Long before the Presidential election of 2020, Trump predicted that it would be rigged. On Election Day, he claimed that he had won. When the results were in, he insisted the election was stolen. His attack on the security of our elections was an attack on democracy itself. Despite the fact that his legal team lost 60 court cases and never produced any evidence of fraud, millions of Trump’s fervent believers continue to think the election was stolen.
Demands for a recount continue, even though hand recounts in Georgia and Arizona produced no evidence of fraud.
Even in counties that Trump won, his supporters demand a recount.
Election deniers in a small rural county in Pennsylvania, where Trump won 70% of the vote, insisted on a hand recount. County officials conceded.
WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — On the 797th day after the defeat of former President Donald J. Trump, a rural Pennsylvania county on Monday began a recount of ballots from Election Day 2020.
Under pressure from conspiracy theorists and election deniers, 28 employees of Lycoming County counted — by hand — nearly 60,000 ballots. It took three days and an estimated 560 work hours, as the vote-counters ticked through paper ballots at long rows of tables in the county elections department in Williamsport, a place used to a different sort of nail-biter as the home of the Little League World Series.
The results of Lycoming County’s hand recount — like earlier recounts of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — revealed no evidence of fraud. The numbers reported more than two years ago were nearly identical to the numbers reported on Thursday.
Mr. Trump ended up with seven fewer votes than were recorded on voting machines in 2020. Joseph R. Biden Jr. had 15 fewer votes. Overall, Mr. Trump gained eight votes against his rival. The former president, who easily carried deep-red Lycoming County in 2020, carried it once again with 69.98 percent of the vote — gaining one one-hundredth of a point in the recount.
Did that quell the doubts of election deniers, who had circulated a petition claiming there was a likelihood of “rampant fraud” in Lycoming in 2020?
It did not.
“This is just one piece of the puzzle,” said Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer who helped lead the recount push and who is a local volunteer for the far-right group Audit the Vote PA. “We’re not done.”
Forrest Lehman, the county director of elections, oversaw the recount but opposed it as a needless bonfire of time, money and common sense. He sighed in his office on Friday….
“It’s surreal to be talking about 2020 in the present tense, over two years down the road,” he said. He attributed the slight discrepancies between the hand recount and voting machine results to human error in reading ambiguous marks on the paper ballots.
Lycoming County’s recount was part of the disturbing trend of mistrust in elections that has become mainstream in American politics, spurred by the lies of Mr. Trump and his supporters. Amid the Appalachian ridges in north-central Pennsylvania, such conspiracy theories have firmly taken hold.
This is Donald Trump’s most important legacy: the deep erosion of trust in democracy. If people no longer trust the validity of elections, they can no longer trust the foundational principles of a democratic society.
For this legacy of mistrust in free and fair elections, Trump must be counted as the worst president in American history. Bar none.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Insanity, Thy Name Is MAGAGOP.
Trump voter: “Trump won? There must have been fraud! I demand a recount”!
The overwhelming impression given by all of this is wonderment at just how really, really stupid so many persons are. Are we ever going to see the end of this? Is this going to be a permanent feature of American politics? There should be some kind of penalty one must pay when they make accusations that are supported by no evidence whatever. Just think! Thousands invaded the Capitol just because one pathological liar made up this lie. Why would we give these ????????? any attention at all?
Absolutely the worst POTUS in history. The Putin puppet insurrectionist who can’t even sell a steak.
…..nor a shot of vodka to calm his diehards.
What is required is more judges in these districts to sanction and fine the groups that continue to waste everyone’s time with this insanity. Enough of this nonsense. If your own people do the recount and you still get the same result, accept it like rational adults. Ipolt may not be the result you want, but it’s the one you get. Millions of us had to put up with Trump’s ruinous rhetoric so show a little integrity and move on.
I feel uncomfortable using disparaging terms like ‘stupid,’ ‘dumb,’ ‘idiot,’ and so forth. But, man, how stupidly dumb and idiotic can people be? Seriously. It sounds like to me, with these MAGA GQPers, it’s akin to not wanting the party to end. Someone asked me why Trump held so much appeal to those to the point of breaking from reality to embrace the fantasies of conspiracy theory. I explained to them that their lives are so bankrupt and bereft of deeper meaning because of the System leaving behind so many people economically as said System favors those who have access to its levers, if not benefitting directly from it. In the wake of this is conservative media playing the victim card by, naturally, blaming others for all their problems, namely minorities, immigrants, and the like. Connecting over this has filled a massive hole in their lives. Truth, lies, Democracy fail to matter as much as the deeper connection to others who share the same sentiments, hence the defense of indefensible and egregious falsehoods, lies, and whatnot. It’s the act of believing together, protesting together, doing something that feels meaningful together in an otherwise lonely, confused, alienated and desperate life.
Here’s the thing: they are winning. They are actively destroying every principle of constitutional governance while keeping the look. By clogging the mechanisms of governing, they increase frustration and wear people out to eventually throw up their hands and give up. Those who are driving this are students of how Nazis took over in 1933. They know that the most effective work was done in 1932, but history, as recounted in a History Channel world (the one in which history is contrived entertainment, not history). And now the people who orchestrated the attempted violent takeover and elimination of American government are in positions in government to further rewrite history and their own Wikipedia profiles. They might well have won already.
I’ve wondered the exact same thing based on the sheer number of RepubliQans who voted to overturn the will of the people and destroy our elections – 147 altogether. Unless Garland literally cleans (the) house the inmates are indeed running the asylum and they will run into the ground. Without a clear legal response to the traitors their mendacity is normalized and will continue unabated. Their dark-money coup is ongoing.