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Image posted, Reuters
US President-elect Joe Biden was officially confirmed to have won, well behind President Donald Trump, in Georgia, according to Secretary of State Brad Ravensberger.
This comes as legal appeals by Donald Trump’s allies over his defeat in three other states have been rejected.
The Democrat defeated his Republican rival in Georgia by 12,670 votes, according to state officials.
On Friday, Ravensburger said he was disappointed his party lost, but “the numbers don’t lie.”
Biden will take office in January as the 46th president of the United States.
Biden’s margin to win the public vote was more than $ 5.9 million. He is expected to get 306 votes to 232 from the electoral college, which is much higher than the 270 votes required for a candidate to win the presidency.
So far, Trump has refused to admit defeat and has made accusations of widespread election fraud, without providing any proof of it.
The latest defeat comes when Trump summoned representatives from the state of Michigan to the White House on Friday, ahead of the state’s deadline to certify the election results.
White House spokeswoman Kylie McNani denied that Trump had met with lawmakers to ask them to advocate for his campaign, saying it was just a routine check-up with local officials.
Also on Friday, Trump held a press conference at the White House on drug prices, falsely claiming once again that he had won the election. In his first public appearance a week ago, he did not respond to any questions and seemed to indicate that he knew another administration would soon take over.
“There will be no such thing. I just hope they keep it,” he said, referring to the new rules aimed at reducing prescription drug costs.
What happened in Georgia?
On Friday, Ravensberger said the result was certified and posted on the State Department’s website.
Ravensberger, who oversees the election process, said Thursday that manually checking ballots did not alter Biden’s victory in the state.
“Georgia’s first historic statewide audit has reiterated that the state’s new secure paper voting system accurately calculates results,” he said in a statement.
“Like other Republicans, I am disappointed, our candidate did not win the Georgia vote,” said pro-Trump Republican Ravensberger.
He said, “I believe in the motto that numbers don’t lie. As Secretary of State, I believe that the numbers we present today are correct.”
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Joe Biden, speaking about the election result: “The vast majority of the people believe it is legitimate.”
This is the first victory for the Democrats in a presidential race in Georgia since the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.
The tally found that the error rate was no higher than 0.73% in any county in the state, and Biden’s margin for victory over Trump remained below 0.5%. The results will be approved on Friday.
Gina Ellis, Trump’s chief legal adviser, said the review was “exactly as we expected” because she said, without evidence, that the state had counted the illegal votes.
But Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who is the director of voting system implementation in Georgia, told CNN on Thursday: “One of the big complaints is that these machines somehow flipped the votes or changed the votes or did something. But That didn’t happen, at least not. ” In Georgia. We have tested it. “
During this week’s audit, nearly 6,000 uncounted votes were found, which slightly reduced Biden’s lead, but that was the result of human error and not the result of attempted fraud, Stirling said.
On Thursday, local media reported that Floyd County officials had fired the director of elections over the matter.
What did Biden say?
Biden spoke, after a hypothetical meeting with state governors, Democrats and Republicans alike, about the coronavirus crisis.
When asked about Trump’s failure to acknowledge defeat, Biden said the president was sending “incredibly damaging messages … to the rest of the world about how democracy works” and that he would be remembered “as one of the presidents most irresponsible of the history of the United States “.
“It is difficult to understand how this man thinks,” he continued, adding: “What he is doing is outrageous.”
On the election result, Biden said: “The vast majority of people believe it is legitimate.”
Republican Senator Mitt Romney, who lost to Barack Obama in 2012, echoed what Biden said in a tweet, criticizing “Trump’s public pressure on state and local officials to undermine the will of the people and change the elections.” .
“It is difficult to imagine a worse and more undemocratic job than this, of an American president in office,” he wrote.
What about legal challenges?
Republicans lost their final lawsuit in Georgia as the court rejected their efforts to block certification of the results, which is due to happen on Friday.
And in Arizona, a judge on Thursday rejected a lawsuit filed by the state’s Republican Party last week, seeking to conduct a new vote audit in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, the state capital and largest city. .
And in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign asked the judge to allow them to reinstate a claim they dropped Sunday that Republican observers were illegally barred from viewing the vote count.
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Joe Biden will take office as the 46th President of the United States on January 20.
Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, continued in a press conference Thursday, offering unfounded conspiracy theories and allegations of voter fraud.
Giuliani criticized press reports about his team’s legal challenges, saying that the media had shown “an irrational and pathological hatred of the president.”
Giuliani said the campaign is withdrawing the last remaining lawsuit in Michigan. He said he had achieved his goal of stopping score certification in a major county within the state.
However, the vice chairman of the Wayne County Board of Votes in Michigan said the attempt by two Republicans to revoke their previous certification of the result was invalid and that the certification was binding.
A Republican woman said Trump called her personally after the vote was passed “to make sure she’s safe.”
Biden won the county by a wide margin, according to unofficial results, and won the entire state of Michigan with 146,000 votes.
What could Trump’s strategy be? Coming؟
US media say the president may try to seek help from Republican lawmakers in states whose results need to be changed (Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, for example) to target the polling station system.
He also called Michigan lawmakers to the White House, suggesting a possible change in tactics to be adopted in the next phase.
Image posted, Reuters
Michigan is one of the states Trump is trying to convert
The United States is a democratic republic, and the president does not win the popular vote, but needs a majority of “electors”, who are appointed from each state according to its representation in Congress.
Each state usually determines them according to who won the popular vote.
But federal law states that state legislators have the power to appoint voters if a state does not make a decision.
This may seem far-fetched, because it is extremely difficult to prove, no evidence of voter fraud has emerged, and the denial of representation of millions of voters is likely to spark national protests.
Reuters quoted a source familiar with Trump’s strategy as saying it was now “more about involving lawmakers.”
But even one of the Michigan lawmakers who went to the White House, Mike Shirky, said earlier this week that the naming of voters by the legislature “is not going to happen.”
