Trump Campaign’s Election Fraud Hotline Got the Merciless Pranking It Deserved

Donald Trump’s wildly unsuccessful reelection campaign set up a hotline on Election Day and encouraged people to call in and report election fraud—that thing they definitely swore was happening, despite the ongoing debunking of pretty much all of their claims. But they wanted to give people a way to call or write in and let them know what they were seeing at the polls.

Weirdly, they still didn’t seem too concerned with instances of actual voter suppression, like the egregiously long lines in majority-BIPOC communities across the country or the pro-Trump caravans blocking traffic leading to the polls or the many, many instances of reported intimidation. But they were convinced that Democrats were, I don’t know, burning ballots or something.

“Help stop voter suppression, irregularities and fraud,” reads a graphic posted online by Rudy Giuliani, the Trump children, and other campaign surrogates. “Tell us what you are seeing.”

They asked, and boy did people deliver, like this person who discovered that the form didn’t have a character limit:

One Georgia woman said she was approached by a man with red skin while she was in line to vote. “He challenged me to a fiddle competition […] otherwise Biden was going to win.”

“I saw people who were literally spreading poop all over their ballots.”

“Hello, I saw a dead person voting for Joe Biden in Philadelphia. His eyes were glassy, he smelled like a corpse, and he walked up to the chek-in table and said I have awoken from my eternal slumber to feast on the brains of the living and also vote for Joe Biden.'”

Sookie Stackhouse has some thoughts on the refusal to count votes from dead voters:

“If the Democrats can [vote twice], why can’t I?”

“So um I committed some voter fraud, I’m very proud of it and I’d like to tell Mr. Rudy Giuliani about it.”

According to the Washington Post, “The prank calls have reportedly made for miserable work among the campaign staffers working the hotline.”

(image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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