Bill Maher confronted Vice President JD Vance over President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud during Friday’s Real Time on HBO.

Trump has infamously insisted the 2020 election was rigged against him, a refrain that has become a de facto purity test within the Republican Party and even among Trump’s judicial nominees, dozens of whom have dodged straightforward questions from senators about who won the contest.

In Trump’s State of the Union in February, he said of Democrats, “They wanna cheat. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.” Vance, who was seated behind Trump, stood and clapped.

During their interview, Maher speculated to Vance that the 2028 Republican nominee for president would be either him or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The comedian said that regardless of which Republican is the nominee, the false allegations of voter fraud must cease:

MAHER: Here’s my dealbreaker for your side.

VANCE: Ok.

MAHER: Under Trump, you guys have two outcomes an election can be: either we win, or they cheated. That sh*t has to stop. And the person– and that means the person who has to stop it would be you or Marco. Can you tell me you will do that? Will you bring us back to the middle, at least on that, where we can concede elections, where it’s not either one of those two options?

VANCE: Ok, Bill. So this is where I’m probably gonna lose you here, but here’s–

MAHER: That happened about eight minutes ago.

VANCE: Look, I don’t think that we should not concede elections, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think that if you go back, if you go back to the president’s core argument, he was making an argument about problems that existed in 2020. And here’s the problem that I’m most focused on. The president and I have talked a lot about this, and I think we share a perspective here. But set to the side the stuff that really gets you and your audience very angry about whether the count was legitimate in Georgia, or Pennsylvania, or any of these other states. Is it true that large technology companies – some of whom have financial interests that exist outside the United States of America – were they censoring information in the run-up to an election? And set to the side the stuff, again, the Georgia stuff–

MAHER: No, that was litigated. Dominion, the Fox News paid a–

VANCE: I’m trying to make the more middle-ground argument here.

MAHER: No.

VANCE: 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. So, in a fundamental sense, like, if the First Amendment says that we have a free and open debate and then the American people judge based on that free and open debate, the sense in which I think the election in 2020 was rigged, I’m sorry, is that you had technology companies that were putting their thumb on the scale in a way that completely obliterated the real open exchange of ideas. By the way, it didn’t happen in 2024, but it happened in 2020, and it was a problem.

MAHER: Well, you’re gonna get a big pat on the back when you go back to the White House.

Watch above via HBO.

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