Biden says Trump is damaging democracy
Georgia confirms Biden’s victory in state as it completes hand audit of ballots Defiant Trump plans to meet Michigan lawmakers as he seeks to overturn defeat House Speaker Pelosi, Senate Dem leader Schumer going to Delaware to see Biden
US President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday accused Donald Trump of brazenly damaging democracy, as the incumbent’s campaign to reverse his election loss through fraud claims was dealt another blow with a recount in Georgia.
Trump was behind “incredibly damaging messages being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions”, Biden told reporters in his home state of Delaware.
“It’s hard to fathom how this man thinks,” said Biden. “I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won, is not going to be able to win and we’re going to be sworn in on January 20th.”
Trump has refused to accept his loss on November 3, despite his opponent getting over six million more votes. Biden won the state-by-state Electoral College votes that ultimately decide who takes the White House by 306 to 232, flipping five states that went to Trump four years ago.
That includes Georgia, where a hand recount of its five million ballots confirmed on Thursday that Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the southern state in almost three decades.
The recount showed Biden had won by 12,284 votes, according to figures posted on Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger’s website — slightly fewer than the approximately 14,000 he originally led by.
Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis attacked the outcome and pledged the campaign will “pursue all legal options”.
After initially making baseless claims of
widespread fraud, Trump has appeared to shift his strategy to asking states to overrule the will of voters.
In Michigan, Trump placed a telephone call to a Republican on a once-obscure board who wants to withdraw her certification of the election result in a heavily Democratic county that includes majority-Black Detroit.
“He was checking to make sure I was safe
after seeing/hearing about the threats and doxxing,” Wayne County Board of Canvassers chairwoman Monica Palmer told the Detroit Free Press, referring to personal information posted about her on social media.
Trump also reportedly invited Michigan Republican lawmakers to the White House on Friday, even as his campaign withdrew a federal lawsuit that asked the courts to block final certification of the state’s results.
The Trump team is focusing on Michigan and Pennsylvania for now, but even if both those states flipped to the president he would need another state to overturn its vote to surpass Biden in the Electoral College.
Michigan’s state legislative leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield, both Republicans, will visit the White House at Trump’s request, according to a source in Michigan.
The two lawmakers will listen to what the president has to say, the source said. Shirkey told a Michigan news outlet earlier this week that the legislature would not appoint a sec
ond slate of electors. “It’s incredibly dangerous that they are even entertaining the conversation,” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, told MSNBC. “This is an embarrassment to the state.”
“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, said.
Biden is due on Friday to meet Democratic leaders in Congress, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after spending most of the week with ad
visers planning his administration. Biden won Michigan on November 3 by 155,000 votes, a margin of victory more than 10 times higher than Trump’s when he won the state in 2016. Asked about Trump’s calls with officials there, Biden said it was “another incident where he will go down in history as being one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history”.
Republican senator Mitt Romney, a former presidential candidate, accused the president of resorting 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,” he said in the statement posted on Twitter late Thursday.
In Georgia, some discrepancies were found in Republican leaning counties, according to Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system manager who helped monitor the socalled risk-level audit. “The good part was, the audit did its job. It found those tranches of votes,” he told Fox News.
The issues, which were chalked up to human error and not fraud, included memory cards that were not scanned in Douglas and Walton counties, more than 2,700 missing votes in Fayette County, and 2,600 ballots from Floyd County that were not scanned. The focus on Georgia is not just because of the recount. The state’s two US Senate races are going to runoffs on January 5 that will determine control of the chamber and the ability of Biden to push through his agenda. —