Voting fraud, transgender rights: Trump’s false, misleading claims at California GOP Convention

Playing to his audience by “owning the libs,” in this case progressive Democratic leaders in California, former President Donald Trump made a slew of false or misleading claims at Friday’s California Republican Party Fall Convention in Anaheim.

Here’s a look at what he said and where the facts lie:

Claim: California’s mail-in ballot system is rigged

Rating: False

Trump spent a great deal of time trying to discredit California’s voting system.

“The state is rigged. It’s a rigged election,” he said. “It’s a horrible thing, and we have to turn it back.”

“There’s no way we lose this state in a real election,” he added about his campaign for the presidency.

Voter fraud across the country, and in California, is extremely rare.

A 2020 Associated Press review of voter fraud in six battleground states found fewer than 475 potential cases across 25.5 million ballots cast. A Loyola Law School study of elections between 2000 and 2014 found 31 instances of voter fraud out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.

In 2020, it was actually the California Republican Party that admitted to placing more than 50 fake ballot drop boxes in Los Angeles, Fresno and Orange counties.

Trump also resurfaced the false claim that former President Jimmy Carter said “don’t use mail-in ballots.”

Although Carter raised concerns about absentee voting in a 2005 report, he never called for its elimination.

In his closing comments, Trump vowed to eliminate mail-in voting options, among other changes to voting systems.

“I will secure our elections — with special emphasis placed on California so that we can go all paper ballots, Voter ID, same date election and you actually have to go to the booth,” he said.

Claim: California is in a man-made drought. We have water but it all goes to the ocean

Rating: Unintentionally-true, false

Trump said we’re in a “man-made drought.” As evidence of that claim, he said he saw stretches of lush, green crops amid “massive amounts of farmland that was absolutely dry and dead” alongside the highway as he traveled to Anaheim.

While he is probably referring to environmental regulations that have tightened slightly in recent decades, the only thing true about that statement is that human-caused climate change is making extreme drought and heat more likely.

As for the dry fields, it’s entirely normal for farmers to plant some fields and let others lie fallow. Plus last year’s season of heavy rain led contractors with the State Water Project to receive 100% of water allocations and 81% for the Central Valley Project.

“We have the water... so much up north. And they have a valve so massive its the size of this room and all the water gets turned out and into the Pacific,” Trump also claimed.

That ‘valve’ is a set of enormous pumps that withdraw about 5 million acre-feet of water a year from the Delta south to farms and cities, or about a quarter of all the water that naturally flows into the ocean — enough water for millions of families in Southern California and much of the San Joaquin Valley’s farmland.

Claim: California is taking children away and sterilizing them

Rating: False

The former president vowed numerous times throughout his speech to protect parental rights and stop what he called “child sexual mutilation,” referring to gender affirmation surgeries for transgender individuals.

In his comments, he said, the state of California “has no right to take children away from their parents and sterilize them.”

“Can you believe this? I will stop it immediately,” he added.

California does not allow people to take children away from their parents to undergo gender-affirming surgeries.

Attorney General Rob Bonta has filed a lawsuit against a southern California school district over its policy requiring schools to notify parents if their children change their gender identification or pronouns. The case does not involve any issues with surgeries or “sterilization.”

In fact, Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this month vetoed a bill that would have required judges to consider whether a parent affirms their child’s gender identity when making custody and visitation decisions.

Trump also promised to cut federal funds to schools “pushing critical race theory, transgenderism, racial, sexual or political content on our children.”

Claim: Trump built almost 500 miles of border wall during his presidency

Rating: Half-true

Trump sought to drum up support for his campaign by looking back at one of his key promises from 2016 — strengthening the U.S.-Mexico border.

The former president claimed he built almost 500 miles of barriers at the border during his presidency.

“Three years ago, we had the stronger border in the United States,” he said.

The veracity of that claim depends on how you count the barriers that were built.

Trump’s administration built 52 miles of new primary border barriers where none stood previously. The figure he’s using refers to primary and secondary border barriers. His administration built 458 miles of those, but the majority were to replace smaller, dilapidated barriers, according to Politifact.