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Trump Delivers 46-Minute Rant Against Election, Insists He Won All States

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2020 //
73

Our democracy is under attack by the man who took an oath to protect the Constitution. Donald Trump gave a 46-minute speech denouncing the outcome of the election, which he insists was fraudulent despite the fact that his own Attorney General concluded that the Department of Justice did not find evidence of widespread fraud that would change the outcome of the election. Trump’s legal team has filed dozens of lawsuits, almost all of which were rejected in court by judges of both parties, including judges appointed by Trump. The few cases that went in Trump’s favor were over minor issues that did not affect the outcome of the election in any state.

The Washington Post reported on Trump’s speech:

Escalating his attack on democracy from within the White House, President Trump on Wednesday distributed an astonishing 46-minute video rant filled with baseless allegations of voter fraud and outright falsehoods in which he declared the nation’s election system “under coordinated assault and siege” and argued that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost to President-elect Joe Biden.


Standing behind the presidential lectern in the Diplomatic Reception Room and flanked by the flags of his office and of the country whose Constitution he swore an oath to uphold, Trump tried to leverage the power of the presidency to subvert the vote and overturn the election results.


The rambling and bellicose monologue — which Trump said “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made” and was delivered direct-to-camera with no audience — underscored his desperation to reverse the outcome of his election loss after a month of failed legal challenges and as some key states already have certified Biden’s victory.


The president’s latest salvo came a day after his attorney general, William P. Barr, said the Justice Department had found no evidence of voting fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.


Trump delivered in person many of the claims he previously has advanced on social media or that his lawyers have brought on his behalf in courts, which have been debunked or summarily dismissed because there is no evidence to support them.
Trump claimed in Wednesday’s video, again without evidence, that “corrupt forces” had stuffed ballot boxes with fraudulent votes. He claimed the fraud was “massive” and “on a scale never seen before.” He called on the Supreme Court to “do what’s right for our country,” which he suggested entailed terminating hundreds of thousands of votes so that “I very easily win in all states.”




Although Trump last week authorized his administration to cooperate with Biden’s transition, he still has refused to concede. With Wednesday’s remarks, the president intensified his protest of the results and threatened to disrupt the nation’s long history of a peaceful transfer of power.
“

This election was rigged. Everybody knows it,” Trump said. He added, “Our country needs somebody to say, ‘You’re right.’ . . . If we don’t root out the fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that’s taken place in our 2020 election, we don’t have a country anymore.”




Trump also claimed that Dominion Voting Systems, which manufactures voting machines used in many states, was “very suspect” and that many voters who pressed the button for “Trump” had their votes counted for Biden. There is no evidence that votes were in any way compromised, and Dominion has said there is no merit to Trump’s claims.


Biden decisively won the election with 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232. In the national popular vote, Biden leads with 80.9 million to Trump’s 74 million, a difference of 4.4 percentage points and nearly 7 million votes.


A majority of states already have certified their results ahead of the Dec. 14 meeting of the electoral college to finalize the national result. Those states include Georgia, which delivered Biden one of his narrowest victories and where officials conducted a hand recount that still had Biden winning by about 13,000 votes.
Trump’s video Wednesday represented his most comprehensive remarks yet about the election and came after he has spent the month since the election largely hidden from public view, save for a handful of official appearances and a call-in appearance on Fox News Channel.




Any hope that the president might be slowly coming to grips with his loss and accepting the fact that Biden will be sworn in as president on Jan. 20 was dashed by his combative and emphatic tone, which amounted to a call to arms to his supporters. The fight is paying dividends so far, with Trump’s political operation using a blizzard of misleading appeals to supporters to raise more than $170 million since Election Day on Nov. 3.


As he invariably has throughout his presidency, Trump spun an alternate reality. Although his words actually worked to undermine democracy, he cast himself as the protector of democracy, saying his single greatest achievement as president would be to restore “voter integrity for our nation.”


Trump released a two-minute edited version of the video on Twitter, which the social media company labeled as “disputed,” and included a link to the full 46-minute video on Facebook, where the company applied a label explaining that voting by mail has long been trustworthy and that voter fraud is “extremely rare.”





As Trump released his video, his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was in Michigan making a similar case to state legislators and citizens there. The former New York mayor alleged at a video news conference in Lansing that there were extensive voting irregularities in the state, largely in Detroit, a majority-Black city that voted heavily for Biden. Giuliani claimed a similar pattern of fraud emerged in several other large urban centers with municipal governments controlled by Democrats.




“It was a plan to steal this election,” Giuliani said.
There is no evidence to support this claim. Giuliani cited affidavits that had been used in lawsuits that have so far been rejected in the state.


Giuliani gave a pugilistic exhortation to Trump supporters at the late afternoon press conference.
“We have to fight. The president does not intend to give up,” he said, urging Michigan Republicans to put “pressure on state legislators” to uphold their constitutional obligation to decide state results in a disputed presidential election.


“You have to get them to remember that their oath to the constitution sometimes requires being criticized,” Giuliani added. “It sometimes even requires being threatened. But you don’t back off of an oath because a vote is too hard.”


On Wednesday evening, Giuliani and Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis made similar arguments before a Michigan House panel. In her opening statement, Ellis referred to Trump’s video message and said the state legislature has a constitutional mandate “not to allow a corrupt” election. She said the nation’s founders provided “a tool — state legislators — to combat corruption” in elections.


That interpretation of a constitutional mandate is disputed by many election experts, who nonetheless worry that it could lead some state legislators to attempt to overturn certified election results.


Norm Eisen, a former Obama appointee who serves as counsel to the bipartisan Voter Protection Program, called that interpretation “constitutional disinformation that has no basis in law.”




This activity comes as Trump prepares to visit Georgia on Saturday to hold a campaign rally for Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Republicans facing runoff elections on Jan. 5.


Trump’s baseless allegations of voter fraud in Georgia have roiled the race, with Republicans divided over whether to trust the election system or, as former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell argued, stay home in protest.


Powell led a rally in a northern Atlanta suburb Wednesday in which she exhorted hundreds of the president’s supporters not to participate in the Senate runoffs, in part because she said the state’s voting machines are not trustworthy.


“I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all unless your vote is secure,” Powell said. “There should not be a runoff. Certainly not on Dominion machines.”




Powell claimed falsely that Dominion machines were rigged to weight Biden’s votes more heavily than Trump’s, that a hand recount was a sham, and that state and local election officials have been destroying ballots and other evidence of fraud. She has presented no proof of her claims.


L. Lin Wood, another Trump ally who helped lead Wednesday’s event, made similarly baseless claims.
“We’re not going to vote on your damn machines made in China,” Wood said. “We’re going to vote on machines made in the USA!”


Wood took aim at just about every state Republican leader in Georgia, including Perdue, Loeffler, Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the state party chair, David Shafer, even though some of them have stood by Trump and echoed his false claims of fraud.


“If they don’t fight for Donald Trump, including Loeffler and Perdue, send them all home!” Wood exclaimed to the crowd. “You are criminals!”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Insane, Trump

QAnon Conspiracists Target Georgia

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2020 //
20

Led by Trump and his base, QAnon conspiracy theorists are targeting Georgia in their effort to overturn the 2020 election. We are heading into Cloud CuckooLand in American politics.

This story by Drew Harrell explains why Georgia election official was so angry. Read it to the end. It appeared in the Washington Post:

In her legal quest to reverse the reality of last month’s election, President Trump’s recently disavowed attorney Sidney Powell has gained a strange new ally: the longtime administrator of the message board 8kun, the QAnon conspiracy theory’s Internet home.
Powell on Tuesday filed an affidavit from Ron Watkins, the son of 8kun’s owner Jim Watkins, in a Georgia lawsuit alleging that Dominion Voting Systems machines used in the election had been corrupted as part of a sprawling voter-fraud conspiracy.
Powell has claimed that a diabolical scheme backed by global communists had invisibly shifted votes with help from a mysterious computer algorithm pioneered by the long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez — a wild story debunked by fact-checkers as a “fantasy parade” and devoid of proof.
No real evidence was included in Watkins’s affidavit, either. But Watkins, who said in the affidavit that he lives in Japan, nevertheless speculated that — based on his recent reading of the Dominion software’s online user guide — it may be “within the realm of possibility” for a biased poll worker to fraudulently switch votes.

Watkins’s affidavit marks one of the first official connections between a notable player in the QAnon conspiracy universe and Trump’s muddled multistate legal campaign, which some of the president’s allies have labeled, in the words of Chris Christie, a “national embarrassment.”
Many similar Trump-QAnon overtures have already played out on TV and social media since the election nearly one month ago. Watkins made similar allegations in an unchallenged segment on the far-right One America News network, which Trump retweeted to his 88 million followers last month.

Powell and her client Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, are effectively celebrities to QAnon loyalists, who posit online that both will soon help “release the Kraken” and expose a bombshell that could salvage a Trump second term, vanquish his enemies and unveil the hidden machinations of a communist conspiracy.
Since claiming to have resigned last month from 8kun, Watkins has devoted much of his online activity to claims about unfounded suspicions regarding Dominion, an 18-year-old voting-technology company whose computer programs, ballot printers and other products are used by elections officials in 28 states. Trump and his supporters have loudly attacked the Denver-based company as having contributed in some unproved way to steal the vote.

In a lengthy rebuttal last week, Dominion said that Powell’s claims were nonsensical: Manual recounts, machine tests and independent audits had reaffirmed that the voting systems had given accurate, undistorted results. Her “wild and reckless allegations,” the company added, were “not only demonstrably false” but had “led to stalking, harassment, and death threats to Dominion employees.”


In his affidavit, Watkins called himself an information security expert with nine years of experience as a “network and information defense analyst” and security engineer. But he did not mention that his experience had come largely through 8kun, the site once called 8chan that was knocked offline for nearly three months last year.

The message board is infamous for its anonymous threads of racist bile and extremist threats, and the site was used by gunmen to announce and celebrate three fatal attacks last year — at an El Paso Walmart, a San Diego-area synagogue and a New Zealand mosque.

Major web-services providers that form the Internet’s backbone have refused to work with the site, with one executive telling The Washington Post last year that Watkins’s site had facilitated “mass shootings and extreme hate speech with intolerable consequences.”


Ron Watkins holds an exalted role in QAnon’s online sphere of influence: He and his father are among the few people who can verify posts from Q, the conspiracy theory’s unnamed prophet (and a self-proclaimed government agent with top-secret clearance) who claims to post solely on 8kun. (The strange arrangement has fueled unproved theories that the Watkinses have helped write Q’s posts, or are Q themselves, which both men deny.)

Q has posted more than 4,000 times since 2017, but only three times since the election, sparking a mix of anxiety and faith-based recommitment among QAnon believers.


Attorney General William P. Barr said on Tuesday that investigators with the FBI and Justice Department hadn’t “seen anything to substantiate” the claims of mass voter fraud.


But Watkins and his supporters have continued to hunt for clues to support the unproven claims of a secret Dominion scheme.

Shortly after midnight Tuesday, Watkins posted what he called “a smoking-gun video” of a Dominion worker manipulating Georgia voting data by “plugging an elections USB drive into an external laptop … then suspiciously walking away.”


The undated video — which was recorded at a distance and includes a man and woman offering ongoing commentary of the “nerd boy” as he works inside an election office — shows nothing even remotely conclusive of voter fraud: The man uses a computer and a thumb drive, all of it very obviously caught on camera.

But Watkins’s messages nevertheless kicked QAnon-echoing accounts and online Trump supporters into conspiracy-theory overdrive. Many began sharing the name of a Georgia man they believed had been captured on the video, after they’d zoomed in on the man’s identification badge. A number of accounts on Twitter, 8kun and other pro-Trump websites shared links to the man’s possible LinkedIn profile, phone numbers, home address and personal details, including a photo of him as a groomsman in a friend’s wedding in 2018.

A Dominion representative said the company wouldn’t comment on alleged employee matters or safety issues, but that it was working to report all threats to law enforcement.


Watkins did not respond to questions, and a woman he had thanked on Twitter for sharing the original video said she had “no comment about anything.”

The man’s name and identifying information is still bouncing around the Web, with some people calling for his imprisonment, torture or execution. For several hours on Tuesday, just typing in the first two letters of his name into Twitter would automatically complete the rest of his name. One tweet includes his name and said he is “guilty of treason” and added, alongside an animated image of a hanging noose: “May God have mercy on your soul.”


Gabriel Sterling, a top official with the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, addressed the threat in a fiery news conference Tuesday afternoon and called out Trump and Republican senators for not condemning the violent language. Sterling said the man caught on camera had been transferring a report to a county computer so he could read it.

“It’s all gone too far. All of it,” he said. “This 20-year-old contractor for a voting system company [was] just trying to do this job,” he added. “His family is getting harassed now. There’s a noose out there with his name on it. And it’s not right. … This kid took a job. He just took a job, and it’s just wrong.”

Categories Elections, Georgia, Insane

Georgia: Election Official Condemns Trump’s Attacks on Election: “This Has to Stop”

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2020 //
13

Georgia has a Republican Governor and Republican state officials. The presidential election was conducted under the auspices of Republicans. Biden won the election by a small margin. Trump insisted on a hand recount, and it confirmed that Biden won. Trump has demanded another recount.

Trump has taken to Twitter to excoriate Governor Kemp for refusing to change the results. He and his proxies have attacked the state’s election officials. The Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger condemned the conspiracy theories and groundless attacks on the election. Another state election official spoke out and said, “This has to stop.” He warned that someone could be killed because of the violence unleashed by Trump.

This story appeared in the New York Times:

ATLANTA — In one of the most striking rebukes to President Trump since he launched his baseless attacks on the American electoral process, a top-ranking Georgia election official lashed out at the president on Tuesday for failing to condemn threats of violence against people overseeing the voting system in his state.

“It has to stop,” Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, said at an afternoon news conference at the state Capitol, his voice shaking with emotion. “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language.”

He added: “This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It’s too much.”

Mr. Sterling’s outburst of anger and frustration came amid a sustained assault on Georgia’s election process by Mr. Trump as he seeks to reverse his loss to his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Sterling, who previously said he had received threats himself, said that threats had also been made against the wife of his superior, Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state.

“Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia,” Mr. Sterling said. He added that the president needed to “step up” and say, “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”

Mr. Sterling also called on the state’s two Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, to condemn the rhetoric that he said was getting dangerously out of hand. The two senators, both Trump loyalists, have called for Mr. Raffensperger to resign.

As Mr. Trump hurls false claims of fraud in Georgia, a number of lawsuits filed by conservatives in state and federal courts are seeking to decertify the results. The second of two recounts requested by the Trump campaign is in progress and is expected to wind up Wednesday. And the Georgia Republican Party has descended into a state of virtual civil war as some of its most powerful players maneuver and malign their rivals, seeking advantage, or at least survival.

In the meantime, Mr. Trump continues to lash out at Gov. Brian Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger, both staunch Republicans and Trump supporters, over the fact that he lost Georgia, saying they have not sufficiently rooted out fraud.

As late as Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump made the latest in a series of unsubstantiated claims about the Georgia election, writing on Twitter that the state had been “scammed” and urging Mr. Kemp to “call off” the election.

Some of Mr. Trump’s supporters have taken to the streets and the Capitol building in downtown Atlanta, where the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars recently joined them. In other cases, Trump supporters have harassed or threatened Mr. Sterling, Mr. Raffensperger and others.

In a statement Tuesday evening, Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said: “The campaign is focused on ensuring that all legal votes are counted and all illegal votes are not. No one should engage in threats or violence, and if that has happened, we condemn that fully.”

Amid all of this, Mr. Sterling, a detail-oriented former city councilman from the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs, has taken on a prominent role in the state as it conducted its recounts. Along with Mr. Raffensperger, he has often been the main speaker in numerous news conferences in which he has explained the complexities of Georgia’s election and recount systems and has argued that the results, which currently show Mr. Biden winning by about 12,700 votes, are trustworthy.

Ari Schaffer, press secretary for the secretary of state’s office, did not answer directly when asked Tuesday whether Mr. Raffensperger had given Mr. Sterling his blessing to speak out so forcefully against the president. But he noted that the deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, had been standing near Mr. Sterling when he made his statements.

“Gabriel has my support,” Ms. Fuchs said independently in a text message.

Late Tuesday, representatives for Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue said they condemned violence of any kind but also said they would not apologize for seeking accountability and accuracy in the state’s elections. 

In the second of two news conferences called by the secretary of state’s office on Tuesday, Mr. Sterling, speaking loudly, emotionally and deliberately, said that people had intruded on Mr. Raffensperger’s personal property. He said that Mr. Raffensperger’s wife “is getting sexualized threats through her cellphone.” He mentioned that he had police protection outside his own house, a topic he had also broached in a Nov. 21 tweet.

“So this is fun … multiple attempted hacks of my emails, police protection around my home, the threats,” Mr. Sterling wrote then. “But all is well … following the law, following the process … doing our jobs.”

This is not fun. This is no joke. Trump is sowing distrust in democracy and endangering the lives of election officials who refuse to rig the results for him.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Georgia, Lies, Trump

Bill Barr: No Widespread Fraud in 2020 Election

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2020 //
45

The Boston Globe reports that Attorney General Bill Barr said that the Department of Justice has not discovered any widespread fraud. Whatever they have found has not been enough to change the outcome of the election.

Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday the Justice Department has not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

His comments come despite President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the election was stolen, and his refusal to concede his loss to President-Elect Joe Biden.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Barr said U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but they’ve uncovered no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told the AP.

When will Trump stop claiming that the election was “stolen”? When will he stop undermining our democracy?

Categories Elections, Fraud, Trump

Trump Legal Team Asks Federal Court to Overturn Michigan Election Results

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2020 //
30

The Detroit Free Press reported today that Trump lawyers asked a federal court to set aside the certified election results and give the state’s electoral votes to Trump. They never give up, despite their many losses and their lack of any evidence of fraud. Are these billable hours? There must be a reason they ignore their humiliating setbacks and soldier on. Trump continues to insist that he won the election, on Twitter and in a FOX interview. Michael Isikoff (@Isikoff) tweeted: “Post-pardon Mike Flynn says in radio interview: “I do not believe for a second the country will accept Biden as the next president based on what we know is probably the greatest fraud our country has ever experienced.” Says worldviewweekend.com/tv/video/wvw-t…”

TrumpWorld is cultivating a fascist “stabbed in the back” scenario to undermine our democracy. Trump’s chief cyber security expert Chris Krebs said the 2020 election was the fairest ever. Trump fired him.

The Detroit Free Press wrote today:

Allies of President Donald Trump want a federal court in Michigan to force state leaders to set aside election results and award its 16 electoral votes to the president. 

A separate conservative group also wants the Michigan Supreme Court to invalidate the results that show President-elect Joe Biden won the state. 

The latest lawsuit, filed in the Eastern District of Michigan and before the state’s highest court, rely on unfounded allegations of widespread fraud and misconduct that judges in the state and across the country have previously rejected. Neither has a high likelihood of success. 

There is no evidence of mass fraud or wrongdoing that affected election operations in Michigan or elsewhere. Biden earned roughly 154,000 more votes than Trump in Michigan.


Categories Elections, Fake News, Fascism, Hoax, Michigan, Trump

The Most Outrageous Effort to Overturn an Election in U.S. History

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2020 //
94

Political reporter David Sanger wrote a fascinating analysis of Trump’s attempt to reverse the results of the election. Trump lost the electoral college; Biden won 306 votes, surpassing the necessary 270. Trump lost the popular vote by nearly six million votes. He obviously forgot that he swore an oath on the Bible to defend the Constitution. He is actively subverting it.

David Sanger wrote:

President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction.

Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million popular votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College margin. Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is even trying has set off widespread alarms, not least in Mr. Biden’s camp.

“I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday, before adding, “It’s just outrageous what he’s doing.” Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump’s behavior as embarrassing, he acknowledged that “incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions.”

Mr. Trump has only weeks to make his last-ditch effort work: Most of the states he needs to strip Mr. Biden of votes are scheduled to certify their electors by the beginning of next week. The electors cast their ballots on Dec. 14, and Congress opens them in a joint session on Jan. 6.

Even if Mr. Trump somehow pulled off his electoral vote switch, there are other safeguards in place, assuming people in power do not simply bend to the president’s will.

The first test will be Michigan, where Mr. Trump is trying to get the State Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden’s 157,000-vote margin of victory. He has taken the extraordinary step of inviting a delegation of state Republican leaders to the White House, hoping to persuade them to ignore the popular vote outcome.

“That’s not going to happen,” Mike Shirkey, the Republican leader of the Michigan State Senate, said on Tuesday. “We are going to follow the law and follow the process.”

Beyond that, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, could send Congress a competing electoral slate, based on the election vote, arguing that the proper procedures were ignored. That dispute would create just enough confusion, in Mr. Trump’s Hail Mary calculus, that the House and Senate together would have to resolve it in ways untested in modern times.

Federal law dating to 1887, passed in reaction to the Hayes election, provides the framework, but not specifics, of how it would be done. Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law and election law expert at Ohio State University, noted that the law only required Congress to consider all submissions “purporting to be the valid electoral votes.”

But Michigan alone would not be enough for Mr. Trump. He would also need at least two other states to fold to his pressure. The most likely candidates are Georgia and Arizona, which both went for Mr. Trump in 2016 and have Republican-controlled legislatures and Republican governors.

Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona has said he will accept the state election results, although only after all the campaign lawsuits are resolved. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, where a hand recount reaffirmed Mr. Biden’s victory on Thursday, has not publicly said one way or another who won his state.

Mr. Trump has said little in public apart from tweets endorsing wild conspiracy theories about how he was denied victory. Yet his strategy, if it can be called that, has become clear over two days of increasingly frenetic action by a president 62 days from losing power.

In just that time, Mr. Trump has fired the federal election official who has challenged his false claims of fraud, tried to halt the vote-certification process in Detroit to disenfranchise an overwhelmingly Black electorate that voted against him, and now is misusing the powers of his office in his effort to take Michigan’s 16 electoral votes away from Mr. Biden.

In many ways it is even more of an attempted power grab than the one in 1876. At the time, Hayes was governor of Ohio, not president of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant was, and when Hayes won — also by wrenching the vote around in three states — he became known as “His Fraudulency.”

“But this is far worse,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian and author of “Presidents of War.” “In the case of Hayes, both sides agreed that the outcome in at least three states was in dispute. In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day.”

“This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election.”

He added: “This is what many of the founders dreaded.”

Mr. Trump telegraphed this strategy during the campaign. He told voters at a rally in Middletown, Pa., in September that he would win at the polls, or in the Supreme Court, or in the House — where, under the 12th Amendment, every state delegation gets one vote in choosing the president. (There are 26 delegations of 50 dominated by Republicans, even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats.)

“I don’t want to end up in the Supreme Court, and I don’t want to go back to Congress, even though we have an advantage if we go back to Congress,” he said then. “Does everyone understand that?”

Now that is clearly the Plan B, after the failure of Plan A, an improvisational legal strategy to overturn election results by invalidating ballots in key states. In state after state, the president’s lawyers have been laughed out of court, unable to provide evidence to back up his claims that mail-in ballots were falsified, or that glitches on voting machines with software from Dominion Voting Systems might, just might, have changed or deleted 2.7 million votes.

Those theories figured in a rambling news conference that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, held with other members of his legal team on Thursday. The group threw out a series of disconnected arguments to try to make the case that Mr. Trump really won. The arguments included blaming mail-in ballots that they said were prone to fraud as well as Dominion, which they suggested was tied to former President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (who died seven years ago), and had vague connections to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros, the philanthropist and billionaire Democratic fund-raiser.

“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history,” Christopher Krebs, who was fired Tuesday night by Mr. Trump as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Thursday afternoon.

“And possibly the craziest,” he went on. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky.”

Mr. Krebs has often noted that the purpose of a reliable election system is to convince those who lost elections that they have, indeed, lost.

Even some of Mr. Trump’s onetime enthusiasts and former top aides have abandoned him on his claims, often with sarcastic derision. “Their basic argument is this was a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there’s no evidence of it,” said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, who was ousted last year.

“Now if that’s true, I really want to know who the people are who pulled this off,” he said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “We need to hire them at the C.I.A.”

On this subject, here is another excellent article:

WHY TRUMP IS LIKELY TO FAIL IN HIS EFFORTS TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY.


Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, History, Hoax, Trump

Trump Fires Director of Election Security for Saying the Election Was Fair

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2020 //
36

The Boston Globe has the story, as does every other news outlet:

President Trump on Tuesday fired the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election.

Trump fired Christopher Krebs in a tweet, saying his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate.”

The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee and director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Trump

How FOX News Foiled Trump’s Plans to Steal the Election

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2020 //
23

The Washington Monthy writes that Trump had an elaborate plan, dreamed up by one of his inner circle (Stephen Miller?) Jared Kushner?), to demand a halt to the counting on Election Day, knowing that the mail-in ballots would favor Biden. But then FOX News called Arizona for Biden, and his plan was foiled. He was furious and demanded that FOX retract its call, but it did not back down. He even attacked the person who heads FOX’s Decision Desk, but to no avail.

Donald Trump telegraphed his plan to steal the election in the days leading up to Nov. 3. He wanted to declare victory on election night, stop the counting mail-in votes he considered illegal, and, if necessary, send the election to the judiciary and eventually the Supreme Court. 

Implementing that strategy would require a public relations effort in which Trump made at least a plausible case that he had won re-election. Michigan and Wisconsin looked out of reach. So the president would need to maintain the illusion that he was winning the rest of his 2016 states to have any pathway to 270 electoral votes. The most vulnerable were Pennsylvania and Arizona. 

Republicans had ensured, via the courts, that Pennsylvania couldn’t begin counting mail-in ballots prior to November 3rd. So Trump was relying on an early lead in that state coming from those who had voted in person on Election Day. That made Arizona pivotal to the public relations campaign for Trump to claim victory. 

But at 11:20 pm on Tuesday, Fox News foiled the plan by calling Arizona for Biden. The Associated Press followed at 2:50 AM. Eventually, they were joined by NPR, “PBS NewsHour,” Univision, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. With Arizona gone, Trump would have no clear path to 270 electoral votes.

Categories Elections, Fraud, Trump

Trump Continues to Rant about “Rigged” Election

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2020 //
80

Many parents look to the president of the United States as someone who is worthy of emulation. He (and someday she) is a role model. What Donald Trump is modeling right now is how to be a sore loser, how to throw a childish temper tantrum, how to undermine the democratic system of government founded on the consent of the governed.

We already have a convoluted democratic system, in which the will of the majority is overridden by the antique “electoral college.” The electoral college made Trump the president in 2016, even though Hillary Clinton won three million votes more than he did. In 2020, Trump lost the popular vote by five million, and Biden has unofficially won 306 electoral college votes, 36 more than is required to be called the winner. World leaders are congratulating Biden; Biden is moving forward, but Trump continues to whine that the election was “rigged” and that he is the actual winner.

The results of voting in the states have not yet been certified, and Trump is well within his rights to ask for recounts where the votes were very close. He has filed lawsuits in many states, and thus far none has been successful. All have been dismissed for lack of evidence of voter fraud or misdeeds of any kind. Based on past history, election experts say that the recounts are unlikely to change the results.

No one should object to recounts or serious lawsuits. Trump commits a grave error, however, in insisting that the election was “stolen” because he didn’t win. That’s the behavior of a toddler or a tyrant or both. It does a terrible disservice to the legitimacy of our democracy. Out of sheer spite, he hopes to undermine the Biden presidency in the eyes of his followers.

We have never seen anything like this in our lifetimes. We have never seen a president intent on destroying the Constitution and smearing the reputations of state election officials in every state that he did not win.

Politico reported this morning that Trump tweeted that Biden won, then withdrew the tweet and replaced it with another spurious claim of victory:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP offered JOE BIDEN a backhanded concession this morning, tweeting “He won” amid a series of complaints about the 2020 election. LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, he took it all back. TRUMP tweeted: “RIGGED ELECTION. WE WILL WIN. … He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”

Toddler or tyrant?

Categories Democracy, Elections, Trump

In the Public Interest: Some Good News from the 2020 Elections

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2020 //
14

“In the Public Interest” is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that advocates on behalf of the common good, an increasingly scarce resource these past four years.

Here is the good news that ITPI has gathered. Add to it by contacting them directly.

Even in defeat, Trump is doing it again—sucking up all the attention with aimless lawsuits and absurd tweets about voter fraud and the “Fake News Media.”

But there’s plenty of good news coming out of last week.

Voters passed a host of ballot measures in states and localities that make government work for all of us, not the wealthy few who rig the rules in their favor. They voted to raise revenue for education, transit, and libraries; expand family leave; reject the failed war on drugs; give workers a raise; and much more.

  • Florida voters passed Amendment 2, which will raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026. The Florida Policy Institute estimates this will lift pay for 5 million Floridians.
  • In Colorado, voters approved Proposition 118, providing workers in the state 12 weeks of paid family leave and 16 weeks for the birth of a child. Reasons to Be Cheerful pointed out how in Iceland, paid family leave has helped contribute to the country’s high rate of gender equality.
  • Arizona voters passed Proposition 208, increasing taxes on high-income earners to raise funding for teachers and schools. Despite big business opposition, the tax increase was likely bolstered by teacher strikes in recent years and long-term organizing by organizations like LUCHA and unions like UNITE HERE.
  • Louisiana voters (thankfully) rejected Amendment 5, which would’ve allowed localities to give special property tax breaks to manufacturing corporations. The state already gives one of the largest tax breaks for industrial property in the nation. The Louisiana Budget Project writes, “If industrial property tax breaks were the key to a vibrant, thriving economy, Louisiana would be Silicon Valley. But it’s not.”
  • In Nebraska, voters passed Initiative 428, capping predatory payday lenders’ rates at 36 percent annually.
  • California voters approved Proposition 17, which will allow people with felonies on parole to vote.
  • In every state where a ballot measure asked voters to turn back the war on drugs, people approved decriminalization.
  • In Nevada, voters passed Question 6, requiring all utility providers to acquire half of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030.
  • Colorado voters rejected a ban on most abortions at 22 weeks or later in pregnancy, protecting the right to choose.
  • Voters in Multnomah County, Oregon, passed Measure 26-214 to provide universal tuition-free preschool for Portland’s three- and four-year-olds by taxing high income earners.
  • Portland, Maine, voters passed Question A, increasing the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and requiring time-and-a-half pay during emergencies. They also approved Question C, what was deemed a “Green New Deal for Portland,” and Question D, rent control and tenant protections.
  • Over 80 percent of Philadelphia voters approved the ban of the use by police of “stop-and-frisk” tactics, which disproportionately target people of color.
  • Voters in San Francisco passed Proposition L, raising taxes on corporations that pay their CEO 100 times or more than the median of its local employees.
  • Voters in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Columbus (Ohio), and several other jurisdictions adopted measures to rein in the power of police.
  • Atlanta voters approved a ballot measure to give property tax breaks to homeowners who live in permanently affordable housing sponsored by the Atlanta Community Land Trust.
  • As EveryLibrary reports, voters in 17 states approved 28 measures supporting public libraries. This includes at least $728 million for new construction and renovation of library buildings and hundreds of millions of dollars for collections, programs, and staffing.
  • As the Economic Policy Institute reports, multiple cities passed measures creating new dedicated revenue for public transit, including Austin, San Antonio, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, and Fairfax, Virginia.

There are plenty more, especially at the local level.

Did anything “pro-public” happen in your neck of the woods?

Categories Elections
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