19, November 2020
US: Vote recounts in Georgia and Wisconsin will likely not change Trump election defeat 0
President Donald Trump’s attempts to cling to power appeared more tenuous than ever on Wednesday as election officials in Georgia said a soon-to-be-completed recount was not likely to change President-elect Joe Biden’s victory there.
Georgia is one of several states where Trump’s campaign is contesting election returns, so far without success. Election officials there said recount results due to be announced on Thursday were not likely to overturn Biden’s 14,000-vote victory in the state. They also said the recount would not provide evidence for Trump’s unsupported claims of widespread fraud.
“He’s been misinformed on that front,” Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system manager, told reporters.
Election officials in Wisconsin likewise said that a partial recount requested by the Trump campaign would not reverse the Republican incumbent’s loss in that state, which he won in 2016.
Trump himself has stayed out of the public eye while venting his anger on Twitter. His election-related lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan have met with little courtroom success.
Trump’s refusal to concede the Nov. 3 election is blocking the smooth transition to a new administration and complicating Biden’s response to the coronavirus pandemic when he takes office on Jan. 20.
Opinion polls show Trump’s unfounded claims about the election having been “rigged” have a political benefit, with as many as half of Trump’s fellow Republicans believing them, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Arizona’s top election official, Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, said she faced escalating threats of violence and blamed Trump for spreading misinformation to undermine trust in the results.
The president is holding out hope that a manual recount ordered by Georgia can erase Biden’s lead there. The state’s top election official said that was unlikely.
“I don’t believe at the end of the day it’ll change the total results,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, told CNN.
As of Wednesday morning, Biden’s lead over Trump had fallen to 12,781 ballots, down from 14,156 previously, according to Sterling, the state voting system manager. Sterling said he expected the recount to be completed by midnight EST on Wednesday (0500 GMT Thursday) and certified by the state on Friday.
In Wisconsin, the state Elections Commission said it would oversee recounts in two heavily Democratic counties – Milwaukee and Dane, which includes Madison – after the Trump campaign paid $3 million, less than the $7.9 million estimated cost of a statewide recount.
Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said a recount would start on Friday and finish within days. He said the recount would probably not change the tally significantly. “Certainly nothing anywhere near what would be required for changing the outcomes,” he said.
Biden won Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes to lead Trump 49.5% to 48.8%.
In the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the election winner, Biden captured 306 votes to Trump’s 232. He won the popular vote by more than 5.8 million.
To remain in office, Trump would need to overturn results in at least three large and closely competitive states to reach the threshold of 270 electoral votes. That would be unprecedented.
False claim on Detroit
Trump is also challenging results in Michigan, falsely claiming on Wednesday that the number of votes in Detroit had surpassed the number of residents. The largest city in the state is heavily Democratic.
“In Detroit, there are FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE. Nothing can be done to cure that giant scam. I win Michigan!” he tweeted.
City records show that 250,138 votes were cast there in the presidential election. That is a little more than a third of the city’s population, which according to the U.S. Census Bureau is 670,031.
The state’s top election official said all counties, including Detroit’s Wayne County, had certified their tallies.
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s campaign sought to reintroduce claims to a lawsuit it dropped three days ago that alleged that Republican observers were not allowed to watch ballot counting. Lawyers said they had dropped the claims because of miscommunication.
Earlier in the day, the state Supreme Court said it would hear an appeal in a separate case challenging thousands of mail-in votes in Philadelphia.
Biden held a virtual meeting on Wednesday with frontline healthcare workers in Delaware who complained about a lack of personal protective equipment and COVID-19 tests for themselves.
He warned that the delay in declaring him the election winner could mean that “soon we’re going to be behind by weeks or months being able to put together the whole initiative” to distribute coronavirus vaccines when they become available.
The General Services Administration agency, run by a Trump appointee, has yet to formally declare an election winner. Biden’s team says that is hindering coordination with the current White House coronavirus task force.
States face a Dec. 8 deadline to certify election results in time for the official Electoral College vote on Dec. 14.
Congress is scheduled to count the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, which is normally a formality. But Trump supporters in the Senate and House of Representatives could object to the results in a final, desperate attempt to deprive Biden of 270 electoral votes and turn the final decision over to the House.
Election officials from both parties, across the United States, have said there is no evidence of vote tampering, and a federal review drew the same conclusion.
Source: REUTERS
20, November 2020
US: Georgia vote recount affirms Biden’s victory over Trump in the state 0
After a painstaking recount, Georgia officials confirmed on Thursday that President-elect Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in the battleground state on Nov. 3, further narrowing the president’s dubious effort to overturn the election results.
The result of the six-day hand recount of the state’s 5 million ballots had been widely expected, despite baseless allegations from Trump and his allies that Georgia’s vote tallies were suspect because of widespread fraud.
Amid a series of losses in court, Trump’s re-election campaign has shifted to a new strategy that relies on persuading Republican state legislators in crucial states to ignore the election results and intervene on Trump’s behalf, according to three people familiar with the plan.
The campaign has filed multiple lawsuits to try to challenge the results in battleground states that Biden won, as election officials across the country have affirmed that there is no evidence of major irregularities. Judges in three states delivered new legal setbacks to the campaign on Thursday, rejecting claims of improper vote counting.
Biden, a Democrat, has captured 306 electoral votes to the Republican Trump’s 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the winner of the election, well above the 270 needed for victory.
Georgia’s audit, launched after unofficial results showed Biden leading Trump by about 14,000 votes cast, ended with Biden winning by 12,284, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office. The state is expected to certify Biden’s victory on Friday.
Trump and his allies, including Georgia’s Republican U.S. senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who both face runoff elections in January, have accused fellow Republican Raffensperger without evidence of overseeing a flawed election, an allegation Raffensperger has angrily disputed.
In remarks on Thursday after a call with 10 state governors, Biden called Trump’s attempt to reverse the results “totally irresponsible.”
“It sends a horrible message about who we are as a country,” said the president-elect, although he expressed no concern that the gambit would succeed in preventing him from taking office on Jan. 20.
While legal experts see Trump’s last-gasp effort as unlikely to succeed, they say the strategy represents an unprecedented assault on the country’s democratic institutions by a sitting president.
The Trump campaign has already asked a judge in Pennsylvania, where Biden won by 82,000 votes, to declare Trump the winner, allowing the Republican-controlled legislature to choose the state’s 20 Electoral College voters.
Several prominent law firms have pulled out of the campaign’s legal challenges, leaving Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to spearhead the efforts.
Giuliani alleges conspiracy
At a news conference on Thursday, Giuliani said he planned to file more lawsuits and that Democrats had engaged in a “national conspiracy” to manipulate vote totals, although he admitted he did not have any evidence.
Other members of the legal team floated a theory involving Venezuela and George Soros, a bogeyman of conservatives, although they said they would probably not pursue it in court.
Giuliani said accounts of suspicious activity would ultimately overturn the election, which Biden won nationwide by 5.9 million votes. Some of those accounts have already been thrown out of court.
“We cannot allow these crooks – because that’s what they are – to steal this election. They elected Donald Trump. They didn’t elect Joe Biden,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani’s agitated performance, featuring rivulets of hair dye running down his face, was widely mocked by Democrats. Others expressed alarm.
“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history,” tweeted Christopher Krebs, who headed up the U.S. government’s efforts to combat election disinformation until he was fired by Trump earlier this week.
‘No excuse’
Critics say Trump’s refusal to concede has serious implications for national security and the fight against the coronavirus, which has killed more than 250,000 Americans.
Biden is not receiving the classified intelligence due a president-elect, and his transition team has not received the funding, office space and briefings from current government officials normally afforded to an incoming administration.
He warned the delay could cause additional deaths as the pandemic surges to record levels across the country.
“There is no excuse not to share the data and let us begin to plan, because on Day One it’s going to take us time, if we don’t have access to all this data,” he said in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. “It’s going to put us behind the eight ball by a matter of a month or more, and that’s lives.”
The former vice president has focused on preparing his incoming administration, naming senior staff members and getting briefed by his advisers. He said on Thursday he had selected a Treasury secretary and could announce his pick as soon as next week.
Democratic leaders in Congress sent a letter on Thursday to the administrator in charge of releasing transition funds, Emily Murphy, demanding that she explain why she has yet to recognize Biden as president-elect.
Part of the new Trump campaign effort involves trying to delay certification, the normally routine process by which election results are finalized, a senior campaign official said.
In Detroit on Tuesday, Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers refused at first to certify the results, then reversed themselves, then signed affidavits that they wanted to rescind their certification.
One of the members told Reuters that Trump called her after she agreed to certify the results.
Trump’s campaign dropped a federal lawsuit on Thursday challenging the election results in Michigan, citing the Wayne County officials’ affidavits. Officials said the affidavits were too late to stop certification.
Republican legislative leaders from Michigan are scheduled to visit the White House on Friday at Trump’s request, a source in Michigan said, adding the lawmakers planned to hear what the president had to say.
Source: REUTERS