Rudy Giuliani, head advisor to Donald Trump and taxidermic gopher, is fretting over the slim but mighty corpse voter contingency. On Sunday, he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the election could tip in Hillary Clinton’s favor due to corrupt voting practices—keeping dead people registered, for instance—in the inner cities.
And, to be clear, only Democrats will be engaging in this illegal activity.
“I can’t sit here and tell you that [Democrats] don’t cheat,” Giuliani spat and sputtered on CNN’s “State Of the Union.” “And I know that because they control the polling places in [inner cities]. There are no Republicans, and it’s very hard to get people there who will challenge votes. So what they do is, they leave dead people on the rolls, and then they pay people to vote as dead people, four, five, six, seven times.”
The former New York City mayor pointed specifically to Chicago and to Philadelphia as cities where votes would be cast from the afterlife.
“I’m sorry, dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans,” said a not especially apologetic Giuliani. “You want me to [say] that I think the election in Philadelphia and Chicago is going to be fair? I would have to be a moron to say that.”
According to Giuliani, 72o dead people voted in a Chicago election when he was a prosecutor and, years later, 60 of the deceased cast ballots in his mayoral election.
Trump continues to promise victory while bellyaching that the election has been “rigged” against him. The orange spray-painted port-a-john has spent the weekend fussing on Twitter about the inequities to which he has been subjected.
Giuliani did concede that election fraud would only impact close races of one to two percentage points. If the margin is wider, “rigging” won’t influence the outcome.
Nonetheless, doubling down on this rhetoric of inequity encourages Trump supporters to challenge a Clinton victory. Tapper—clearly unimpressed by the voting corpse theory—opens the conversation by quoting Trump supporter Dan Bowman. Via the Boston Globe:
“If [Clinton’s] in office, I hope we can start a coup,” says Bowman. “She should be in prison or shot...There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take...I would do whatever I can for my country.”
Giuliani brushed off the troubling remark as “wacko” talk, primarily emphasizing that Trump was not to blame for it.
Tapper also questioned Giuliani’s assertion that the inner cities would employ dishonest voting procedures. In 2012, he remarked, Mitt Romney’s significant loss in Philadelphia had nothing to do with election fraud. Republicans themselves had found this theory to be false.
“I think there are a lot of elections experts that would have very, very strong disagreements with you,” he told Giuliani.
“Well then,” Giuliani returned, “they never prosecuted elections fraud.”
At the very least, Democrats can rest easy knowing that Republicans will play fair and square.
“I’ve found very few situations where Republicans cheat,” said Giuliani. “They don’t control the inner cities the way Democrats do. Maybe if Republicans controlled the inner cities, they’d do as much cheating as the Democrats do.”
Click the video below to hear Giuliani pose his socioeconomically and racially prejudiced argument on inner city afterlife voting.