By Lola Miller
Your commercial awareness dose
Donald Trump is refusing to concede the U.S. 2020 Presidential Election formally, and continues to allege mass scale voter fraud, tweeting on the November 18th: “I WON THE ELECTION. VOTER FRAUD ALL OVER THE COMPANY!”. The Trump administration’s own Department for Homeland Security clearly disputed these claims, releasing a statement last week that the “November 3rd election was the most secure in American history”.
Nonetheless, the Trump campaign has placed several lawsuits against different states since the election; although many of these have been rejected or withdrawn. Whilst unlikely to succeed, these legal efforts to halt the president-elect set a dangerous precedent for American politics.
Democratic candidate Joe Biden has now won the election with 290 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232, the benchmark for victory being 270. As it stands, the Trump Campaign is seeking a partial recount in Wisconsin, where Biden leads by 20,000 votes. Georgia continues to undergo recounts, where The Wall Street Journal reports Biden leads by over 12,000. On November 18th another iteration of a lawsuit in Pennsylvania was filed, arguing that a constitutional violation had occurred through the process of counting mail-in ballots.
The Trump campaign posits that restrictions on observing the counting of the mail-in ballots indicate voter fraud in Pennsylvania and that the process of “curing” ballots led to the Democrat victory in this state. “Curing” ballots is a system whereby some mail-in ballots are returned to voters, before election day, to correct technical issues with the forms which may have otherwise rendered the vote invalid. There is no state law against this, regardless of Trump’s claims.
Even if the fixed ballots were discounted, this would unlikely affect Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania – he is up 80,000 votes as of November 19th. In denouncing certain votes as “illegal”, Trump threatens the tenets of democracy. Denying the right to vote by false accusations of criminal activity is a gateway to denying other vital human rights on the basis of law; historically, these were tactics used by autocratic regimes or dictators in order to secure power and remove political opponents.
For Trump to reclaim the presidency, the results of three states would have to be overturned – which would be unprecedented. In recent political history, the most significant recount was the infamous 2000 Bush v. Gore case, where the results of the presidential election hinged upon Florida. Al Gore demanded a recount upon hearing that George W. Bush had won Florida by only 1,784 votes. Bush nonetheless retained the state when the U.S. Supreme Court eventually ceased the recount, winning by a margin of 537 votes. It seems unlikely that Trump’s recounts could yield him victory, given Biden’s comparatively wide leads in each contested state.
So, if Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results through legal avenues are broadly projected to fail, why is he continuing in this rhetoric? BBC Political Analyst Anthony Zurker suggests that this tactic is “preserving the hopes of Trump loyalists across the country”; the Trump campaign does not expect to overturn the results, but rather aims to create political instability. By dragging the recount process out, Trump hinders states from officially certifying their results; if continued, this could bring uncertainty to Biden’s decisive victory. Trump’s grandstanding could jeopardise Biden and Harris’ transition, The Guardian raising concerns that this could impact measures on the “escalating pandemic, the climate crisis, and the migrant emergency in Central America”.
Logistical issues aside, Trump’s abject denial of the result of the election sets a dangerous and unconstitutional precedent: If a president can refute the outcome of a democratic election based on no substantial evidence, the prevailing understanding that American politicians are held to account by the U.S. constitution becomes spurious. Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama recently stated that right-wing conspiracies perpetuated during his own presidency had indicated to him that “the old rules about paying the price for being caught lying, or making things up, no longer applied” within the American political stage.
Trump’s concerted efforts to undermine Biden’s legitimacy shows a worrying continuation in this trend. His encouragement of the spread of misinformation, and legal efforts to hinder Biden’s victory reveals that he is willfully abusing the country’s legal and bureaucratic systems in a grasping attempt for personal political gain. This refusal to concede is a damning indictment of Trump’s own integrity, and must make us question whether, in the future, we will be able to trust the integrity of the U.S. political system as a whole.
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