US President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday accused Donald Trump of blatantly damaging democracy as the incumbent’s campaign to reverse his electoral defeat through claims of fraud took another hit with a tally in Georgia.
Trump was behind “incredibly damaging messages being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy works,” Biden told reporters in his home state of Delaware.
Trump has refused to accept his defeat on November 3, even though his opponent garnered more than six million more votes.
Biden also won the Electoral College votes that ultimately decide who takes the White House from 306 to 232, changing five states that went to Trump four years ago.
That includes Georgia, where a manual recount of its five million votes confirmed Thursday that Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the southern state in nearly three decades.
The tally showed that Biden had won by 12,284 votes, according to figures posted on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s website, slightly less than the roughly 14,000 he originally led.
After initially making unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud, Trump appeared to change his strategy to ask states to override the will of the voters.
In Michigan, Trump made a phone call to a Republican on a once-unknown board who wants to withdraw his certification of the election result in a heavily Democratic county that includes black-majority Detroit.
“I was checking she was safe after seeing / hearing about the threats and abuse,” Wayne County Board of Electors President Monica Palmer told Detroit Free Press, referring to personal information posted about her on social networks.
Trump also reportedly invited Michigan Republican lawmakers to the White House, even as his campaign withdrew a federal lawsuit asking the courts to block final certification of the state’s results.
Biden won Michigan on November 3 by 155,000 votes, a margin of victory more than 10 times that of Trump when he won the state in 2016.
When asked about Trump’s calls with officials there, Biden said it was “another incident in which he will go down in history as one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history.”
“It’s hard to understand how this man thinks,” Biden said. “I am sure you know that you have not won, that you will not be able to win and that we will be sworn in on January 20.”
More accusations by Trump camp
Earlier Thursday, Trump had sent his attorney Rudy Giuliani to give a press conference where he read affidavits alleging fraudulent electoral activity in several states and said the campaign would file a new lawsuit in Georgia.
Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, blatantly accused the Democrats of being “criminals” who committed massive fraud in various battle states “to steal an election from the American people.”
“It changes the election results in Michigan if you eliminate Wayne County,” said Giuliani, who repeatedly wiped sweat from his forehead and at one point had a dark liquid that could have been hair dye snaking through a side of his face.
When Giuliani and other Trump lawyers described the allegations that included charges of communist involvement, the president, apparently watching on television, took to Twitter to applaud them for presenting “an open and closed case of voter fraud.”
Chris Krebs, the top US election security official who was fired by Trump after calling the election the safest in history, wrote on Twitter that the press conference was “the most dangerous 1 hour and 45 minutes on television. in American history “and” possibly the craziest. ” “
Count ‘did its job’
In Georgia, some discrepancies were found in Republican-leaning counties, according to Gabriel Sterling, manager of Georgia’s voting system who helped monitor the so-called risk level audit.
“The good thing was that the audit did its job. He found those vote bands, ”he told Fox News.
The problems, which were attributed to human error rather than fraud, included memory cards that were not scanned in Douglas and Walton counties, more than 2,700 missing votes in Fayette County, and 2,600 Floyd County ballots that were not scanned.
Raffensperger, who like Sterling is a Republican, said before the results were released that there was no widespread voter fraud.
The focus on Georgia isn’t just about the count. The two state elections to the US Senate will go into the runoff on January 5 that will determine control of the chamber and Biden’s ability to push his agenda.
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