Maher challenges Vance on Trump election fraud claims: ‘That s— has to stop’

Administration Maher challenges Vance on Trump election fraud claims: ‘That s— has to stop’ Comments: by Finya Swai - 06/27/26 9:15 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Finya Swai - 06/27/26 9:15 AM ET Comments: Link copied

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Comedian Bill Maher on Friday challenged Vice President Vance over President Trump’s false claims of election fraud, saying the GOP must stop insisting they were “cheated” by losses and return to a place where candidates concede defeat.

“Under Trump, you guys have two outcomes an election can be: Either we win, or they cheated. That s— has to stop,” he told Vance during the latest episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

The vice president was then asked whether he or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, two likely front-runners for the Republican nomination in 2028, would move the Republican Party away from Trump’s repeated allegations of voter fraud if elected president.

“Will you bring us back to the middle, at least on that, where we can concede elections?” the host asked.

Vance agreed that candidates should not refuse to concede elections, he framed Trump’s core argument about election fraud — particularly in the 2020 presidential election — as one centered on issues with the flow of information and censorship from larger technology companies.

“The biggest criticism I had of the 2020 election is that you had technology companies that were quite literally censoring negative information about the left and promoting negative information about the right,” Vance said.

“You had technology companies that were putting their thumb on the scale in a way that completely obliterated the real open exchange of ideas,” he continued.

Maher pointed to the settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems, now called Liberty Vote, as a counter to his point. The vice president, however, sidestepped the comments.

Trump has for years maintained his 2020 loss to former President Biden was a product of fraud, despite a lack of evidence and a series of court rulings siding against him.

During his State of the Union address to Congress earlier this year, the president said Democrats “want to cheat” in elections, while providing no evidence. He argued that their policies are so unpopular “that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.”

Vance, who was seated behind the president, applauded the remarks at the time.

Trump’s focus on election fraud has shaped his administration’s policy agenda. In March, he signed an executive order aimed at overhauling election administration. He has been a frequent critic of mail-in voting, despite himself voting by mail in Florida earlier this year.

A slate of Democrats sued the Trump administration over its crackdown on mail-in voting. A federal judge on Thursday blocked a proposal from the administration that sought to use the U.S. Postal Service to hold back mail ballots in states that refuse to share sensitive voter data to the federal government.

The president has also proposed giving the federal government more power over elections, which sparked bipartisan pushback.