There was even a voter-fraud commission set up to investigate the claims. They quietly disbanded.
A class case of "we refuse to look for evidence, therefore there is no evidence"
Also why pick on Padilla, why not Jon Husted (Rep, Ohio). What about all the Republican lead states where massive fraud was supposed to have happened? Trump expended no political capital or effort whatsoever on doing anything meaningful about supposed voter fraud, and couldn't even persuade any Republican state administrations he had any credible evidence or reason for alleging it. He just gave up immediately at the first hurdle of being asked what he wanted to do and why. In fact he didn't even pursue this personally, he just delegated it to some flunkies and walked away from the issue until the next election.
How to explain this? It's almost as if he had no credible reason for making the claims and the whole thing was just for show.
Which is the tell that Trump didn’t believe his own claims of vote fraud. Bear in mind he pulled exactly the same stunt in 2016 claiming massive vote fraud but when he won never mentioned it again until 2020.
If he’d actually believed there was vote fraud or a chance of it, he would have done something about it. Investigations, hearings, technical audits, best practices and standards. Statistical analysis to identify issues (as against the analyses that do happen that show insignificant fraud). He had 4 years to sort this out. You’d think it would be one if his top priorities.
Of course none of that happened because the whole show is entirely performative. In fact doing anything about it would take his excuse away, because if he addressed vote security he couldn’t blame vote security issues on anyone else.