President Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to overturn the November 3 election result took another hit on Friday after it was announced that Georgia had lost, while the winner, President-elect Joe Biden, took more jobs in his new American administration.
Biden, a Democrat, is preparing to take office on January 20, but Trump, a Republican, has refused to budge and seeks to invalidate or reverse the results through lawsuits and recounts in multiple states, claiming, without proof, widespread. electoral fraud.
Read also: Donald Trump Seeks To Override US Election Result As Georgia Recount Reaffirms Joe Biden’s Victory
That effort, which Trump critics have called an unprecedented push by a sitting president to subvert the will of the voters, has met with little success as the Trump campaign suffered a series of legal and political defeats.
He got more bad news Friday when Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced that a manual recount and audit of all ballots cast in the southern state had determined Biden was the winner.
Biden is the first Democrat to lead Georgia since 1992.
“The numbers reflect the verdict of the people, not a decision by the secretary of state’s office or the courts, or any of the campaigns,” Raffensperger, a Republican and Trump supporter, told reporters. Official figures on the Secretary of State’s website showed that Biden won the state by 12,670 votes.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, said the law required him to formalize the certification of the results, “which paves the way for the Trump campaign to pursue other legal options in a separate recount if they so desire. “. But he also said that the audit showed some errors in the original vote count.
Trump had previously expressed his dismay, saying on Twitter that Georgia officials refused to “let us see signatures that would expose hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots” and would give him and his party “a BIG VICTORY.”
The president did not provide evidence to support his claim.
Trump, in his first public comments in days on the election result, re-affirmed “I won” while deviating from the subject of a White House event on lowering drug prices. But he also seemed to acknowledge the possibility that he would not stay in power, saying that drug companies had opposed his pricing reform and “I just hope they stick with it.”
Having been affected by a series of court losses, Trump’s team is hopeful that Republican-controlled legislatures in Biden-won battle states will sideline the results and declare Trump the winner, according to three people familiar with the plan.
He’s focusing on Michigan and Pennsylvania for now, but even if both states changed the president, he would have to revoke the vote in another state to jump ahead of Biden in the Electoral College.
Such an extraordinary event would be unprecedented in modern American history. Not only would Trump need three state legislatures to intervene against the vote counts as they are now, but he would also have those actions confirmed by Congress and, almost certainly, the United States Supreme Court.
Undeterred by the increasing odds, Trump invited Michigan state legislative leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield, both Republicans, to meet with him Friday at the White House.
In a statement released after the meeting in the Oval Office, Shirkey and Chatfield said they had discussed how Michigan needed additional federal funding to combat the coronavirus pandemic, and said they had faith in a review of Michigan’s election process that is leading to out state. legislators.
“We have not yet learned of any information that will change the outcome of the elections in Michigan and, as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan voters, as we have said throughout this choice”. said his statement.
The White House had no immediate comment.
Arriving at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport earlier that day, Shirkey and his colleagues were greeted by a crowd of protesters, some carrying signs reading “SHAME” while others shouting “Respect Michigan voters.”
Biden, who turned 78 on Friday, continued to lay the foundation for his administration, announcing appointments that included his former deputy chief of staff Louisa Terrell as incoming director of the White House office of legislative affairs, the primary liaison with Congress.
Read also: After Georgia’s recount, Joe Biden strengthens the presidency
Biden also met with the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and with the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leaders in Congress, in his home state of Delaware.
They agreed that Congress should pass an emergency aid package in the current session to mitigate the economic pain of the pandemic, according to a joint statement. More than 252,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19.
‘PUT THE COUNTRY IN FIRST PLACE’
The president’s attorneys argue that the US Constitution gives legislatures, rather than governors and secretaries of state, the ultimate authority to appoint voters. Republicans control the legislatures of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Those states were the pillars of Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, but Biden prevailed in all three by even greater margins than Trump four years ago.
Legal experts have sounded the alarm at the idea of a sitting president seeking to undermine the will of the voters, though they have expressed skepticism that a state legislature can legally replace its own constituents.
Pressure for Trump to initiate the formal transition process increased, and some more Republicans expressed doubts about Trump’s claims of fraudulent voting.
US Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who will retire at the end of the year, said Biden had a “very good chance” of becoming the next president and that the loser of the election should “put the country first.”
There is a “right way and a wrong way” for Trump to challenge what he sees as electoral irregularities, said Susan Collins, the Maine senator, in a statement. “The correct way is to collect the evidence and present legal challenges in our courts. The wrong way is to try to pressure state election officials. ”
Nationally, Biden won nearly 6 million more votes than Trump, a difference of 3.8 percentage points. But the outcome of the election is determined in the Electoral College, where each state’s electoral votes, based primarily on population, are generally awarded to the winner of a state’s popular vote.
Biden leads by 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 as states work to certify their results at least six days before the Electoral College meeting on Dec. 14.
.
