Editorial: President Donald Trump is making a dangerous claim of voter fraud with scant evidence
"Judge throws out Trump bid to stop PA vote certification"
Three cases comprise the entire limited scope of Trump’s legal wins, and he has stretched each small valid point beyond credulity to allege widespread voter fraud.
Evan Vucci, The Associated Press
President Donald Trump listens during an event on Operation Warp Speed in the Rose Garden of the White House, Friday, Nov. 13, 2020, in Washington.
By The Denver Post Editorial Board | November 21, 2020 at 6:00 a.m.
Supporters of President Donald Trump should be reconsidering their votes. Trump’s behavior these past three weeks has been beyond the pale.
Let us be very precise in our criticism. Some of the president’s legal actions have been acceptable and even upheld in court, although the president has frequently misrepresented these small wins as evidence of widespread voter fraud and falsely claimed they mean he has won the elections in contested states.
Requesting a recount when the outcome is close is a good check on our systems and to date, recounts, audits, and canvass processes .. https://apnews.com/article/trump-wisconsin-deadline-vote-recount-1348ed4b4691fa28bd3102c4f97599c1 .. have led to small changes in the initial vote tabulations where they have been completed. Trump’s legal team sued in Philadelphia to ensure that poll watchers could get close enough to poll workers to observe their work. Lower courts ruled observers should be permitted to be six feet from poll watchers, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned that ruling last week .. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/17/pennsylvania-supreme-court-philadelphia-ballots-437082 . Trump uses the initial ruling in his favor to falsely claim that he won in the state of Pennsylvania. Before Election Day, The Supreme Court ruled .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/us/supreme-court-wisconsin-ballots.html .. that ballots in Wisconsin had to arrive at polling centers on or before Election Day regardless of when the envelopes were postmarked. Trump has falsely claimed that this ruling means ballots postmarked after election day in other states are therefore also “illegal.” That is not the case.
And now, Trump and his legal team have crossed a line that is far beyond reasonable or rational.
Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are claiming on behalf of the president of the United States that two companies that sell election hardware and software used their technology to switch millions of votes that were cast for Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.
That would be the crime of the century, and if it were true, it would have major ramifications for every contest up and down the millions of ballots cast in the modern era of vote tabulation. We do not believe it is true, but we are terrified that thousands of Americans will believe Trump, Giuliani and Powell despite the complete lack of evidence presented so far. To our horror, the official Republican Party Twitter account tweeted out Powell’s most outlandish accusations. Trump’s accusations that the election is being stolen from him have led to reprehensible threats of violence against Republican and Democratic election officials throughout the country.
Powell has presented no evidence of her claims other than pointing out some very loose (often extremely dated and no-longer existent) connections between two voting software and hardware companies and foreign governments or prominent Democrats. The problem with Powell’s key allegation is that the company that actually has ties to Venezuela — Smartmatic was founded in Venezuela and did receive money from the government during the company’s founding — was only used in one place in 2020: Los Angeles County. So Powell and Giuliani are jumping through elaborate hoops to try to tie the much more widely used Dominion Voting Systems to Smartmatic. Journalists, including a detailed report from The Associated Press .. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-afs:Content:9740535009 , have followed this thread through inquiries and records and found no connection other than that Dominion purchased a smaller company from Smartmatic around 2007. Smartmatic owned the company briefly and sold it after a Democratic congresswoman raised concerns about the potential for a foreign country to be invested in domestic voting systems .. https://maloney.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/smartmatic-announces-sale-sequoia-voting-systems . Dominion is headquartered in Denver.
According to The Washington Post, the Dominion software called into question by Trump was used in only two out of five counties where the president is alleging votes were switched in Georgia and Michigan. Georgia has just completed counting all 5 million ballots by hand and announced Friday that Biden won the state by about 12,000 votes. If a software company had switched votes, the hand counting would have caught it. Georgia’s in-person election system does use an electronic machine, but that machine then prints a ballot that the voter reviews before casting it. That paper record – the one reviewed by voters — is what was used during the recount.
Do we think there would be merit in a federal investigation launched in a bi-partisan manner to investigate Trump’s claims? No. Substantially more evidence is needed to justify such an endeavor. However, there is strong evidence on social media that thousands of Americans, even some formerly highly regarded Coloradans, believe this election was stolen from Trump. If an investigation could restore even some of their faith in our election systems, then it would be worthwhile.
But what America really needs is for the president to admit this claim has no merit and for him to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden and begin the transition process.
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Repeat: If this latest fictional claim by Trump and his people election fraud were true it would mean the Trump administration have missed the fraudulent interference in the electoral process for quite a time. Or, they knew and have not made it public until now.
Either, it itself, would constitute an extremely serious failure of the Trump administration to protect the integrity of the American electoral process.
So, if found to be true, Giuliani, Trump and Powell you would have succeeded in exposing your own extreme negligence. I hope you understand this.
Serious anti-democracy drips. Trending to treasonous.
Latest details on US election recounts and court challenges in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan
"Judge throws out Trump bid to stop PA vote certification"
Posted 10h ago
Joe Biden leads in Pennsylvania by a margin of more than 80,000 votes.(AP: Mary Altaffer)
Donald Trump's campaign lawyers are appealing against a judge's decision to dismiss a lawsuit which sought to throw out millions of mail-in votes in Pennsylvania.
The appeal was lodged on Sunday, a day after US District Judge Matthew Brann dismissed the Trump campaign's case as "like Frankenstein’s Monster … haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories".
It has been two weeks since Joe Biden claimed victory as the 46th president of the United States, but President Donald Trump is yet to concede defeat.
While Mr Biden is the clear winner, vote counting is still underway, and the multiple legal challenges launched by the Trump campaign are further slowing the final tally.
Here's all the latest on the states where results have been disputed.
The Trump campaign has requested another recount of votes in Georgia, a day after state officials certified results showing Biden won the state.
This latest recount will be the third in the state, after the initial close result triggered a second hand count.
The state's results show Biden beating Trump by 12,670 votes out of about 5 million cast, or 0.25 per cent.
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Under state law, a side can call for a recount if the margin is less than 0.5 per cent.
The state's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has said he is confident in the results. In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, he wrote: "Georgia's voting system has never been more secure or trustworthy."
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Wisconsin
Trump's campaign wants a recount in Wisconsin's two largest Democratic counties, claiming absentee ballots were illegally altered or issued and that government officials violated state law.
The recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties began on Friday and must be completed by December 1.
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Biden received 577,455 votes in those two counties compared with 213,157 for Trump.
The Trump campaign had originally sought a recount of the entire state, costing around $US7.9 million ($10.8 million). Instead, Trump paid $US3 million for a recount in the two counties.
The Trump campaign has advanced unsubstantiated claims of "massive improprieties and fraud" in the election. (AP: Morry Gash)
Judge Brann wrote in his order that Trump had asked the court to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters.
In seeking such a "startling outcome", he said, a plaintiff could be expected to provide compelling legal arguments and "factual proof of rampant corruption" — but "that has not happened".
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Biden leads the state by a margin of more than 80,000 votes.
Michigan
House Speaker Lee Chatfield said the President did not ask Michigan Republican lawmakers to "break the law" or "interfere" with the election during a meeting at the White House ahead of a meeting about whether to certify Biden's 154,000-vote victory in the battleground state.
Chatfield was among seven Republican legislators who met with Trump for about an hour in the White House on Friday.
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Biden won the state by 2.8 percentage points but the Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party want state officials to investigate alleged ballot irregularities in Wayne County, the state's largest, and home to the city of Detroit.
Staff for the state elections bureau said even if any irregularities were verified, they would not significantly affect the outcome.
Michigan's elections agency has recommended that a Biden victory be certified by the Board of State Canvassers, which has two Democrats and two Republicans, on Monday.
Arizona
A judge rejected the Arizona Republican Party’s bid to postpone the certification of election results in Maricopa County and dismissed a legal challenge that sought a new audit of a sampling of ballots.
Judge John Hanna issued the ruling on Thursday with little explanation, saying only that the party's request to amend its lawsuit was futile, barring it from refiling the case and promising a full explanation of his reasons for the decision in the future.
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On Friday, Maricopa County officials certified results that showed Joe Biden won the state.
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Nevada
A Nevada judge declined a request to block statewide certification of the election results or order a repeat of the vote in Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County for a Republican congressional candidate who lost by nearly 5 per cent to an incumbent Democrat.
The rulings in separate cases by Clark County District Court Judge Gloria Sturman won't affect other legal actions pending in Nevada before Judge Sturman and other judges.
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One of those cases aims to nullify the Nevada election or have Trump declared the winner despite tallies showing that of the more than 1.4 million votes cast, Biden won more than 33,000 votes.
A hearing in that case is scheduled for December 1.
What happens next?
States have until December 8 to settle any ongoing disputes about the election result.
Once that deadline has passed, each state's electors have a further six days to vote by paper ballot before Congress meets to count those electoral votes on January 6.
Once a candidate has received 270 or more electoral votes, the President of the Senate will officially announce the results.
The winning candidate will then be officially sworn in as president on Inauguration Day — January 20.
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