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WASHINGTON • The phone call would have been ridiculous out loud if it hadn’t been so serious.
When Ms. Tina Barton picked up the phone, she found someone from President Donald Trump’s campaign asking her to sign a letter that raised questions about the results of the US presidential election.
The election that Ms. Barton, as Republican secretary for the small town of Rochester Hills in Michigan, helped oversee.
The choice that she knew was fair and accurate because she had helped make it that way.
The choice she had publicly defended amid threats that prompted her to upgrade her home security system.
“Do you know who you’re talking to right now?” he asked the campaign officer. Obviously not.
If the president expected Republicans across the country to line up behind his false and absurd claims that the elections were somehow rigged on a gigantic scale by a nefarious multinational conspiracy, he was in for a surprise.
Republicans in Washington may have been pleased with Trump’s fantastic claims, but at the state and local levels, Republicans played a pivotal role in resisting mounting pressure from their own party to override the vote after Trump delayed the vote. November 3.
The three weeks that followed put American democracy to the test and demonstrated that the two-century system is far more vulnerable to subversion than many had imagined, despite the incumbent president losing by six million votes across the globe. country.
But in the end, the system stood firm against the most intense assault by an aggrieved president in the nation’s history due to a Republican city clerk in Michigan, a Republican secretary of state in Georgia, a Republican county supervisor in Arizona, and judges. Republican-appointed. in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
They rejected conspiracy theories, certified results, dismissed lawsuits, and repudiated a chairman of his own party, leaving him thundering about an alleged plot that would have had to include people who had voted for him, donated or even appointed him.
The desperate effort to hold onto the job by the will of the people effectively ended when his own director of the General Services Administration determined that Democrat Joe Biden is president-elect and a judge put on the bench berated him for ridiculous litigation.
“Free and fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Trump-appointed Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote to a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia last Friday, when he dismissed the latest. of dozens of legal claims filed by Trump and his allies.
“The charges of injustice are serious. But calling an election unfair does not mean it is.
“The charges require specific indictments and then evidence. We don’t have any here.”
President Trump is not giving up his push to overturn the election results in Wisconsin, even though state officials announced that a recount in Milwaukee County had only added to Biden’s lead.
“The Wisconsin count is not about finding errors in the count, it is about finding people who have voted illegally, and that case will start after the count ends, on Monday or Tuesday,” Trump tweeted on Saturday.
Twitter flagged his tweet about “too many votes illegal” for making a disputed claim on voter fraud.
Ms. Barton said: “It is simply devastating to see … how we have come, as a country, to think that violence and threats are the answer.
“But now we have to go back and rebuild the trust of the voters and let the people realize that our elections are not rigged.”
NYTIMES, BLOOMBERG
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