae Dowless and a number of his accomplices have been indicted on fraud charges after they apparently illegally collected numerous unfilled absentee mail-in ballots and filled them with votes for Republicans. Dowless was personally hired by Republican candidate Mark Harris, whose own son, a federal prosecutor, testified at an election board hearing that he warned his father against hiring Dowless because he had repeatedly committed fraud in past elections.