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Trump's Attempts to Overturn the Election Are Unparalleled in U.S. History

The president's push to prevent states from certifying electors and get legislators to override voters' will eclipses even the bitter 1876 election as an audacious use of brute political force.

By David E. Sanger
NY Times
Nov. 20, 2020

WASHINGTON - President Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election are unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction.

Mr. Trump's chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million popular votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College margin. Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is even trying has set off widespread alarms, not least in Mr. Biden's camp.

"I'm confident he knows he hasn't won," Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday, before adding, "It's just outrageous what he's doing." Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump's behavior as embarrassing, he acknowledged that "incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions."

Mr. Trump has only weeks to make his last-ditch effort work: Most of the states he needs to strip Mr. Biden of votes are scheduled to certify their electors by the beginning of next week. The electors cast their ballots on Dec. 14, and Congress opens them in a joint session on Jan. 6.

Even if Mr. Trump somehow pulled off his electoral vote switch, there are other safeguards in place, assuming people in power do not simply bend to the president's will.

The first test will be Michigan, where Mr. Trump is trying to get the State Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden's 157,000-vote margin of victory. He has taken the extraordinary step of inviting a delegation of state Republican leaders to the White House, hoping to persuade them to ignore the popular vote outcome.
   
"That's not going to happen," Mike Shirkey, the Republican leader of the Michigan State Senate, said on Tuesday. "We are going to follow the law and follow the process."

Beyond that, Michigan's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, could send Congress a competing electoral slate, based on the election vote, arguing that the proper procedures were ignored. That dispute would create just enough confusion, in Mr. Trump's Hail Mary calculus, that the House and Senate together would have to resolve it in ways untested in modern times.

Federal law dating to 1887, passed in reaction to the Hayes election, provides the framework, but not specifics, of how it would be done. Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law and election law expert at Ohio State University, noted that the law only required Congress to consider all submissions "purporting to be the valid electoral votes."

But Michigan alone would not be enough for Mr. Trump. He would also need at least two other states to fold to his pressure. The most likely candidates are Georgia and Arizona, which both went for Mr. Trump in 2016 and have Republican-controlled legislatures and Republican governors.

Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona has said he will accept the state election results, although only after all the campaign lawsuits are resolved. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, where a hand recount reaffirmed Mr. Biden's victory on Thursday, has not publicly said one way or another who won his state.

Mr. Trump has said little in public apart from tweets endorsing wild conspiracy theories about how he was denied victory. Yet his strategy, if it can be called that, has become clear over two days of increasingly frenetic action by a president 62 days from losing power.

In just that time, Mr. Trump has fired the federal election official who has challenged his false claims of fraud, tried to halt the vote-certification process in Detroit to disenfranchise an overwhelmingly Black electorate that voted against him, and now is misusing the powers of his office in his effort to take Michigan's 16 electoral votes away from Mr. Biden.

In many ways it is even more of an attempted power grab than the one in 1876. At the time, Hayes was governor of Ohio, not president of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant was, and when Hayes won - also by wrenching the vote around in three states - he became known as "His Fraudulency."

"But this is far worse," said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian and author of "Presidents of War." "In the case of Hayes, both sides agreed that the outcome in at least three states was in dispute. In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day."

"This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election."

He added: "This is what many of the founders dreaded."

Mr. Trump telegraphed this strategy during the campaign. He told voters at a rally in Middletown, Pa., in September that he would win at the polls, or in the Supreme Court, or in the House - where, under the 12th Amendment, every state delegation gets one vote in choosing the president. (There are 26 delegations of 50 dominated by Republicans, even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats.)

"I don't want to end up in the Supreme Court, and I don't want to go back to Congress, even though we have an advantage if we go back to Congress," he said then. "Does everyone understand that?"

Now that is clearly the Plan B, after the failure of Plan A, an improvisational legal strategy to overturn election results by invalidating ballots in key states. In state after state, the president's lawyers have been laughed out of court, unable to provide evidence to back up his claims that mail-in ballots were falsified, or that glitches on voting machines with software from Dominion Voting Systems might, just might, have changed or deleted 2.7 million votes.

Those theories figured in a rambling news conference that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, held with other members of his legal team on Thursday. The group threw out a series of disconnected arguments to try to make the case that Mr. Trump really won. The arguments included blaming mail-in ballots that they said were prone to fraud as well as Dominion, which they suggested was tied to former President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (who died seven years ago), and had vague connections to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros, the philanthropist and billionaire Democratic fund-raiser.

"That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history," Christopher Krebs, who was fired Tuesday night by Mr. Trump as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Thursday afternoon.

"And possibly the craziest," he went on. "If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're lucky."

Mr. Krebs has often noted that the purpose of a reliable election system is to convince those who lost elections that they have, indeed, lost.

Even some of Mr. Trump's onetime enthusiasts and former top aides have abandoned him on his claims, often with sarcastic derision. "Their basic argument is this was a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there's no evidence of it," said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump's third national security adviser, who was ousted last year.

"Now if that's true, I really want to know who the people are who pulled this off," he said on Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "We need to hire them at the C.I.A."

Trump makes futile last stand to overturn results as Georgia certifies Biden win

President met with Michigan's Republican leaders at White House in desperate bid to subvert democracy
   
David Smith in Washington
Sat 21 Nov 2020 00.44 GMT
Guardian

Donald Trump was on Friday making a futile but dangerous last stand, without precedent in modern American history, to overturn the result of the presidential election so he can remain in power.

Even as Joe Biden's victory in the state of Georgia was confirmed, the president met with Republican leaders from Michigan at the White House in an increasingly desperate bid to subvert democracy after a series of courtroom defeats over allegations of voter fraud.

The Trump campaign's apparent strategy is to persuade Republican-controlled legislatures in Michigan and other battleground states in the electoral college to set aside the will of the people and declare Trump the winner, despite officials declaring it the most secure election in American history.

"The entire election, frankly, in all the swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump," Sidney Powell, one of Trump's lawyers, told the Fox Business Network on Thursday.

Michigan's state legislative leaders, the senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, and the house speaker, Lee Chatfield, both Republicans, visited the White House on Friday at Trump's request.

Shirkey was greeted by protesters and media at Washington's Reagan international airport. There were chants of "Certify the results!" and a shout of "Where is the evidence of fraud?"

However, following the White House meeting, Shirkey and Chatfield affirmed their commitment to abide by the electoral process, in an apparent blow to Trump's efforts.

"We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan's electors," the pair said in a joint statement. "Michigan's certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and intimidation."

Most experts have dismissed Trump's efforts as political fantasy and probably unlawful. But they warn that an American president trying to reverse a free and fair election could poison millions of minds, conditioning his base to lose faith in democracy and regard Biden as an illegitimate president.

Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state defeated by Trump in the 2016 election, tweeted on Friday: "Protecting one man's ego is not worth damaging the legitimacy of our democracy."

Biden, a former vice-president, won the election and is preparing to take office on 20 January, but Trump has refused to concede and is searching for a way to invalidate the results, alleging widespread irregularities without providing evidence.

Speaking in the White House briefing room on Friday about an initiative to lower prescription medicine prices, Trump maintained his baseless claim that he was the true winner. "Big pharma ran millions of dollars of negative advertisements against me during the campaign - which I won, by the way," he told reporters.

"But, you know, we'll find that out. Almost 74m votes. We had big pharma against us. We had the media against us. We had big tech against us. We had a lot of dishonesty against us."

Biden received nearly 6m more votes than Trump but the winner is determined by the electoral college, where each state's electoral votes, based largely on population, are awarded to the winner of a state's popular vote.

Biden leads by 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232 as states work to certify their results at least six days before the electoral college convenes on 14 December to ratify the vote.

The Trump campaign is particularly targeting Michigan, which Biden won by 154,000 votes, in the hope that Republicans there will manipulate the electoral system.

Both Shirkey and Chatfield have previously denied that they might try to overturn Biden's win, noting that Michigan law does not allow the legislature to directly select electors or award them to anyone other than the person who received the most votes.

Even so, Michigan's governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, told the MSNBC TV network: "It's incredibly dangerous that they are even entertaining the conversation. This is an embarrassment to the state."

Earlier this week, two Republicans canvassers blocked the certification of votes in Wayne county, Michigan, where Detroit is located, a majority Black city. They later relented, amid cries of racism, and the results were certified. It then emerged that Trump made contact with the canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, on Tuesday to express gratitude for their support.

On Wednesday, Palmer and Hartmann signed affidavits saying they believed the county vote "should not be certified" after all. But Michigan's secretary of state said they cannot rescind their votes.

Trump's dominance of the Republican party is such that few prominent figures have spoken out again his scorched earth strategy.

However, Mitt Romney, a senator for Utah and the party's 2012 presidential nominee, broke ranks on Thursday. He said: "Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the president has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president."

Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican and Trump supporter, on Friday certified results that showed Biden won the state by just over 12,600 votes after a manual recount and an audit were conducted. "The numbers reflect the verdict of the people, not a decision by the secretary of state's office or courts, or of either campaigns," he told reporters.

Trump's attempts to reverse his defeat via lawsuits and recounts have met with no meaningful success. Yet his campaign has not abandoned its offensive in the courts.

Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, said in an hour-and-a-half-long press conference on Thursday that there are plans to file more lawsuits. He accused Democrats of masterminding a "national conspiracy" to steal the election, referencing China, Cuba, the Clinton Foundation, billionaire George Soros and the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez but offering no proof.

"I know crimes, I can smell them," said Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, sweating profusely as what appeared to be hair dye trickled down his face. "You don't have to smell this one, I can prove it to you." He offered no evidence to support his claims.

Chris Krebs, the Trump administration election official fired last week over the comments about the security of the election, tweeted: "That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest."

Biden, celebrating his 78th birthday - he is the oldest US president-elect in history - met the House of Representatives speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, on Friday after spending most of the week with advisers planning his administration, despite the refusal of the Trump administration to cooperate with his team, even over dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump's last-ditch efforts to overturn results fail to make dent in Biden victory

President's desperate efforts include pleas to Republican state lawmakers as states certify election results

Lauren Aratani
Guardian
22 Nov 2020 20.46 GMT

Desperate efforts by Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the result of the American election are facing an ever narrowing range of options as court cases and recounts have repeatedly failed to make any dent in the convincing victory of Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

Now that states are certifying their election results, it appears the president's last-ditch efforts will entail desperate pleas to Republican state lawmakers in hopes they will ignore their state laws and somehow skew the election to favor his reelection in the all-important electoral college.

It has been two weeks exactly since Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election, and since then, Republicans and Trump's campaign have made multiple attempts to take the election results to the courts and woo state Republican officials into helping them subvert the votes of their constituents.

But the effort has largely failed to make meaningful headway with any of the lawsuits in key swing states, and state officials have mostly stuck by the original counts. In just the past few days, Trump's dream of overturning the results of the election has significantly narrowed after results were certified in Georgia and Arizona's largest county in Biden's favor on Friday.

The states were two of six that the Trump campaign and Republicans were targeting in efforts to push slim margins that favored Biden over Trump. Their haphazard plans have fallen apart as judges across the country halted legal challenges that cried fraud in an election that experts and public officials have said showed no evidence of widespread fraud.

Three other swing states, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, are set to join Georgia in certifying their results as their certification deadlines approach next week. Arizona and Wisconsin, the last of the state's targeted by the Trump campaign, have certification deadlines the week after.

On Saturday the Trump team said it was filing a petition for a full recount in Georgia, but its efforts suffered another blow when a federal judge ruled that Pennsylvania officials could certify election results that showed Biden winning the state by more than 80,000 votes.

US middle district judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, turned down the request for an injunction by Trump's campaign, spoiling the incumbent's hopes of overturning the results of the presidential contest.

"This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations," Brann wrote.

Brann added that he "has no authority to take away the right to vote of even a single person, let alone millions of citizens".

After the judgement, Pennsylvania attorney general, Josh Shapiro, said on Twitter: "I've been telling everyone who will listen: these suits are baseless."

Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said Trump had "exhausted all plausible legal options" to challenge the result in Pennsylvania. He called on Trump to concede the election and congratulated Biden on his victory.

Trump's lawyers said they would appeal the ruling, with the hopes of quickly reaching the US supreme court.

"We are disappointed we did not at least get the opportunity to present our evidence at a hearing. Unfortunately the censorship continues," Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in a statement.

Faced with such realities, Trump's effort seems to be pivoting to try and persuade Republican politicians in some states to ignore the verdict of the popular vote and send electors for Trump, not Biden, to the electoral college, which is the body that actually selects the new president.

Sidney Powell, one of Trump's lawyers, told Fox Business Network that "legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump".

As states move closer to certify their election results, the legal pathways that even the most impassioned state lawmakers have to meaningfully change the results in their state are slim. Nor are there many signs that local officials are willing to go along with changes to normal practices in regards to the electoral college.

That fact was highlighted by a statement from Michigan's top two Republican lawmakers who visited Trump at the White House on Friday.

"As legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan's electors," wrote Mike Shirkey, the leader of the state's senate, and Lee Chatfield, the speaker of the state's House of Representatives.

They also said that they have "not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election", a blow to Trump showing that, despite consistently claiming the election was rigged against him, at least some Republicans believe the evidence of the claim is slim.

All Michigan's counties have certified the results, so it is up to the state's board of canvassers to certify the results for the entire state. The board, made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, is set to meet on Monday. While one of the Republican board members suggested that the state should conduct an audit of the election, the board's power is narrow and election lawyers in the state have said the path to fighting certification is complicated.

Trump may attempt to invite other Republican state lawmakers from the targeted swing states.

The White House is undergoing discussions on inviting Pennsylvania state legislators to the Oval Office, likely in attempts to court their support in sidestepping the people's vote, CNN reported Saturday morning. Pennsylvania's counties need to certify their election results by Monday, after which it will go to the Democratic secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar.

While Trump's closest allies are making public appearances decrying the results of the election and calling for an overturn of its results, Trump has largely kept out of the public eye, seemingly sulking as his loss becomes an unshakeable reality.

But in a possible sign that some Republican resolve might be shifting Elizabeth Cheney, a senior figure and the party and congresswoman from Wyoming, issued a statement calling on Trump to prove his allegations of fraud or accept that he has lost.

"If the president cannot prove these claims or demonstrate that they would change the election result, he should fulfil his path to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States by respecting sanctity of the electoral process," Cheney said.

Biden's popular vote lead over Trump stretches to more than 6m

President-elect currently has 79,823,827 votes as he continues to rack up the highest number of votes in US history

Guardian staff and agencies
22 Nov 2020 17.23 GMT

Joe Biden's popular vote lead over Donald Trump has now stretched to more than 6m as he continues to rack up the highest number of votes in American history.

The Democratic challenger, and now president-elect, currently has 79,823,827 compared to the president's 73,786,905 - itself a record for a losing candidate in terms of sheer number of votes cast.
Trump's last-ditch efforts to overturn results fail to make dent in Biden victory
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Biden's win in the popular vote tally has also delivered him a convincing mandate in the all-important electoral college, which actually decides who becomes the next occupant of the White House, after flipping states like Georgia, Arizona and the midwestern rust belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

However, it has not stopped Trump and many of his Republican allies from seeking to undermine the result of the election by launching a series of lawsuits and technical objections and asking for recounts. None of the tactics have shown any evidence to back up Trump's false claims of widespread ballot fraud.

Biden, who has denounced Trump's attempt to reverse the election results as "totally irresponsible", was spending Saturday meeting with transition advisers as he draws up his administration. Trump was scheduled to participate virtually in his last summit of the 20 biggest world economies.

Senior Republicans have remained largely silent about Trump's unsubstantiated claims of election fraud or have defended his right to seek redress, but pressure was building after several voiced doubts on Friday.

Two Republican sources said a press conference on Thursday at which Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani accused Democrats of engaging in a "national conspiracy" to manipulate vote totals, while conceding that he had no evidence, may have been a turning point for some former allies.

The General Services Administration, run by a Trump appointee, still has not recognized Biden's victory, preventing his team from gaining access to government office space and funding normally provided to an incoming administration ahead of inauguration day on 20 January.

The president-elect spent his 78th birthday on Friday in his home state of Delaware at work on the government transition, including a meeting with Congress' top two Democrats: the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer.

In two months, he will take the reins of a politically fractured nation facing the worst public health crisis in a century, high unemployment and a reckoning on racial injustice.

As he wrestles with those issues, Biden will be attempting to accomplish another feat: demonstrating to Americans that age is but a number and he's up to the job. Biden will be sworn in as the oldest president in the nation's history, displacing Ronald Reagan, who left the White House in 1989 when he was 77 years and 349 days old.

The age and health of both Biden and Trump - less than four years Biden's junior - loomed throughout a race that was decided by a younger and more diverse electorate.

Out of the gate, Biden will be keen to demonstrate he's got the vigor to serve.

"It's crucial that he and his staff put himself in the position early in his presidency where he can express what he wants with a crispness that's not always been his strength," said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University who has advised legislators from both parties. "He has got to build up credibility with the American people that he's physically and mentally up to the job."

A Great Election, Against All Odds

Democracy is hard work. That work paid off.

By The Editorial Board

Nov. 23, 2020
NY Times

The 2020 election was not simply free of fraud, or whatever cooked-up malfeasance the president is braying about at this hour. It was, from an administrative standpoint, a resounding success. In the face of a raging pandemic and the highest turnout in more than a century, Americans enjoyed one of the most secure, most accurate and most well-run elections ever.

Don't take our word for it. Listen to the state and local officials of both parties in dozens of states who were tasked with overseeing the process.

"Numbers don't lie," Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said on Friday when he certified his state's vote total following a hand recount of about five million ballots. Joe Biden won Georgia by a little more than 12,000 votes.

Same story in Michigan. "We have not seen any evidence of fraud or foul play in the actual administration of the election,'' said a spokesman for the Democratic secretary of state there. "What we have seen is that it was smooth, transparent, secure and accurate."

Over all, the 2020 election "was the most secure in American history," according to a statement put out this month by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is made up of top federal and state election officials. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."

A bipartisan consensus like this may tempt some people to conclude that the dire pre-election warnings were overblown, that the risks to the election were never that serious. The reality is the opposite. The threats were many and real. There were massive logistical hurdles to running an election during a deadly disease outbreak. There was chaos sown deliberately by a sitting president to undermine Americans' faith in the integrity of the democratic process. There was good reason to fear an electoral meltdown.

That the meltdown didn't materialize was thanks to months of hard work and selfless commitment by tens of thousands of Americans across the country: state and local elections officials, volunteer poll workers, overburdened postal carriers, helpful neighbors and generous philanthropists.

Together, this ad hoc democracy-protection network fanned out to expand access to mail-in ballots, helping more than 100 million Americans, nearly two-thirds of all voters, to vote early or absentee. They took on poll worker shifts so that older Americans would not have to risk their lives to keep precincts open. They volunteered time to ensure votes would be counted as quickly and accurately as possible. It was a heroic effort, and the people who worked its front lines deserve Americans' everlasting gratitude.

It is neither wise nor realistic to count on this sort of mobilization happening every four years. "The smoothness of the election was not self-executing," said Vanita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an organization that supports voting rights. "Don't lose sight of how much work we did to make it this way."

The nation will need to prioritize voting rights and election administration to a degree it has never adequately done. For example, why are Americans still waiting for hours in line to cast their ballots? In 2014, a bipartisan commission said no one ought to have to wait more than 30 minutes to vote. Six years on, the country is nowhere close to that goal.
The Interpreter: Original insights, commentary and discussions on the major news stories of the week.

The solutions are not a mystery. Here are three of the most obvious ones.

More money. In the first wave of the pandemic last spring, elections experts and officials pleaded with Congress to provide up to $4 billion to help ensure a smooth election. Lawmakers approved one-tenth of that amount. "We get what we pay for," said Justin Levitt, an election law scholar at Loyola Law School. "We poured trillions into pandemic recovery, and a teaspoonful into the democracy that makes it work."

Some of the shortfall was made up by private philanthropists, who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to state and local governments. Professional sports teams offered up their empty arenas so voters could safely cast ballots in person. Donors provided masks and other protective gear for poll workers. All of that was welcome, and yet the American people pay taxes for just this purpose; they shouldn't have to rely on the beneficence of the wealthy to keep their democracy intact.

Less voter suppression. It wasn't so long ago that both parties supported the protection of voting rights. In 2006, Congress overwhelmingly voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act. Today, the Republican Party is awash in conspiracy theories and - there's no other way to put it - fundamentally distrusts the American electorate.

In hundreds of lawsuits filed over voting and election procedures in 2020 - the most ever in an election season - Republicans consistently sided against voters. In too many cases, the courts let them have their way. They blocked reasonable, targeted measures to make voting easier during the pandemic, like extending ballot-arrival deadlines or increasing the number of drop boxes.

President Trump has spent the past five years building a fantasy world in which he can lose only because the other side cheated, and far too many people are content to live in it. In the absence of a whit of evidence, a majority of Republicans say they believe Joe Biden's victory is the result of fraud. That's why Mr. Raffensperger, a committed Republican, is being punished for his defense of Georgia's electoral process with everything from death threats to a potentially illegal request by Senator Lindsey Graham, a top Republican, who Mr. Raffensperger said tried to persuade him to throw out legally cast ballots.

The United States needs members of both major political parties to support voting rights and access to the polls - not just because they believe it helps democracy, but because they believe it helps them.

Thwart disinformation. America needs a far more aggressive and coordinated response to the massive disinformation campaigns polluting social media and people's dialogue with one another.

Social-media giants like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube did more in 2020 to combat these campaigns than ever before, and yet it wasn't nearly enough. When a lie can race around the globe in minutes, anything less than an immediate response is too slow. The labels applied to misleading or factually untrue content were often vague, and did not necessarily refute the disinformation.

Also, it's obvious that most of the disinformation right now is coming from one side of the political spectrum. Social media companies need to confront that reality head-on and stop worrying about being called biased. That's especially important when it comes to the accounts of high-profile figures like President Trump, who have the power to deceive huge numbers of Americans with a single tweet.

Democracy is a fragile thing, and it requires constant tending and vigilance to survive. Americans were lucky this time. They were also well prepared. When pushed to the brink, they mobilized to protect their democracy. For this moment, at least, tune out the president, his flailing dishonesty and his bottomless disregard for the American experiment. Instead, express gratitude to the millions of Americans who still believe in that experiment, and who did all they could to make this election succeed in the face of daunting odds. Then help make sure they don't have to do it by themselves again

Trump agrees to begin transition as key agency calls Biden apparent election winner

President says he will continue to fight results as General Services Administration clears way for handover

Sam Levin and Maanvi Singh
Guardian
Tue 24 Nov 2020 04.17 GMT

The General Services Administration has declared president-elect Joe Biden the apparent winner of the US election, clearing the way for the formal transition from Donald Trump's administration to begin after weeks of delay.

The GSA said on Monday that it had determined that Biden was the winner of the 3 November race after weeks of Trump refusing to concede and violating the traditions of the transition of power at the White House.

Trump said on Twitter he had directed his team to cooperate on the transition, but vowed to continue fighting the election results, despite the lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud. Hours later, he said: "Will never concede to fake ballots & "˜Dominion'."

Emily Murphy, who heads the GSA, said she made the determination based on "the law" and "facts."

"Please know that I came to my decision independently, based on the law and available facts. I was never directly or indirectly pressured by any executive branch official including those who work at the White House or GSA with regard to the substance or timing of my decision," Murphy wrote in a letter to Biden.

Murphy had faced growing pressure from Democrats and some Republicans to allow the transition to begin, as Trump's efforts to challenge the results in numerous battleground states failed.

A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday tossed a Trump campaign lawsuit that sought to prevent certification in that state. And on Monday, Michigan certified Biden's victory, despite an unprecedented push by the president last week to undermine that move to allow for an audit of ballots in Wayne county, where Biden won by more than 330,000 votes.

GSA certification is a process that in typical election years occurs without fanfare or discussion shortly after the race is called by major news outlets.

Murphy's refusal to declare Biden the winner weeks after the election prevented the transition team of Biden and Vice president-elect Kamala Harris from accessing federal funding and meeting with government officials to prepare for inauguration on 20 January.

The delay was particularly concerning given the urgent and unprecedented tasks facing the federal government amid a significantly worsening pandemic and economic crisis. The US must also begin work to prepare a national rollout of Covid-19 vaccines. There were also major concerns about the potential national security implications of a delayed transition, which blocked Biden from accessing classified briefings.

After Murphy's letter was made public, Trump tweeted, "We will keep up the good fight and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same."

The Trump legal team dismissed the certification as "simply a procedural step" and insisted it would fight on.

Yohannes Abraham, executive director of the Biden transition, said in a statement Monday that the move by the GSA "is a needed step to begin tackling the challenges facing our nation, including getting the pandemic under control and our economy back on track".

He added: "In the days ahead, transition officials will begin meeting with federal officials to discuss the pandemic response, have a full accounting of our national security interests, and gain complete understanding of the Trump administration's efforts to hollow out government agencies."

With GSA permitting the formal transition to start, more Republicans started to acknowledge the reality that Biden is president-elect.

"President Trump's legal team has not presented evidence of the massive fraud which would have had to be present to overturn the election," said Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator from Louisiana. "I voted for President Trump but Joe Biden won."

A majority of GOP senators have refused to recognize Biden's win, arguing that Trump should be allowed to pursue his cases in court, despite the lack of evidence of any widespread fraud that would change the outcome of the race. Since the Associated Press and other news organizations across the country declared Biden the winner on 7 November, five days after polls closed, Trump and his allies have continued to spread misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories, seeking to undermine the legitimacy of mail-in voting and falsely asserting that the election was "stolen".

Audits, recounts and the Trump campaign's court cases, however, have resulted in no meaningful changes to the election results, and in some cases, Biden's lead has only increased. Judges repeatedly thr ew out the Trump campaign team's cases.

But the false accusations of fraud did lead some election officials to seek to delay certification of the vote. The city commissioner's office in Philadelphia, where counting took days, reported facing death threats, and Trump supporters have staged protests outside election offices across the US.

Murphy's letter came on the same day that Biden announced his selection for several key cabinet roles. The president-elect said he would be nominating Tony Blinken as secretary of state, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser and John Kerry as "climate tsar", suggesting a return to the priorities of the Obama era.

Biden also selected Alejandro Mayorkas for homeland security secretary. If he is confirmed, he would be the first Latino and migrant to have the position. He has further chosen Avril Haines to be the first female director of national intelligence and Janet Yellen to be the country's first female treasury secretary.

Trump's bizarre Georgia play: GOP in chaos just so he can show he's still the boss

on November 25, 2020
By Heather Digby Parton, Salon
- Commentary

Despite having begrudgingly allowed the General Services Administration to issue an "ascertainment" that Joe Biden is the president-elect and the normal transition process could begin, Donald Trump is still relentlessly flogging the lie that the election was stolen by the Democrats and he is the rightful winner. And he's sending out a daily fusillade of emails begging for money, with the alleged goal of overturning the results.

There is no record of how much the Trump campaign have raised with his grift. According to some reports, they were taking in $10 million a day shortly after the election was called. It appears Team Trump plans to use most of the money for a post-presidency slush fund, either to finance Trump's hypothetical 2024 run or to curry favors with Republican politicians. I don't think we need to wonder whether any of it will wind up in Trump's pockets, because of course it will.

So far, the legal challenges have all been thrown out of court since they offered no real evidence. Once all the lawyers who cared about their reputations dropped out, the only ones left were a clown car full of fools driven by Rudy Giuliani, with the even more delusional legal sidekick Sidney Powell riding shotgun.

Powell was shoved out the door this week when her conspiracy theories proved to be too much even for the Trump campaign, which should tell you everything you need to know. But for a worked-up, cult-like base primed by the likes of Pizzagate and QAnon to believe anything, Powell's wild stories about how the election was stolen from Trump make perfect sense.

Powell's "theory" isn't worth going into here because it's utter nonsense. But that's not the reason she was canned. She made the mistake of saying that Republicans and Democrats alike were on the take, which didn't sit well with the party. But her bigger error was in focusing on Georgia and ranting against Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the pair of Republican incumbents who are fighting to hold their seats - and a GOP Senate majority - in the January runoff elections. And Powell had the audacity to air some of the party's dirty laundry.

Recall that Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia was one of Trump's made men in Congress, vociferously defending him through thick and thin. When Sen. Johnny Isakson resigned due to poor health, Trump wanted Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to appoint Collins to the Senate. But Kemp preferred the moneyed-up Loeffler - who, together with her husband, New York Stock Exchange chair Jeffrey Sprecher, is reportedly worth at least $800 million - and she was ultimately given the seat. Trump wasn't happy about that and there's apparently some lingering bad blood between him and Kemp. You know how he is.

Collins ran against Loeffler in the November special election - a nonpartisan "jungle primary" - and finished third, splitting the Republican vote and leading to Loeffler's January runoff against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat. (Powell claimed the vote was rigged against Collins in favor of Loeffler.) Trump then put Collins in charge of his fruitless recount effort in the state - having already completed a hand audit of all the votes, Georgia is now conducting a second machine recount - and there's a lot of back-stabbing going on among all the players, complicating their ability to show a united front.

Trump has of course waded in, tweeting one bogus claim about voter fraud and election irregularities after another, all of them false. Loeffler and Perdue, the other incumbent Republican senator headed for a runoff in January (against Democrat Jon Ossoff), sought to please Trump by demanding the resignation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who had the temerity to run an honest election. Collins dutifully echoed Trump's inane tweeting, garnering a harsh rebuke from Raffensperger, who called him a "failed candidate" and "a liar." (One can't help but suspect he was indirectly addressing the big guy, who fits that bill even better than Collins.) Trump has been tagging Kemp with every one of his outrageous tweets, undoubtedly taking pleasure in taunting the Georgia governor for refusing to show proper fealty by appointing Collins in the first place.

So, the Republican Party in Georgia was already a big mess, with its various players and the president engaged in a circular firing squad armed with rhetorical AR-15s. Along came Sidney Powell, seemingly implicating the state party in a massive kickback and voter-fraud conspiracy which had to make Mitch McConnell get a little bit twitchy. Unfortunately for Mitch, Georgia Republicans may not be able to put that toothpaste back in the tube. All this infighting hasn't just tapped into the paranoid strain among the base, it has revitalized one of the most powerful themes of the old conservative movement: a powerful hatred of "RINOs," or Republicans in Name Only.

Morning Consult recently polled Republican voters and found that the vast majority see Trump as reflecting their values far more than GOP leaders do:

    Nearly 7 in 10 Republican voters (68 percent) said they consider Trump to be more in touch with the party's rank and file, compared with 20 percent who said the same of Republicans in Congress.

Attacking Republican officials who fail to toe the line is comfortably familiar to GOP base voters. (Just ask former House Speaker Paul Ryan.) They've been ruthlessly culling their herd this way for a couple of decades now, and are always eager to show their power.

Across social media, Trump followers are calling for Loeffler and Perdue to step in and demand that the state's presidential vote be audited yet again, with all signatures checked on absentee ballots. As mentioned above, there has already been a hand count, and a machine recount is now underway. Rechecking signatures is literally impossible, since signed envelopes were already checked and separated from the ballots in order to protect the secrecy of the vote. Right-wing Georgia attorney Lin Wood (who is also representing Kenosha vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse) is one of those leading the charge with threats to withhold his vote if the two Senate candidates fail to take action:

He has not backed off even in light of Powell's removal, and he's not alone. The Daily Beast reports that a couple of shady groups affiliated with Roger Stone are involved as well, encouraging voters to write in Trump's name in the Senate races to show the RINOs who's boss. A lawyer for one of these groups admits that Stone is a client but denies knowing anything about it. (We know Stone would never be involved in any sort of dirty tricks, so that's that. )

If Stone is involved, these shenanigans are almost certainly being conducted with Trump's approval. From his point of view, maybe that makes a certain amount of sense. Trump doesn't care whether the Senate stays in Republican hands, even if he's actually planning another run in 2024. The idea that he's anybody's team player is laughable, and he may see his personal interest in demonstrating how much power he still has with the base as he plans his next moves. It wouldn't surprise me if Trump's inner circle sees an advantage in a narrative that Loeffler and Perdue were defeated because his base rejected Republicans who refused to put it all on the line for Trump.

It's obvious that Donald Trump is in torturous psychological turmoil right now. Demonstrating a little dominance - over whoever happens to be vulnerable - might be just what the doctor ordered.

Donald Trump says he will leave White House if electoral college votes for Joe Biden

President's comments are the closest he has come to admitting defeat in election and set stage for college vote on 14 December

Martin Farrer and agencies
Guardian
27 Nov 2020 23.16 GMT

Donald Trump has said that he will leave the White House when the electoral college votes for Democratic president-elect Joe Biden in the closest the outgoing president has come to conceding defeat.

Biden won the presidential election with 306 electoral college votes - many more than the 270 required - to Trump's 232. Biden also leads Trump by more than 6 million in the popular vote tally.

Trump has so far defied tradition by refusing to concede defeat, instead making a series of baseless claims about alleged ballot fraud and launching legal attempts to challenge the outcomes in several states such Pennsylvania and Michigan.

But desperate efforts by Trump and his aides to overturn results in key states, either by lawsuits or by pressuring state legislators, have failed.

Speaking to reporters on the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump said if Biden - who is due to be sworn in on 20 January - was certified the election winner by the electoral college, he would depart the White House.

Trump's comments, made to reporters at the White House after speaking to troops during the traditional Thanksgiving Day address to US service members, appear to take him one step nearer to admitting defeat.

Asked if he would leave the White House if the college vote went against him, Trump said: "Certainly I will. And you know that," adding that: "If they do, they've made a mistake."

However, Trump said it would be "a very hard thing to concede" and declined to say whether he would attend Biden's inauguration, which is due to take place on 20 January.

It was the first time he had taken questions from reporters since election day, and at times he turned combative, calling one reporter a "lightweight" and telling him "don't talk to me like that".

Trump's administration has already given the green light for a formal transition to get underway. But Trump took issue with Biden moving forward.

"I think it's not right that he's trying to pick a Cabinet," Trump said, even though officials from both teams are already working together to get Biden's team up to speed.

At one point he urged reporters not to allow Biden the credit for pending coronavirus vaccines.

"Don't let him take credit for the vaccines because the vaccines were me and I pushed people harder than they've ever been pushed before," he said.

As for whether or not he plans to formally declare his candidacy to run again in 2024 - as he has discussed with aides - Trump he didn't "want to talk about 2024 yet."

In late-night tweets, Trump complained that the media had not covered his news conference in the way he had wanted, saying the main point he had tried to make was that he won the election. Twitter flagged his comments.

The electoral college is due to meet on 14 December when each state's nominated electors will cast their votes for the winner of the state's presidential ballot. The votes are officially counted by Congress on 6 January.

When asked about Trump's comments, Biden campaign spokesperson, Michael Gwin said: "President-elect Biden won 306 electoral votes. States continue to certify those results, the Electoral College will soon meet to ratify that outcome," adding: "Biden will be sworn in as President on January 20, 2021."

Showing that he intends to stay in the political fray until the end of his term, Trump said on Thursday he would travel on 5 December to Georgia, a once solidly Republican state he lost narrowly to Biden, to campaign for two Republican Senate candidates.

The two runoff elections in Georgia on 5 January will determine whether the Republicans keep their majority in the Senate.

Biden and Trump both stayed close to home to celebrate Thanksgiving as the coronavirus pandemic raged across the country.

Biden spent the holiday with his family in Delaware, giving a presidential-style address in a message posted on Twitter. He said Americans were making a "shared sacrifice for the whole country" and a "statement of common purpose" by staying at home with their immediate families.

Trump often likes to celebrate holidays at his Mar-a-Largo resort in Florida. But on Thursday he remained in the Washington area, spending part of the morning at his Trump National Golf Club in Virginia where he played a round of golf.

The US is rapidly approaching 13m confirmed Covid-19 infections, and by Thursday more than 263,000 people in the country had lost their lives to coronavirus.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report

**************

Republicans are right: democracy is rigged. But they are the beneficiaries

Stephen Holmes

Conservatives relish the irony of Trump's audacious reversal of the truth around rigging - because it distracts attention from their minority rule

Guardian
Thu 26 Nov 2020 11.35 GMT

The Republican establishment, despite being unfairly advantaged by the skewed composition of the electoral college, by over-representation in the House due to partisan gerrymandering and in the Senate due to equal State suffrage, has been in no hurry to reject Donald Trump's ludicrous allegation that the American electoral system is rigged to favor Democrats. Sweating the make-or-break Georgia runoffs, the party's leaders are apparently frightened to cross the mad king, who owns their voters, lest he cause their ratings to plummet as he is doing with Fox News. But Republican complicity with this unprecedented attack on American democracy is not a matter of short-term expediency or fear of reprisals. It is much worse than that. Mitch McConnell and the others are not merely humoring the president until his mania subsides. Trump's voters are the Republicans' voters and the Republican party cannot easily cut them, and their deranged conspiracy theories, loose even after 20 January.

This has important implications for how Biden should respond to the incalculable damage Trump has inflicted on the country, including how his Department of Justice approaches the restoration of the rule of law.

The Republican party is deeply committed to the outrageously tilted playing field that allows a minority of voters to choose a majority of senators and, indirectly, a majority of supreme court justices, not to mention the occasional president as in 2000 and 2016. They are an unabashedly anti-democratic party in that sense alone, even if we set aside their brazen efforts at voter suppression and voter intimidation. This is perhaps the main reason why its leaders have proved so reluctant to dissociate themselves from Trump's specious allegation that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged". They know that the system is rigged. It is rigged to favor Republicans. And they relish not only the irony of Trump's audacious reversal of the truth, but also the way it distracts attention from the genuinely unconscionable rigging that gives an American minority the power to impose its will on the American majority.

Republican officials are slowly distancing themselves from the embarrassingly delusional president's refusal to accept the reality of his defeat. But the fact that it is taking them so long reflects a deep truth about the country's politics, namely that Americans are still fighting the civil war. When Trump and his madcap surrogates cry "voter fraud", they do not mean fraud in the technical sense of ballot stuffing or the miscounting of legal votes. What they mean is that Democrats have debased the composition of the electorate by making it easier for African Americans in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, the most reliably Democratic voters in the country, to register and vote. Trump would have been elected in a landslide, they imply, if only "real Americans", meaning exactly who you think, had been allowed to vote.

Nixon's famous "southern strategy", crafted with the support of Strom Thurmond, the infamous South Carolina segregationist, suffices to remind us that Republican pandering to white fears of demographic inundation did not begin, and will not end, with Donald Trump. Key to the historical origins of Republican acquiescence in Trump's efforts to wreck American democracy is his last-ditch and doomed gambit to convince Republican controlled state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to replace the pro-Biden delegates to their state's electoral college with a pro-Trump slate of electors.

Trump's advisers evidently believe that this anti-democratic maneuver is perfectly constitutional since article II, section 1, clause 2 of the US constitution declares that "each state shall appoint" presidential electors "in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct". That clause seems straightforward enough until we recall, as Republicans are apparently loath to do, that the framers' constitution was radically revised by the civil war amendments. In particular, section 2 of the 14th amendment of 1868 was designed to penalize any state that attempted to deny any American citizen "the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for president and vice-president of the United States". Allowing Republican-controlled state legislatures to appoint the electors would run grievously afoul of this all-important clause. It was bitterly contested in the states of the former Confederacy for the same reason that Trump's diehard supporters are refusing to accept his defeat. Section 2 of the 14th amendment was seen at the time, and is apparently still seen today, as a betrayal of the racial solidarity of the white majority because crafted to reshape the American electorate by enfranchising African Americans. Shamelessly echoing the South's post-civil war howls of betrayal, Trump shows why he should forever be remembered as the second president of the Confederacy.

While none of this implies that Joe Biden's well-meaning appetite for some measure of bipartisanship is completely hopeless, it does suggest that he may be thinking about it in the wrong way. The Republican establishment, as mentioned, is panicked by the prospect of alienating Trump's voters. But they also have strong reasons, after 20 January, to consign Trump himself to political oblivion. This is the wedge that the president-elect should exploit. After all, the presidential hopes of Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and even Mike Pompeo depend on the current darling of their electorate being swept from the scene. And if his strident voice can be silenced, the party can hope to retreat into its pre-Trump habits of making only the kind of discreet appeals to white resentment acceptable in polite company.

Although Biden says that he wants to restore the rule of law that has been desecrated by the outgoing attorney general, William Barr, he may imagine that the best way to convince at least some Republicans to cooperate with his administration is to close the books on the past by directing his new justice department to let bygones be bygones. But attempting to "heal the soul of the nation" by discouraging a thorough inquiry into Trump's potential violations of federal law recalls Robert Frost's definition of a liberal as "a man who can't take his own side in an argument".

If retreat from confrontation is what Biden has in mind, he may be underestimating the tacit desire of the Republican leadership to rid themselves of the rabble-rouser who is keeping their electorate hostage. They may well silently but heartily approve if Biden keeps his promise to abstain from interfering with his new attorney general's efforts to uncover the extent of Trump's malfeasance in office. Even criminal prosecution, if it comes to that, might be an act of bipartisanship since, by publicly disgracing Trump, it would free a few more Republicans to be occasionally cooperative. This possibility should appeal to a president-elect who, with 80 million voters at his back, is not only willing to reach across the aisle but eager to take his own side's side in an argument.

    Stephen Holmes is professor of law at NYU School of Law and co-author with Ivan Krastev of The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Penguin 2019)

Joe Biden gains votes in Wisconsin county after Trump-ordered recount

Milwaukee recount, which cost Trump campaign $3m, boosts Democratic president-elect days before state must certify result

Guardian
Sat 28 Nov 2020 07.05 GMT

A recount in Wisconsin's largest county demanded by President Donald Trump's election campaign ended on Friday with the president-elect, Joe Biden, gaining votes.

After the recount in Milwaukee county, Biden made a net gain of 132 votes, out of nearly 460,000 cast. Overall, the Democrat gained 257 votes to Trump's 125.

Trump's campaign had demanded recounts in two of Wisconsin's most populous and Democratic-leaning counties, after he lost Wisconsin to Biden by more than 20,000 votes. The two recounts will cost the Trump campaign $3m. Dane county is expected to finish its recount on Sunday.

Overall, Biden won November's US presidential election with 306 electoral college votes to Trump's 232. Biden also leads by more than 6m in the popular vote tally.

After the recount ended, the Milwaukee county clerk, George Christenson, said: "The recount demonstrates what we already know: that elections in Milwaukee county are fair, transparent, accurate and secure."

The Trump campaign is still expected to mount a legal challenge to the overall result in Wisconsin, but time is running out. The state is due to certify its presidential result on Tuesday.

On Friday, Trump's legal team suffered yet another defeat when a federal appeals court in Philadelphia rejected the campaign's latest effort to challenge the state's election results.

Trump's lawyers said they would take the case to the supreme court despite the Philadelphia judges' assessment that the "campaign's claims have no merit".

Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the three-judge panel: "Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here."

Trump continued to maintain without evidence that there was election fraud in the state, tweeting early on Saturday: "The 1,126,940 votes were created out of thin air. I won Pennsylvania by a lot, perhaps more than anyone will ever know."

Meanwhile, Trump's baseless claims of electoral fraud in Georgia are increasingly worrying his own party. Republicans are concerned that the chaos caused by Trump's stance and his false comments on the conduct of the election in the key swing state, which Biden won for the Democrats, could hinder his party's efforts to retain control of the Senate.

A runoff for the state's two Senate seats is scheduled for early January and if the Democrats clinch both seats, it will give them control of the upper house as well as the House of Representatives.

When asked about his previous baseless claims of fraud in Georgia during a Thanksgiving Day press conference, Trump said he was "very worried" about them, saying: "You have a fraudulent system." He then called the state's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who has defended the state's election process, an "enemy of the people".

Such attacks have Republicans worried as they seek to motivate Georgia voters to come to the polls in January, volunteer for their Senate campaigns and - perhaps most importantly of all - dig deep into their pockets to pay for the unexpected runoff races.

In particular Trump's comments have spurred conspiracy theories that the state's electoral system is rigged and prompted some of his supporters to make calls for a boycott of the coming vote - something that local Georgia Republicans desperately do not want. "His demonization of Georgia's entire electoral system is hurting his party's chances at keeping the Senate," warned an article published by Politico.

With Reuters and Associated Press

************

Federal court rejects Trump election lawsuit in Pennsylvania

Trump's legal team vows to appeal to supreme court after yet another defeat, as judge says claims "˜have no merit'

Associated Press
Fri 28 Nov 2020 20.17 GMT

Donald Trump's legal team suffered yet another defeat in court Friday as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the campaign's latest effort to challenge the state's election results.

Trump's lawyers vowed to appeal to the supreme court despite the Philadelphia judges' assessment that the "campaign's claims have no merit".

"Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here," Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the three-judge panel.

The case had been argued last week in a lower court by Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who insisted during five hours of oral arguments that the 2020 presidential election had been marred by widespread fraud in Pennsylvania. However, Giuliani failed to offer any tangible proof of that in court.

The US district judge Matthew Brann had said the campaign's error-filled complaint, "like Frankenstein's Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together" and denied Giuliani the right to amend it for a second time.

The 3rd US circuit court of appeals called that decision justified. The three judges on the panel were all appointed by Republican presidents. including Bibas, a former University of Pennsylvania law professor appointed by Trump. Trump's sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, sat on the court for 20 years, retiring in 2019.

"Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections," Bibas said in the opinion, which also denied the campaign's request to stop the state from certifying its results, a demand he called "breathtaking".

In fact, Pennsylvania officials had certified their vote count Monday for President-elect Joe Biden, who defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in the state. Nationally, Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, garnered nearly 80 million votes, a record in US presidential elections.

Trump has said he hopes the supreme court will intervene in the race as it did in 2000, when its decision to stop the recount in Florida gave the election to Republican George W Bush. On November 5, as the vote count continued, Trump posted a tweet saying the "US Supreme Court should decide!"

Ever since, Trump and his surrogates have attacked the election as flawed and filed a flurry of lawsuits to try to block the results in six battleground states. But they've found little sympathy from judges, nearly all of whom dismissed their complaints about the security of mail-in ballots, which millions of people used to vote from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump perhaps hopes a supreme court he helped steer toward a conservative 6-3 majority would be more open to his pleas, especially since the high court upheld Pennsylvania's decision to accept mail-in ballots through 6 November by only a 4-4 vote last month. Since then, the Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett has joined the court.

"The activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the allegations of massive fraud," Trump's lawyer Jenna Ellis tweeted after Friday's ruling. "On to SCOTUS!"

In the case before Brann, the Trump campaign asked to disenfranchise the state's 6.8 million voters, or at least the 700,000 who voted by mail in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other Democratic-leaning areas.

"One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption," Brann wrote in his scathing ruling on 21 November. "That has not happened."

A separate Republican challenge that reached the Pennsylvania supreme court this week seeks to stop the state from further certifying any races on the ballot. The Democratic governor Tom Wolf's administration is fighting that effort, saying it would prevent the state's legislature and congressional delegation from being seated in the coming weeks.

On Thursday, Trump said the 3 November election was still far from over. Yet he offered the clearest signal to date that he would leave the White House peaceably on January 20 if the electoral college formalized Biden's win.

"Certainly I will. But you know that," Trump said at the White House, taking questions from reporters for the first time since election day.

On Friday, however, he continued to baselessly attack Detroit, Atlanta and other Democratic cities with large Black populations as the source of "massive voter fraud". And he claimed, without evidence, that a Pennsylvania poll watcher had uncovered computer memory drives that "gave Biden 50,000 votes" apiece.

All 50 states must certify their results before the electoral college meets on 14 December, and any challenge to the results must be resolved by 8 December. Biden won both the electoral college and popular vote by wide margins.

Trump loses another election court challenge

on November 29, 2020
By Agence France-Presse

The US state of Pennsylvania's supreme court dismissed another legal challenge to the election by supporters of President Donald Trump on Saturday, further reducing his already near-impossible odds of overturning the results.

A Republican lawsuit had sought to invalidate mail-in ballots in the battleground state that President-elect Joe Biden won by about 81,000 votes - or to throw out all votes and allow the state's legislature to decide the winner.

The court dismissed both claims in a unanimous decision, calling the second one an "extraordinary proposition that the court disenfranchise all 6.9 million Pennsylvanians who voted in the general election."

The lawsuit argued that a Pennsylvania law from 2019 allowing universal mail-in voting was unconstitutional.

The judges said that their November 21 challenge to the law was filed too late, coming more than a year after it was enacted and with the election results "becoming seemingly apparent."

Pennsylvania officially certified Biden's victory there on November 24. The lawsuit had also sought to stop certification.

Saturday's decision follows a long line of similar ones, including a ruling the day before in which a federal appeals court flatly dismissed Trump's claim that the election was unfair and refused to freeze Biden's win in Pennsylvania.

Trump has refused to give up on his claims of fraud in the November 3 election despite his repeated court defeats, tweeting bizarre conspiracy theories and vowing to continue his legal fight.

On Thursday, he said for the first time that he would leave the White House if Biden is officially confirmed the winner by the Electoral College on December 14.

But on Friday he tweeted that "Biden can only enter the White House as president if he can prove that his ridiculous "˜80,000,000 votes' were not fraudulently or illegally obtained."

Biden, who is to be sworn in on January 20, won 306 votes in the Electoral College to Trump's 232.

The president-elect has said that Americans "won't stand" for attempts to derail the vote outcome.

In Key States, Republicans Were Critical in Resisting Trump's Election Narrative

They refuted conspiracy theories, certified results, dismissed lawsuits and repudiated a president of their own party.

By Peter Baker and Kathleen Gray
NY Times
Nov. 29, 2020

The telephone call would have been laugh-out-loud ridiculous if it had not been so serious. When Tina Barton picked up, she found someone from President Trump's campaign asking her to sign a letter raising doubts about the results of the election.

The election that Ms. Barton as the Republican clerk of the small Michigan city of Rochester Hills had helped oversee. The election that she knew to be fair and accurate because she had helped make it so. The election that she had publicly defended amid threats that made her upgrade her home security system.

"Do you know who you're talking to right now?" she asked the campaign official.

Evidently not.

If the president hoped Republicans across the country would fall in line behind his false and farcical claims that the election was somehow rigged on a mammoth scale by a nefarious multinational conspiracy, he was in for a surprise. Republicans in Washington may have indulged Mr. Trump's fantastical assertions, but at the state and local level, Republicans played a critical role in resisting the mounting pressure from their own party to overturn the vote after Mr. Trump fell behind on Nov. 3.

The three weeks that followed tested American democracy and demonstrated that the two-century-old system is far more vulnerable to subversion than many had imagined even though the incumbent president lost by six million votes nationwide. But in the end, the system stood firm against the most intense assault from an aggrieved president in the nation's history because of a Republican city clerk in Michigan, a Republican secretary of state in Georgia, a Republican county supervisor in Arizona and Republican-appointed judges in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

They refuted conspiracy theories, certified results, dismissed lawsuits and repudiated a president of their own party, leaving him to thunder about a supposed plot that would have had to include people who had voted for him, donated to him or even been appointed by him. The desperate effort to hang onto office over the will of the people effectively ended when his own director of the General Services Administration determined that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the president-elect and a judge Mr. Trump put on the bench chastised him for ludicrous litigation.

"Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy," Judge Stephanos Bibas, appointed by Mr. Trump in 2017, wrote for a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia on Friday as it dismissed the latest of dozens of legal claims filed by Mr. Trump and his allies. "Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here."

Unfounded as it is, the president's campaign against the results may leave lasting scars. With much of the Republican establishment endorsing or staying silent on Mr. Trump's claims, and polls indicating that tens of millions of Republicans believe the election was somehow rigged, faith in American democracy, the fundamental tenet of the social contract established by the framers, has eroded in a dangerous way. And Mr. Biden, the incoming president, now faces a country where many of his constituents consider him illegitimate.

Those who defied Mr. Trump despite their own partisan backgrounds remain bruised by the experience too, in some cases questioning the political system that they have spent years upholding. They may pay a price if their fellow Republicans see what they did as acts of disloyalty rather than conscience. But those who have spoken out expressed no regrets.

"I've got a pretty thick skin, but it's hard not to feel shook by it all," Ms. Barton reflected the other day. "We take our job so seriously that it's devastating to us to have something like that happen. I cried every day for a week, every time I thought about it. My biggest concern was, we're already living in a time when so many people have so little confidence in the process and to give them more reason not to trust the results was absolutely devastating to me."

"˜Numbers Don't Lie'

The drama began within hours after the polls closed. The initial leads that Mr. Trump enjoyed in several battleground states began to dwindle as absentee and mail-in votes that favored Mr. Biden were slowly counted and added to the tallies released publicly. Mr. Trump portrayed the numbers as fraudulent and headed to court, filing lawsuits in multiple states.

In Arizona, where Trump allies complained that the use of Sharpie pens invalidated ballots because they bled through, Clint Hickman, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and a Republican, sent an open letter with a Democratic colleague saying they were "concerned about the misinformation spreading about the integrity of our elections."

Mark Brnovich, the state's Republican attorney general who is widely expected to run for governor in 2022, announced he would investigate the use of the Sharpies. A day later, he tweeted he was satisfied that the pens did not influence the election in any way.

Passions continued to rise. The Democratic secretary of state received threats to kill her family and pets and burn down her house. Mr. Hickman stepped up again, issuing another letter calling on Republicans to "dial back the rhetoric, rumors and false claims."

Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the state House of Representatives, likewise pushed back against the conspiracies and resisted an "enormous amount of pressure" for lawmakers to choose their own electors to support Mr. Trump. "I took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution and laws of the State of Arizona," he said.

In Georgia, Mr. Trump and his allies were blocked by Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state. A mild-mannered civil engineer, Mr. Raffensperger is a staunch conservative who won his office two years ago with an endorsement from Mr. Trump and a platform of Trumpian goals, including a promise to protect the voting system from illegal immigrants.

But he bristled at unfounded claims from Mr. Trump's team and other Republicans, including Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who called for his resignation. Representative Doug Collins, a Republican who had just lost a challenge against Ms. Loeffler, took over Mr. Trump's efforts in Georgia and accused Mr. Raffensperger's office of setting rules that "seem to be changing as we go." Mr. Raffensperger took to Facebook to push back, calling Mr. Collins a "liar."

The dispute landed before Judge Steven D. Grimberg, who was nominated to the United States District Court by Mr. Trump and was a member of the Federalist Society, which has provided lists of conservatives from which the president has drawn his Supreme Court nominees.

But if the Trump camp believed it would find a sympathetic ear, it was disabused in the opening minutes of the hearing when the youthful judge seemed increasingly perturbed by the answers he received to his pointed questions. The suit "would require halting the certification results in a state election in which millions of people have voted," the judge noted.

The next day, Mr. Raffensperger spurned Mr. Trump and certified Mr. Biden's victory in Georgia. "Numbers don't lie," the secretary of state said. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Trump ally, then certified Georgia's electors for Mr. Biden while twisting himself to say that the decision now "paves the way for the Trump campaign to pursue other legal options."

In Pennsylvania, the legal efforts found no more traction. The week after the election, Mr. Trump and his allies lost seven cases in succession. By the next weekend, they ended up in federal court before Judge Matthew W. Brann, another Federalist Society member and conservative Republican appointed by President Barack Obama at the behest of a Republican senator.

Judge Brann called the Trump team's claim nothing more than "strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations" and refused to delay certification of the election. "In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state," he wrote. Judge Brann's ruling was the one upheld on Friday.

Mark Aronchick, a lawyer who represented the city of Philadelphia in several cases brought by the Trump campaign, said the past three weeks proved that the judicial system would not simply bend to the president's will.

"This period of time, with all the things that the Trump campaign were throwing, I viewed as very much a stress test on what I will shout from the rooftops is the best legal system the world has ever seen, in terms of independence of the judiciary and the rule of law," he said. "And at both the state and federal level, the system has come through with flying colors."

Nowhere was the pressure more sustained than in Michigan even though Mr. Biden's margin of victory of 154,000 was greater there than in other contested states. At one point, two Republicans on the Wayne County elections board bowed to the president's wishes and refused to certify the results, only to reverse themselves later that night.

Mr. Trump then summoned the Republican leaders of the state legislature, the Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, and Speaker Lee Chatfield, to the White House in a bid to get lawmakers to substitute their own slate of electors. The two men, both rumored to be interested in higher office, were hesitant to go, according to people familiar with their thinking, but felt that if a president called, they had no choice.

Mr. Chatfield, 32, a graduate of Liberty University, the Christian school in Virginia founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, had been a vocal supporter of the president, even warming up the crowd at a rally in Muskegon before Mr. Trump arrived a week before the election. Mr. Shirkey, 65, has not been so visible, but had spoken at several rallies protesting coronavirus lockdown orders issued by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, including on the same day the F.B.I. announced that it had foiled a right-wing plot to kidnap her.

But they rebuffed Mr. Trump nonetheless, issuing a statement shortly after leaving the White House affirming that they had seen no evidence that would change the outcome of the election and would let the winner of the popular vote stand.

But the Trump team seized on any routine mistakes or far-fetched allegations to advance the cause. In Rochester Hills, in Oakland County, votes in one precinct were posted in the absentee tally and then also posted in the in-person total without first being removed from the absentee count.

The mistake was quickly caught and rectified before the results became official, but Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, claimed that "we found 2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats, that were Republican ballots, due to a clerical error."

Ms. Barton, who has served as the Rochester Hills clerk for eight years, learned about Ms. McDaniel's comment from a reporter and promptly took to social media to rebut the "categorically false" assertion. "As a Republican, I am disturbed that this is intentionally being mischaracterized to undermine the election process," Ms. Barton said in a video she posted to Twitter, which was viewed more than 1.2 million times.

Ms. Barton, 49, is another graduate of Liberty University, where she earned a master's degree after graduating from Great Lakes University in Michigan. She posts Bible verses online and has said that "God orders my steps." She served for eight years as the deputy clerk in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Township before being appointed to the Rochester Hills post and has earned respect from both Republicans and Democrats.

She was initially reluctant to give Ms. McDaniel's claim any validity by responding but decided she had no choice. "In relaying the truth, I was going to be opening myself up to criticism and if I ever thought about running for office again, that would be impacted," she said. "But the real cost was in voter confidence. I told my deputy that all these things have to be put aside and I have to speak the truth."

Soon she found herself the target of profane and threatening emails and telephone calls, and while she took comfort that she was safe because her husband is a sheriff's deputy, they nonetheless upgraded the security system at home. "It's just devastating to see what the response has been to our profession and how we have come, as a country, to think that violence and threats is the answer," she said.

As an election official, she spent much of the last four years talking with other officials about cyberthreats to American democracy. Never, she said, did she realize that the real threat this year would come from within.

"But now we have to go back and rebuild voter trust and let people realize that our elections are not rigged," she said. "We have to step back and say how do we restore public confidence in a system that is completely torn down."

GOP Gov. Brian Kemp tells Trump he won't break the law to help him steal Georgia

on November 30, 2020
Raw Story
By Brad Reed

Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Monday responded to President Donald Trump's latest attacks, in which the president demanded he conduct an impossible-to-perform election audit.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Kemp's office responded to Trump on Monday and told him that the governor would not break the law to help him overturn the already-certified Georgia election results.

In particular, Kemp's office took issue with Trump's demand that he overrule Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to conduct a signature-match audit of ballots, despite the fact that voters' signatures were only used on the envelopes used to send in ballots, not the ballots themselves.

"Georgia law prohibits the governor from interfering in elections," said Kemp spokesman Cody Hall. "The Secretary of State, who is an elected constitutional officer, has oversight over elections that cannot be overridden by executive order."

Hall then insisted that Kemp would continue to follow the law and would not actively try to overturn the election results for the president.

"As the governor has said repeatedly, he will continue to follow the law and encourage the Secretary of State to take reasonable steps - including a sample audit of signatures - to restore trust and address serious issues that have been raised," he said.

Wisconsin and Arizona certify Biden wins in yet another blow to Trump

Wisconsin certification comes after partial recount expanded Biden's margin, as president continues to fight results

Guardian
12/1/2020

Joe Biden's victories in the US presidential election battlegrounds of Arizona and Wisconsin were officially recognised on Monday, handing Donald Trump six defeats out of six in his bid to stop states certifying their results.

The finalised vote counts took Biden a step closer to the White House and dealt yet another blow to Trump's longshot efforts to undermine the outcome.

The certification in Wisconsin followed a partial recount that only added to Biden's nearly 20,700-vote margin over Trump, who has promised to file a lawsuit seeking to undo the results.

"Today I carried out my duty to certify the November 3rd election," Wisconsin's governor, Tony Evers, said in a statement. "I want to thank our clerks, election administrators, and poll workers across our state for working tirelessly to ensure we had a safe, fair, and efficient election. Thank you for all your good work."

Trump is mounting a desperate campaign to overturn the results by disqualifying as many as 238,000 ballots in the state, and his attorneys have alleged without evidence that there was widespread fraud and illegal activity.

Trump paid $3m for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties, the two largest Democratic counties in Wisconsin, but the recount ended up increasing Biden's lead by 74 votes.

Wisconsin's Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, said in a statement on Monday: "There's no basis at all for any assertion that there was widespread fraud that would have affected the results."

Kaul noted that Trump's recount targeted only the state's two most populous counties, where the majority of Black people live. "I have every confidence that this disgraceful Jim Crow strategy for mass disenfranchisement of voters will fail. An election isn't a game of gotcha."

And even if Trump were successful in Wisconsin, where he beat Hillary Clinton four years ago, the state's 10 electoral college votes would not be enough to undo Biden's overall victory, as states around the country certify results declaring him the winner.

Trump's legal challenges have also failed in other battleground states, including Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. States are required to certify their results before the electoral college meets on 14 December.

Earlier on Monday, Arizona officials certified Biden's narrow victory in that state. Biden won by about 11,000 votes, a slim margin, although a significant victory nonetheless as in past election cycles Arizona has trended reliably toward Republicans.

    The 2020 election is over again, with certifications today in Arizona and Wisconsin. After last week's certifications in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. all of the states where Trump has launched spurious claims against the outcome have now certified Biden's victory.
    - Susan Glasser (@sbg1) November 30, 2020

Arizona's Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, and Republican governor, Doug Ducey, both vouched for the integrity of the election before signing off on the results.

"We do elections well here in Arizona. The system is strong," Ducey said.

Hobbs said Arizona voters should know that the election "was conducted with transparency, accuracy and fairness in accordance with Arizona's laws and election procedures, despite numerous unfounded claims to the contrary".

Biden is only the second Democrat in 70 years to win Arizona. In the final tally, he beat Trump by 10,457 votes, or 0.3% of the nearly 3.4m ballots cast.

Even as Hobbs, Ducey, the state attorney general and chief justice of the state supreme court certified the election results, Trump's lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis met in a Phoenix hotel ballroom a few miles away to lay out claims of irregularities in the vote count in Arizona and elsewhere. But they did not provide evidence of widespread fraud.

Trump phoned into the meeting and described the election the "greatest scam ever perpetrated against our country". When he mentioned Ducey's name, the crowd booed. He accused the governor of "rushing to sign" papers certifying Democratic wins, adding: "Arizona won't forget what Ducey just did."

Trump also berated Ducey on Twitter, asking: "Why is he rushing to put a Democrat in office, especially when so many horrible things concerning voter fraud are being revealed at the hearing going on right now."

For his part, Ducey, who has previously said his phone's ringtone for calls from the White House is "Hail to the Chief", was seen in a viral video clip receiving a call with that ringtone but rejecting it without answering.

Trump's denials of political reality have left him increasingly isolated as a growing number of Republicans acknowledge the transition and Biden moves ahead with naming appointments to his administration.

There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. In fact, election officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities.

Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told CBS's 60 Minutes programme on Sunday: "There is no foreign power that is flipping votes. There's no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election."

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"˜It's over': Joe Biden's win is certified in all key states - and Donald Trump can't handle it

12/1/2020
By Cody Fenwick, AlterNet

Since Nov. 7, the result of the 2020 presidential race has been clear: Joe Biden has defeated President Donald Trump by a substantial enough margin that the outcome has never really been in doubt by serious observers. But on Monday, the results met a new official threshold as Arizona and Wisconsin became the final decisive swing states to certify their votes.

"All six key states have now certified their election results with Joe Biden as the winner," said attorney Marc Elias, who has been involved in key election law cases for the Democratic Party. "Trump and his allies remain 1-39 in court."

In addition to the newly certified swing states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia have also certified Biden as the winner. Georgia is still undergoing a recount, but it is not expected to affect the result, especially since the state has already conducted an audit of the ballots, carried out by hand, that affirmed a margin for Biden of more than 12,000 votes. Trump also funded recounts of two counties in Wisconsin, which likewise reaffirmed Biden's win. Certifications are also being carried out in swing states Trump won and states where the presidential election outcome was never really in doubt.

Usually, the certification of the presidential results is not a newsworthy event, because - aside from the 2000 race, which was exceptionally close and disputed - the loser in the race concedes as soon as the media calls the election. That makes the formalities of the election process much less interesting to cover. This year, though, Trump has refused to concede the election and, in fact, continues to insist he won. He's been pushing a slew of ridiculous and clumsy lawsuits, along with a disinformation campaign pushing conspiracy fictions, in an effort to overturn the election, but these baseless maneuvers have consistently failed to move him any closer to staying in power. The certification of the key results is just another sign that has clownish coup attempt is failing.

In theory, Trump still has some cards he could try to play. He could try to convince enough electors in the Electoral College to vote for him. But they won't. Alternatively, he can try to convince legislatures in states he lost to send alternative slates of electors that really would vote for him rather than Biden. But there's not really any mechanism to do this. Democrats in Congress would have the power to stop it. And the certification of the official results just makes any effort to overturn the vote all the more pathetic, duplicitous, and untenable. It's just not going to work.

"We still have some mop up legal work to do, but it's fair to say it's over," said Elias.

But Trump isn't handling this news well. He's been lashing out at his allies, like Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, for failing to hand him victory, despite the fact that Kemp had no power or authority to do so. And Republicans seem increasingly worried that Trump is stoking animus among the party's base for its elected officials, which could undermine their hopes of keeping the two Georgia Senate seats on the ballot in January runoff. If Democrats can win both those seats - which looks difficult but not impossible - they'll take control of the Senate, giving Biden a much freer hand to enact his agenda.

That's why it should be particularly concerning for Republicans that Trump is retweeting posts like the following, which express doubts about the purpose of voting for the GOP:

He lashed out specifically at Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey on Monday because of his role in certifying the election results. To be clear, Trump has no grounds for objecting to the results in these states except for the fact that he lost.

This is likely doing serious damage to the GOP as a whole, spreading distrust between loyal party voters and the leadership, which has realized it can't do anything about Trump's loss. But much of GOP leadership, with a few key exceptions, spent far too long tolerating or supporting Trump's empty talk of a stolen election; they may find it hard to turn the clock back now and convince their voters to accept an orderly return to electoral politics.

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Trump's fraud claims undermine democracy, ex-US election security chief says

Chris Krebs, who was fired from Department of Homeland Security two weeks after the election, calls Trump's actions dangerous

Martin Pengelly in New York
Guardian
12/1/2020

Donald Trump and his allies are "undermining democracy" with evidence-free claims of fraud and conspiracy, the former head of US election security said on Sunday, discussing the effort he led before he was fired by the president.

"What I saw was an apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people," Chris Krebs told CBS 60 Minutes.

Trump called the interview "ridiculous, one-sided [and] an international joke", as he continued to tweet conspiracy theories and baseless claims of electoral malpractice.

Trump lost the electoral college to Joe Biden by 306-232, the result he said was a landslide when it was in his favour over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden is more than 6m ahead in the popular vote and won the support of more than 80m Americans, the most of any presidential candidate.

Trump belatedly allowed the transition to proceed but has not conceded defeat, despite his team having won one election-related lawsuit and lost 39.

Relaying baseless claims to reporters over the Thanksgiving holiday, the president did say he will leave the White House if the electoral college is confirmed for Biden. It votes on 14 December, a result certified on 6 January. Inauguration day is 20 January.

Krebs, 43, was fired as head of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) two weeks after election day. Two days after that, at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, the Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani gave a press conference in which he and then team member Sidney Powell pushed Trump's false claims.

"It was upsetting," Krebs told CBS.

"It's not me, it's not just Cisa. It's the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working nonstop, 18-hour days, for months. They're getting death threats for trying to carry out one of our core democratic institutions, an election. And that was, again, to me, a press conference that "¦ didn't make sense. What it was actively doing was undermining democracy. And that's dangerous."

Trump tweeted in response, part of a stream of Sunday night messages.

"There is no foreign power that is flipping votes," Krebs said. "There's no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election."

Claims by Trump lawyers of interference from Venezuela or China were "farcical", he said, adding: "The American people should have 100% confidence in their vote."

Polling, however, shows a majority of Republicans believe the president. Krebs defended state officials who Trump, and subsequently his supporters, have targeted.

"It's in my view a travesty what's happening right now with all these death threats to election officials, to secretaries of state," Krebs said.

"I want everybody to look at Secretary [Kathy] Boockvar in Pennsylvania, Secretary [Jocelyn] Benson in Michigan, Secretary [Barbara] Cegavske in Nevada, Secretary [Katie] Hobbs in Arizona. All strong women that are standing up, that are under attack from all sides, and they're defending democracy. They're doing their jobs.

"Look at Secretary Brad Raffensperger in Georgia. Lifelong Republican. He put country before party in his holding a free and fair election in that state. There are some real heroes out there. There are some real patriots."

Disputing Trump, Barr says no widespread election fraud

By MICHAEL BALSAMO
AP
December 1, 2020 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) - Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday the Justice Department has not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

His comments in an interview with The Associated Press come despite President Donald Trump's repeated baseless claims that the election was stolen, Trump's effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election and his refusal to concede his loss to President-Elect Joe Biden.

Barr said U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they've received, but they've uncovered no evidence that would change the outcome of the election. Barr was headed to the White House later for a previously scheduled meeting.

"To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election," Barr told the AP.

The comments are especially direct coming from Barr, who has been one of the president's most ardent allies. Before the election, he had repeatedly raised the notion that mail-in voter fraud could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans feared going to polls and instead chose to vote by mail.

Shortly after Barr's statement was published, Trump tweeted out more baseless claims of voter fraud. And his attorney Rudy Giuliani and his campaign issued a scathing statement claiming that, "with all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn't been any semblance" of an investigation.

Last month, Barr issued a directive to U.S. attorneys across the country allowing them to pursue any "substantial allegations" of voting irregularities, if they existed, before the 2020 presidential election was certified, despite no evidence at that time of widespread fraud. That memorandum gave prosecutors the ability to go around longstanding Justice Department policy that normally would prohibit such overt actions before the election was certified. Soon after it was issued, the department's top elections crime official announced he would step aside from that position because of the memo.

The Trump campaign team led by Rudy Giuliani has been alleging a widespread conspiracy by Democrats to dump millions of illegal votes into the system with no evidence. They have filed multiple lawsuits in battleground states alleging that partisan poll watchers didn't have a clear enough view at polling sites in some locations and therefore something illegal must have happened. The claims have been repeatedly dismissed including by Republican judges who have ruled the suits lacked evidence. Local Republicans in some battleground states have followed Trump in making similar unsupported claims.

Trump has railed against the election in tweets and in interviews though his own administration has said the 2020 election was the most secure ever. Trump recently allowed his administration to begin the transition over to Biden, but has still refused to admit he lost.

The issues Trump's campaign and its allies have pointed to are typical in every election: Problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost.

But they've also requested federal probes into the claims. Attorney Sidney Powell has spun fictional tales of election systems flipping votes, German servers storing U.S. voting information and election software created in Venezuela "at the direction of Hugo Chavez," - the late Venezuelan president who died in 2013. Powell has since been removed from the legal team after an interview she gave where she threatened to "blow up" Georgia with a "biblical" court filing.

Barr didn't name Powell specifically but said: "There's been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven't seen anything to substantiate that," Barr said.

He said people were confusing the use of the federal criminal justice system with allegations that should be made in civil lawsuits. He said such a remedy for those complaints would be a top-down audit conducted by state or local officials, not the U.S. Justice Department.

"There's a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all, and people don't like something they want the Department of Justice to come in and "˜investigate,'" Barr said.

He said first of all there must be a basis to believe there is a crime to investigate.

"Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations and. And those have been run down; they are being run down," Barr said. "Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. They have been followed up on."

In the campaign statement, Giuliani claimed the had gathered "ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they have not examined."

"We have many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud. As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ. The Justice Department also hasn't audited any voting machines or used their subpoena powers to determine the truth," he said.

The witnesses Giuliani has pointed to in the past included Jessy Jacob, identified as a City of Detroit employee, who said in an affidavit filed in court that she saw other workers coaching voters to cast ballots for Joe Biden and the Democrats.

But a judge who denied a bid to block the certification of Detroit-area election results noted that Jacob's claims of misconduct and fraud included no "date, location, frequency or names of employees" and that she only came forward with her allegations after the unofficial results indicated Biden had won Michigan.

Wisconsin governor calls Trump lawsuit an 'assault'

MADISON, Wis. (AFP) - President Donald Trump's attempt to overturn Wisconsin's election results by tossing ballots only from the state's two most heavily Democratic counties is an "assault on democracy," attorneys for Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said in filings with the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The filings, made late Tuesday, come as the state's highest court is weighing Trump's request to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots in Milwaukee and Dane counties. Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump by a 2-to-1 margin in those counties on his way to a 20,682-vote win statewide.

Trump is not challenging any ballots in the state's other 70 counties, the majority of which Trump won. Trump's legal challenges in other states to overturn election results have failed. In Wisconsin, Trump wants to skip lower courts, saying in his lawsuit that there isn't time to go through the normal process due to the looming Dec. 14 date when electors will gather to cast the state's 10 Electoral College votes.

The state Supreme Court could deny Trump's request to hear the case, forcing it to lower courts, which would likely kill it. Or it could accept the case and issue a decision later. It could also just render a decision based on the written arguments, although that would be unusual.

Attorneys for Evers, as well as lawyers from the state Department of Justice representing the Wisconsin Elections Commission, urged the court not to accept original jurisdiction of the case, saying it must start in lower courts.

"President Trump's (lawsuit) seeks nothing less than to overturn the will of nearly 3.3 million Wisconsin voters," Evers' attorneys said. "It is a shocking and outrageous assault on our democracy. ... He is simply trying to seize Wisconsin's electoral votes, even though he lost the statewide election."

Trump's lawsuit repeats many claims he made during a recount of votes in Milwaukee and Dane counties. He seeks to disqualify 170,140 absentee ballots that were cast early, in-person, saying there wasn't a proper written request made for the ballots; 28,395 absentee ballots cast by those who claimed "indefinitely confined" status; 17,271 absentee ballots collected by poll workers at Madison parks; and 5,517 absentee ballots where clerks filled in missing information on the envelope the ballots were placed in.

None of the ballots Trump challenged during the recount were discounted by elections officials in Dane and Milwaukee counties. Evers argues in his filings that there is no legal basis for the ballots not to be counted.

For example, Evers notes that the Wisconsin Elections Commission agreed more than four years ago to allow election clerks to fill in missing information on envelopes containing absentee ballots. And the commission at least since 2011 said that the envelope doubles as a written request, something Trump is contesting.

Evers' attorneys say Trump's arguments related to the accepting of ballots in Madison's parks and challenges to those who identified as "indefinitely confined" should have been raised before the election.

The state Justice Department also faulted Trump for seeking to invalidate only ballots in two counties "presumably for partisan reasons," even though each category of vote they are trying to disqualify relies on statewide guidance and ballots "surely" were cast in other counties.

Attorneys for Evers and the elections commission also argued that it would be wrong to throw out ballots cast by people who relied on guidance from elections officials. "Widespread disenfranchisement for following the rules does not comport with due process or a healthy democracy," Justice Department attorneys said.

The Democratic National Committee and Biden's electors are also attempting to intervene in the lawsuit. Late Wednesday night, the Trump campaign filed another lawsuit in federal court, echoing many of the claims in its state lawsuit, as well as in two other lawsuits brought by Republicans over Trump's loss in Wisconsin.

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Conservative Georgia election official shreds pro-Trump lawyers for demanding GOP boycott voting

Raw Story
12/3/2020

On CNN Wednesday, Georgia voting system manager Gabriel Sterling, who attracted national attention earlier in the week for a speech condemning the conspiracy theories against the election, responded to pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood urging Republicans to boycott the Senate runoffs at a "Stop the Steal" rally hours before.

"It's insanity," said Sterling. "It's just so baseless from any sense of reality, detached from reality, and yes, I'm a Republican, and I'm going to stay a Republican. I'm going to fight for the sanctity and sanity of a party that has been a big part of America, and I have been fighting for it since I was 15 years old, and Lin Wood, the bizarre irony is he has not voted in a Republican primary since 2004. I question the underlying thought process beyond that. Encouraging anybody not to vote is ridiculous."

"The president has to know at this point he's lost," continued Sterling. "We've done a regular count, we've done a hand tally, which if you remember the first conspiracy theory, was that the Dominion machines were flipping votes, and our hand tallies, dead spot on. And now we're doing a third recount, which is essentially dead count on. And another part of the Dominion issue is in Wisconsin, where the Dominion machines worked, President Trump got 59 percent of the vote. In the counties in Pennsylvania where they were used, 52 percent of the vote."

"None of this makes sense, with the flimsiest of any level of reality," added Sterling. "And the problem is there's people who believe it. We know there are nuts out there who are going to think - the president called Brad Raffensperger an enemy of the people. We have had people go on to his property."

Watch: https://youtu.be/1BQ5eyqJtcA