US Election Trump on Georgia, Biden, transition results cases latest news

15 min readDec 6, 2020

VALDOSTA, Georgia — President Donald Trump is pressing his grievances over losing the presidential election, using a weekend rally to spread baseless allegations of misconduct in last month’s voting in Georgia and beyond even as he pushed supporters

“Let them steal Georgia again, you’ll never be able to look yourself in the mirror,” Trump told rallygoers.

Trump’s 100-minute rally before thousands of largely maskless supporters came not long after he was rebuffed by Georgia’s Republican governor in his astounding call for a special legislative session to give him the state’s electoral votes, even though President-elect Joe Biden won the majority of the vote.

The Jan. 5 Senate runoffs in Georgia will determine the balance of power in Washington after Biden takes office. Republicans in the state are worried that Trump is stoking so much suspicion about Georgia elections that voters will think the system is rigged and decide to sit out the two races.

The latest futile attempt to subvert the presidential election results continued Trump’s unprecedented campaign to undermine confidence in the democratic process, but overshadowed his stated purpose in travelling to Georgia — boosting Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.

Republicans need one victory to maintain their Senate majority. Democrats need a Georgia sweep to force a 50–50 Senate and position Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote. Party officials had hoped the president would dedicate his energy to imploring supporters to vote in the runoff, when Perdue and Loeffler try to hold off Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively.

Trump did echo Republican rhetoric that the races amounted to “the most important congressional runoff, probably in American history.” That is only true because he lost.

But after Air Force One landed, it quickly became apparent that Trump was intent on airing his own complaints and stoking baseless doubts about the conduct of last month’s vote, rather than boosting his party.

“I want to stay on presidential,” Trumps said minutes into his speech. “But I got to get to these two.” He praised the GOP lawmakers, Perdue for his support for military spending and Loeffler for pushing for early coronavirus relief spending. But he quickly pivoted back to his own defeat.

Trump pulled out a piece of paper and read a list of his electoral achievements, including falsely asserting he won Georgia and the White House. Biden carried the state by 12,670 votes and won a record 81 million votes nationally. Trump continued to reiterate his unsubstantiated claims of fraud, despite his own administration assessing the election to have been conducted without any major issues.

Chants of “Fight for Trump” drowned out the two senators as they briefly spoke to the crowd.

Hours before the event, Trump asked Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in a phone call to order the legislative session; the governor refused, according to a senior government official in Georgia with knowledge of the call who was not authorized to discuss the private conversation and spoke on the condition of anonymity. A person close to the White House who was briefed on the matter verified that account of the call.

Kemp, in a tweet, said Trump also asked him to order an audit of signatures on absentee ballot envelopes in his state, a step Kemp is not empowered to take because he has no authority to interfere in the electoral process on Trump’s behalf.

Trump, though, vented his frustrations with Kemp on Twitter and at the rally.

Politicians routinely exaggerate or misrepresent the facts, but never before has an American president refused as Trump has to accept the unambiguous result of a free and fair election.
Representatives from the Trump campaign have spouted fiery rhetoric about electoral fraud on a grand scale. But in courts of law, where proof is required and where there are penalties for lying, they haven’t provided evidence.
We gathered and debunked some of the most prominent false claims about Pennsylvania’s presidential election leveled in recent weeks by Trump and his allies.

In the days since President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, he has relentlessly and falsely attacked the result in Pennsylvania and other battleground states as the product of widespread fraud. His assaults culminated last week in a 46-minute videotaped screed full of demonstrable falsehoods.

Politicians routinely exaggerate or misrepresent the facts, but never before has an American president refused as Trump has to accept the unambiguous result of a free and fair election.

Representatives from the Trump campaign have spouted fiery rhetoric about electoral fraud on a grand scale. But in courts of law, where proof is required and where there are penalties for lying, they haven’t provided evidence or alleged that even one vote in Pennsylvania was deliberately cast illegally. Rather, their legal efforts have been aimed at disqualifying votes that all evidence shows were legitimately cast under rules they disagree with.

As Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, said in dismissing one campaign challenge last month: “Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Below, we’ve gathered and debunked some of the most prominent false claims about Pennsylvania’s presidential election leveled in recent weeks by Trump and his allies.

FACT: Counting and reporting votes slowly isn’t fraud

“They are finding Biden votes all over the place — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!”

Trump, in a tweet on Nov. 4, 2020

On election night, Trump appeared to have a strong “lead” in Pennsylvania, and he expressed confidence he would win the state. He even wrongly “claimed” Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes in a tweet before the race had been decided. But in the days ahead, as more mail ballots were processed and counted, Joe Biden pulled ahead and ultimately won the state by 81,000 votes, or about 1%.

The slow counting of mail ballots, and the way it eroded Trump’s early advantage, was the direct and expected result of Pennsylvania’s election rules — not fraud.

The counting process took longer than in other states because elections officials were prohibited from starting their work before Election Day.

Most of the votes counted that day were cast in person, and two-thirds of them were for Trump. That’s in part because Trump spent months falsely attacking mail voting as susceptible to widespread fraud, which discouraged his supporters from using the method. Biden and Democrats encouraged their supporters to vote by mail, and in the end, Biden won more than three-quarters of Pennsylvania’s mail ballots.

In-person votes are counted more quickly than mail ballots. So Trump’s early “lead” meant nothing other than that most votes for him were counted earlier than votes for Biden. That change in vote margins as mail ballots are counted is a phenomenon known as “the blue shift.”

FACT: Republican observers watched the counting of votes

“They didn’t even allow Republican observers into the building to watch.”

Trump, in a tweet on Nov. 18, 2020

One of Trump’s most frequent complaints is that Republicans weren’t allowed to watch Pennsylvania’s largest cities count votes. Trump has said observers were barred from even entering the facilities where votes were being counted.

That’s not true. And in every county where Republicans raised objections, courts found that officials applied the observation rules evenly to both parties.

Trump has directed much of his ire at Philadelphia, where at one point his legal team sought an emergency order to stop the count. But under sharp questioning from a federal judge, Trump’s lawyers conceded that “a nonzero number” of the president’s supporters had been allowed to watch.

“I’m sorry, then what’s your problem?” U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond asked, sounding exasperated.

Trump’s team also complained that its observers were too far away. Initially, observers from both political parties were 30 feet away from the count. The city later allowed them to be as close as six feet away — the best it said it could offer given the need for coronavirus precautions.

In the end, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that state law only requires partisan monitors to have access to the room where votes are being counted. It does not grant them the right to hover over the workers conducting the count.

FACT: No, the number of mail ballots tallied doesn’t exceed the number submitted

Says more than one million Pennsylvania mail ballots were “created out of thin air.”

Trump, in a tweet on Nov. 28, 2020

A week ago, Trump tweeted that more than a million Pennsylvania mail ballots had been “created” and counted improperly.

The false conspiracy theory at the heart of the tweet involves data that State Sen. Doug Mastriano (R., Franklin) said he found on the Pennsylvania Department of State’s website. Mastriano claimed the data showed a 1.1 million-vote gap between the number of mail ballots requested and the number returned.

But the figures referenced in tweets by Trump and Mastriano conflate Pennsylvania’s June primary election and the general election. And contrary to Mastriano’s claim that the data have been deleted, they are still available.

Trump and Mastriano compared the number of mail ballots cast in the June primary election with the number cast in last month’s general election. The two figures have nothing to do with each other, nor are they evidence of fraud.

FACT: Democrats didn’t block Republicans from “pre-canvassing”

“Why did Pennsylvania Democrats pre-canvass votes in liberal areas, but not let Republicans do the same?”

U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), in a tweet on Nov. 10, 2020

“Pre-canvassing” refers to the process of preparing mail ballots to be counted, which state law prohibits before Election Day. Republicans have argued that “curing” flawed ballots that arrive with problems such as missing signatures — a separate practice that some Pennsylvania counties performed this year — is also a form of pre-canvassing.

A week after Election Day, one of Trump’s allies in Congress accused Pennsylvania Democrats of doing this, while blocking Republicans from doing the same. But that criticism, lodged by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, is baseless.

All counties were allowed to notify voters of such problems, but not all counties did. That was a choice made by county elections officials, not one imposed by Democrats. Some of the ones that gave voters a chance to fix problems do indeed lean Democratic, but there’s no evidence that those counties treated voters differently based on party affiliation.

A group of Republican candidates and voters filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate any mail ballots that were cured, arguing it wasn’t fair for some voters to get a second chance when others did not. That lawsuit was ultimately dismissed by the Commonwealth Court, and other courts have repeatedly shot down the argument that Republicans were disadvantaged by counties’ uneven application of ballot curing.

But some state lawmakers won’t let it go.

In a letter Friday to the state’s congressional delegation, Republicans urged it to dispute the state’s Electoral College votes because they think ballot curing violates Pennsylvania’s prohibition against processing ballots early.

However, the majority of mail-ballot requests — even in conservative counties — came from Democrats, so not curing them would disproportionately affect Democrats.

Gov. Tom Wolf sought to modify the rules and give counties more time to process ballots before Election Day, but Republican state lawmakers blocked that effort. This is why it took days to learn that Biden won Pennsylvania.

FACT: Dominion voting machines didn’t delete votes for Trump

“Report: Dominion deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide. Data analysis finds 221,000 Pennsylvania votes switched from President Trump to Biden.”

Trump, in a tweet on Nov. 12, 2020

Among Trump’s supporters, the word Dominion has become synonymous with fraud.

It started when the president falsely claimed on Twitter that Dominion Voting Systems, one of the most widely used election technology firms in the nation, “deleted” votes for him and “switched” thousands of votes cast in Pennsylvania to Biden.

There is no evidence of this — and Trump won in 12 of the 14 Pennsylvania counties that use the company’s devices.

Hours after Trump sent his tweet, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which oversees election security, released a statement defending the Nov. 3 election as “the most secure in American history.”

“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” the agency said. (Trump later fired its director.)

Dominion released a statement that it “denies claims about any vote switching or alleged software issues with our voting systems,” and Ellen Lyon, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said there is “no factual basis” for claims that thousands of Pennsylvania votes were compromised.

FACT: Trump’s legal team presented no evidence of fraud in court

“Specific allegations were made, and we have massive proof, in the Pennsylvania case. Some people just don’t want to see it.”

Trump, in a tweet on Nov. 28, 2020

Trump’s lawyers vowed to present proof of widespread voter fraud when they asked U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann last month to invalidate Pennsylvania’s election results — but they never did.

Brann stressed this point in his withering Nov. 21 opinion dismissing the case.

“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann wrote. “Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations un-pled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”

Brann is a former Pennsylvania Republican Party official and a member of the conservative Federalist Society who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama at the behest of Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican.

When the Trump campaign made its case again before three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the judge who wrote the decision stressed the same deficiency.

FACT: Trump didn’t challenge enough votes to alter the election

“The number of ballots that our Campaign is challenging in the Pennsylvania case is far larger than the 81,000 vote margin. It’s not even close.”

Trump, in a tweet on Nov. 28, 2020

To overturn the results of Pennsylvania’s presidential election, the Trump campaign would have needed to challenge and successfully invalidate enough ballots to wipe out Biden’s 81,000-vote margin of victory.

It didn’t.

The original legal complaint the campaign filed in federal court seeking to invalidate Pennsylvania’s results included no evidence that even a single vote had been cast illegally.

Trump campaign lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani acknowledged this during a Nov. 17 hearing before Brann.

“This is not a fraud case,” Giuliani said when Brann asked if he had proof to back up his claims.

The campaign’s amended complaint asserts — without evidence — that statistical analysis would prove some 70,000 mail ballots cast by Biden voters were improperly counted to seal his victory. But the campaign filed that amended complaint too late, and Brann declined to even consider it.

Separately, the Trump campaign has asked courts to throw out nearly 12,000 mail ballots with errors such as missing signatures or incomplete home addresses as well as 10,000 mail ballots that were postmarked by Election Day but arrived up to three days after.

Even if the contested ballots had been invalidated, Biden’s victory would still stand.

“Your people are refusing to do what you ask,” he complained in a tweet, as if speaking with Kemp. “What are they hiding? At least immediately ask for a Special Session of the Legislature. That you can easily, and immediately, do.”

At the rally, he took aim once again at Kemp, saying he could assure him victory “if he knew what the hell he was doing.”

Trump’s personal contact with the governor demonstrated he is intent on amplifying his conspiratorial and debunked theories of electoral fraud even as Georgia Republicans want him to turn his focus to the runoff and encourage their supporters to get out and vote.

In his tweet, Kemp said: “As I told the President this morning, I’ve publicly called for a signature audit three times (11/20, 11/24, 12/3) to restore confidence in our election process and to ensure that only legal votes are counted in Georgia.”

While the governor does not have the authority to order a signature audit, an audit was initiated by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and it triggered a full hand recount that confirmed Biden’s victory in Georgia. The race has been certified for Biden and affirmed by the state’s Republican election officials as a fairly conducted and counted vote, with none of the systemic errors Trump alleges.

But after two pro-Trump lawyers this past week questioned whether voting again is even worth it — in echoes of the president’s baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud — even Vice-President Mike Pence betrayed concerns that the Republican coalition could crack under the force of Trump’s grievances.

“I know we’ve all got our doubts about the last election, and I hear some of you saying, ‘Just don’t vote,’” Pence said Friday while campaigning with Perdue in Savannah. “If you don’t vote, they win.”

Few Republicans in Washington or Georgia believe wide swaths of the electorate in this newfound battleground would opt out of voting because of Trump’s false claims or his denigration of the Georgia governor and secretary of state for certifying Biden’s victory in the state.

The risk for the GOP is that it wouldn’t take much of a drop-off to matter if the runoffs are as close as the presidential contest: Biden won Georgia by about 12,500 votes out of 5 million cast. There’s enough noise to explain why Pence felt the need to confront the matter head on after two Trump loyalists floated the idea of the president’s supporters bailing on Perdue and Loeffler.

Trump’s false claims have resonated with voters such as Barry Mann, a 61-year-old business owner who came to hear Pence in Savannah. Mann hasn’t decided whether he’ll vote for his senators a second time.

“I think there’s some issues with our election and more investigation needs to be done,” Mann said, adding that he doesn’t think Perdue and Loeffler have done enough to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the results. “I want to see what happens between now and January,” Mann said.

___

Nadler reported from Atlanta and Miller from Wilmington, Delaware. Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, contributed to this report.

Aamer Madhani, Ben Nadler And Zeke Miller, The Associated Press Does it matter at this point that a departing president nominated a super-spreader of his latest crackpot theories to a top Pentagon post? Just the need to ask the question makes this a very special moment in our nation’s history.

Scott O’Grady, a former military pilot, would hold the title assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs if confirmed. Signifying his loyalty to the delusions of President Donald Trump, O’Grady has repeatedly retweeted tweets that said Trump won the election in “landslide fashion” and millions of votes were illegal.

One of O’Grady’s more preposterous postings said, “Trump won & Biden & his Comrades will now attempt a coup,” next to a photoshopped image of Biden beside Xi Jinping, CNN noted Friday. Trump clearly has a C-team of talking heads helping to make noise in the name of drowning out a proper succession at the White House.

Some of the leading propagandists are bought and paid for with criminal pardons. Roger Stone, the self-proclaimed “dirty trickster,” blurted in an interview: “I just learned of absolute incontrovertible evidence of North Korean boats delivering ballots through a harbor in Maine.”

Former national-security adviser Michael Flynn, never known as loyal to facts, has been nattering darkly about a need for the military to nullify the election. Last week he shared a bizarre message encouraging Trump to “temporarily suspend the Constitution,” impose martial law, and “silence the destructive media.”

All the while, new figures appear in this parade. One overnight internet sensation was a Michigan hearing “witness” named Melissa Carone, who delivered strange remarks about the vote there. Taken together, her statements were both unintelligible and accusatory. Even Trump’s top lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, seated alongside her, apparently gestured to Carone to tone it down.

Former Trump team lawyer Sidney Powell’s performance at a recent news conference was so unmoored, it led other forever-Trumpers to distance themselves from her fabrications about corrupted voting systems.

Perhaps in line with Trump’s post-term agenda, lawyer L. Lin Wood has been suggesting Republicans in Georgia should boycott the Jan. 5 Senate runoffs there, purportedly to force GOP elected officials to act on trying to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the peach state.

On Wednesday Wood told supporters: “We’re not going to vote on your damn machines made in China. We’re going to vote on machines made in the USA.” Republican Gabriel Sterling of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, who recently appealed for crazed threats against his staff to stop, decried the actions of Wood as “looney tunes.”

Don’t be surprised. All this is rooted in the fact that Trump embraced or spread risible conspiracy hoaxes throughout his tenure almost as frequently as he played golf. The Barack Obama birther fraud, the Hillary Clinton “server” fraud, the Wuhan lab plot, the 2016 popular vote claims, the inaugural crowds, and statements about global warming and vaccines.

Don’t blame these parade marchers alone for poisoning democracy. The buck stops with the fabulist-in-chief.

US Election Trump on Georgia, Biden, transition results cases latest news

Written by Cemap