US elections: they are back: Donald Trump and his allies refuse to accept the loss

Monday looked like the end of President Donald Trump’s relentless challenges to the election result, after the federal government recognized President-elect Joe Biden as the “apparent winner” and Trump paved the way for cooperation in a transition of power.

But his unfounded claims have a way of coming back. And on return. And on return.

By Wednesday, Trump was telephoning a local meeting of Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers that had been orchestrated by his campaign to falsely claim, again, that the elections were tainted.

“This election was rigged and we cannot allow that to happen,” Trump said by phone, without offering specific evidence.

The 2020 presidential race is turning into a zombie election that Trump simply won’t let die. Despite dozens of legal and procedural setbacks, his campaign continues to present new challenges that have little hope of success and make new and unfounded claims of fraud.

But that is the point. Trump’s strategy, his allies privately admit, was not to change the outcome, but to create a series of phantom claims about the 2020 presidential race that would infect the nation with doubt and keep his base loyal, despite the winner it was clear and there has been no evidence of massive electoral fraud.

“Zombies are dead people walking among the living; this litigation is the same thing,” said Franita Tolson, a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. “In terms of litigation that could change the elections, all these cases are basically dead men walking.”

It’s a strategy tolerated by many Republicans, notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who cling to Trump as they face the test of retaining their own power in the form of two runoff elections in Georgia in January. .

“This is really our version of an educated coup,” said Thomas Mann, senior fellow scholar at the Institute for Government Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

“It could end quickly if the Republican Party acknowledges what is happening. But they cower at Trump’s connection to the base.

A day after Trump said his administration should start working with Biden’s team, the allies filed three more lawsuits trying to stop certification in two more states on the battlefield. In Minnesota, a judge did not rule on the lawsuit and the state certified the results for Biden. Another was filed in Wisconsin, which does not certify until Tuesday. Arizona Republicans filed a ballot inspection complaint; state certification expires Monday.

And the campaign legal team said state legislators in Arizona and Michigan would hold meetings on the election “to provide confidence that all legal votes have been counted and illegal votes have not been counted in the Nov. 3 election.” .

In Pennsylvania, where Republican state lawmakers gathered in Gettysburg on Wednesday to voice their complaints about the election, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani attended in person and Trump called from the Oval Office.

“We have all the evidence,” Trump said. “All we need is for a judge to hear it correctly without having a political opinion.”

But the strongest legal rebuke so far came from a conservative Republican judge in Pennsylvania federal court, who on Saturday dismissed the Trump team’s lawsuit that sought to throw out the election results. The judge admonished the Trump campaign in a scathing ruling on its lack of evidence. The campaign has appealed.

Trump’s allies have privately acknowledged that his plan would never nullify the results, but could provide Trump with a way out of a loss he was not acknowledging and a way to maintain his loyal base for whatever he does next.

“And then our government and our politics will be hell, because he will continue to do what he is doing from his own private position,” Mann predicted.

Emily Murphy, the top General Services Administration official, declared Biden the “apparent winner” on Monday, a procedural but critical step that allowed the transition to begin in earnest. She made the determination after Trump’s efforts to subvert the vote failed in battle states. He cited “recent developments related to legal challenges and certification of electoral results.”

Michigan certified Biden’s victory at 154,000 counts on Monday, despite Trump’s calls on members of the Republican Party to block the vote to allow an audit of the ballots in Wayne County, where Trump claimed he was a victim of fraud. Biden crushed the president by more than 330,000 votes there.

“The duty of the board today is very clear,” said Aaron Van Langevelde, Republican vice president. “We have a duty to certify this election based on these results.”

Still, Trump’s legal team dismissed the certification as “simply a procedural step” and insisted he would keep fighting.

Trump and his allies have filed at least four cases in Michigan that sought, unsuccessfully, to block the certification of election results in part or across the state.

In Pennsylvania, after Gov. Tom Wolf certified Biden as the winner, an appeals court judge ordered state officials to halt any further steps toward certifying the election results. The state has appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

In Arizona, just as lawyers for a Phoenix-area woman dropped a case claiming the team failed to register her ballot because she completed it with a county-issued Sharpie pen, the Trump campaign filed its own lawsuit echoing the some of the same complaints. When that lawsuit was about to be dismissed, the woman’s attorneys filed a new case reviving the claims and demanding that she be allowed to cast her vote again. All three cases have been dismissed.

“The legal process appears to be unfolding as intended, but the Trump campaign has made clear its desire to throw keys to the system wherever possible,” said Lisa Marshall Manheim, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law.

– AP