Trump in increasingly erratic steps to overturn Biden win
PRESIDENT Donald Trump and his allies are taking increasingly frantic steps to subvert the results of the 2020 US election, including summoning state legislators to the White House as part of a bid to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
Other tactics include personally calling local election officials who are trying to rescind their certification votes in Michigan, suggesting in a legal challenge that Pennsylvania should set aside the popular vote there, and pressuring county officials in Arizona to delay certifying vote tallies.
Election law experts see it as the last, dying gasps of the Trump campaign and say that Mr Biden is certain to walk into the Oval Office come January.
But there is concern that Mr Trump’s effort is doing real damage to public faith in the integrity of American elections.
Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who researches and teaches election law, said: “It’s very concerning that some Republicans apparently can’t fathom the possibility that they legitimately lost this election.
“We depend on democratic norms, including that the losers graciously accept defeat. That seems to be breaking down.”
Mr Trump’s own election security agency has declared the 2020 presidential election to have been the most secure in history.
Days after that statement was issued, Mr Trump sacked the agency’s leader.
The increasingly erratic moves have no reasonable chance of changing the outcome of the 2020 election, where Mr Biden has now received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history and has clinched the 270 electoral college votes needed to win.
But the president’s constant barrage of baseless claims, his work to personally sway local officials who certify votes and his allies’ refusal to admit he lost is likely to have a lasting negative impact on the country.
Legions of his supporters do not believe he lost.
Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar and professor at Loyola Law School: “It’s about trying to set up the conditions where half of the country believes that there are only two possibilities: either they win, or the election was stolen. And that’s not a democracy.”
The two Republican canvassers in Michigan’s Wayne County said on Wednesday they lacked confidence that the election was fair and impartial.
“There has been a distinct lack of transparency throughout the process,” they said.
But election officials countered by saying there has been no evidence of impropriety or fraud in Michigan.
Mr Trump’s allies have homed in on the way that the president’s early lead in Michigan and some other states on election night slipped away as later votes came, casting it as evidence of something nefarious.
But a massive influx of mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic leaned largely towards Mr Biden, who encouraged his supporters to vote by mail, and those votes were the last to be counted.
So it appeared Mr Trump had an edge, when he did not.
In fact, Mr Biden crushed Mr Trump in Wayne County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Detroit, by a more than 2-1 margin on his way to winning Michigan by 154,000 votes, according to unofficial results.