Tag: Trump trying to cheat his way to a second term

Federal appeals court panel rejects Trump request to block certification of Pennsylvania’s election results

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A federal appeals court on Friday rejected President Trump’s request for an emergency injunction to overturn the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results, delivering another defeat to the president’s attempts to reverse the outcome in a state that has already formalized President-elect Joe Biden’s victory there.

Trump’s campaign had filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit after a U.S. district court last weekend dismissed its federal lawsuit against Pennsylvania election authorities and rejected the campaign’s request to be allowed to revise the suit to include more allegations.

The lawsuit sought to halt certification of Pennsylvania’s results on the grounds that Republicans were illegally disadvantaged because some Democratic-leaning areas allowed voters to correct administrative errors on their mail ballots. Continue reading.

Biden won — but Trump gave authoritarians a disturbing lesson on ‘how to steal an election’: political analyst

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During the 2020 presidential election, many of President Donald Trump’s critics — from liberals and progressives to Never Trump conservatives — warned that democracy itself was on the line in the United States and that Trump would become even more dangerously authoritarian during a second term. Trump was defeated by President-elect Joe Biden, but journalist Jeff Greenfield — in an op-ed published in Politico this week — isn’t so sure that U.S. democracy came out of the election unscathed.

“That breeze you felt recently was a national sigh of relief that the 2020 election might finally, at long last, be over,” Greenfield writes. “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and the other close states have, or soon will have, certified the results. Judges have unceremoniously thrown out the dubious legal claims that thousands, or hundreds of thousands or millions of votes should be disallowed….. The guardrails held, right?”

But Greenfield isn’t so sure. Continue reading.

Trump says he’ll leave White House if Biden declared winner of Electoral College

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President Trump on Thursday said he would leave the White House on Jan. 20 if the Electoral College declares President-elect Joe Biden the winner of the election, but indicated he was not prepared to concede defeat.

“Certainly I will. And you know that,” said Trump when asked if he would leave the White House if the Electoral College voted for Biden.

He added, “If they do, they made a mistake.”

“It’s going to be a very hard thing to concede,” Trump told reporters during a press call on Thursday.  Continue reading.

As Biden administration ramps up, Trump legal effort drags on

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Electoral College meetings will convene next month in state capitals to formalize President elect-Joe Biden’s win. But the fast-approaching Dec. 14 date has done little to deter the Trump campaign from continuing a protracted election-related legal effort that an increasing number of Republicans have grown weary of.

With the transition to the incoming Biden administration now underway, a growing number of GOP members see President Trump’s legal challenges and unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud as a futile attempt to throw sand in the gears of the nation’s transfer of power.

The shifting attitude among some Republicans comes after judges have rebuffed numerous lawsuits brought by the campaign and its allies, at times using blistering language to dismiss the litigation. Continue reading.

Sharp Divisions on Vote Counts, as Biden Gets High Marks for His Post-Election Conduct

Large majority of Americans say additional COVID-19 aid is needed – and want Congress to pass it as soon as possible

More than two weeks after the presidential election, there are sharp divisions between voters who supported Joe Biden and Donald Trump over nearly all aspects of the election and voting process, including whether their own votes were counted accurately.

Trump voters, who already were skeptical of the electoral process and prospects for an accurate vote count before the election in October, have become much more so since Biden’s victory. While a 59% majority of all voters say elections in the United States were run and administered well, just 21% of Trump supporters have a positive view of how elections were administered nationally. Among Biden supporters, 94% say the elections were run and administered well.

Disagreements between supporters of the winning and losing candidates over the accuracy of presidential vote counts are not unusual, but the magnitude of the differences between Trump and Biden voters is striking. While 82% of Biden supporters are very confident their own vote was counted accurately, just 35% of Trump supporters say the same. Continue reading.

In Wisconsin recount, Trump challenges pile up, slow tall

MILWAUKEE — Wisconsin recount observer Ardis Cerny stretched her neck as far as she could toward a Plexiglas divider separating her from two vote counters, eagle-eyeing them as they scrutinized ballot papers one by one.

When one tabulator told the ardent supporter of President Donald Trump she was leaning too far over a yellow line on a Milwaukee conference-hall floor meant to keep observers 3 feet away, Cerny bristled.

“I know you don’t want us to see the ballots,” she said. “You think we’ll find something.”

Cerny is part of a large contingent of pro-Trump observers participating in a recount the president requested and paid $3 million for in the state’s two biggest and most liberal counties, Milwaukee and Dane, in a long shot bid to erase Democrat Joe Biden’s more than 20,000-vote lead after the initial count. Continue reading.

Bolton: ‘Trump is throwing rocks through windows’

John Bolton spoke against the president’s postelection actions, and Gov. Larry Hogan called his moves to influence electors “completely outrageous.”

Former White House national security adviser John Bolton on Sunday blasted President Donald Trump for continuing to contest the Nov. 3 election results, accusing his former boss of mounting political damage.

“I think Trump is throwing rocks through windows,” Bolton said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think he’s the political equivalent of a street rioter.”

Breaking tradition, Trump has refused to concede to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, and launched numerous legal challenges to the election results. Continue reading.

Trump campaign appeals dismissal of Pennsylvania election challenge

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President Trump’s campaign on Sunday filed a notice of appeal after a federal judge dismissed Trump’s attempt to block the certification of votes in Pennsylvania.

Attorneys for the president’s campaign, including Rudy Giuliani, submitted an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit following Judge Matthew Brann’s scathing ruling Saturday rejecting Trump’s case.

Brann, a judge for the U.S. Middle District of Pennsylvania, issued an order permitting Pennsylvania to move forward with certifying its election results and dismissing Trump’s lawsuit that alleged, without evidence, widespread voter fraud.  Continue reading.

How A ‘Disinformation Bubble’ Enables The Trumpist Coup Plot

President Donald Trump and his supporters are actively working to overturn the results of the election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden in order to keep him in power. Their despicable plot revolves around disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Americans, in large part voters of color, on the grounds that their ballots were fraudulent. Their claims have been thoroughly demolished in legal proceedings finding no evidence that widespread fraud took place, because it did not. Top federal, state, and local officials have said that there were no election security problems, and the president’s legal team at times has acknowledged in court that no fraud took place.

But the Trumpist effort to steal the election in broad daylight doesn’t rely on whether its arguments can stand up to scrutiny in court. It is a fundamentally political effort. Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team are propagating a shambling mass of lies and deranged conspiracy theories about the election. They hope to create enough confusion to give cover to Republican officials at the local, state, and federal level working to subvert the will of the electorate and use their power to preserve the president’s. They want local and state Republican officials to refuse to certify election results in key states that Trump lost, in hopes that either Republican state legislators in those states will overturn the results and hand the president a victory or the election is thrown to Congress, where Republicans can grant him a second term. 

This seditious conspiracy to shatter American democracy relies on the impermeability of the right-wing information bubble: The facts are not on their side, and the law is not on their side, but the Trumpist media is on their side, so they are banging the table as loudly as they can. They will likely fail — in no small part because the key players in the would-be coup are incompetent loons — but the cost America pays will be high nevertheless. Continue reading.

Justice Dept. meets Trump, Giuliani vote-fraud claims with silent skepticism

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The Justice Department has met President Trump’s fantastical claims of widespread voter fraud with two weeks of skeptical silence, not taking any overt moves to investigate what Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, claims is a globe-spanning conspiracy to steal the election.

Such deafening silence from one of the government’s main enforcers of election law indicates just how little evidence there is to support the wild, wide-ranging claims made by Trump and his supporters, most notably Giuliani in a Thursday news conference held inside the Republican National Committee headquarters.

Privately, Justice Department officials have said they are willing to investigate legitimate claims of vote fraud; Attorney General William P. Barr even loosened some restrictions that might otherwise have discouraged prosecutors from doing so before results are certified. Continue reading.