Biden denounces Trump’s ‘irresponsible’ fight to reverse elections

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE – NOVEMBER 19: US President-elect Joe Biden speaks while addressing the media after a virtual meeting with the executive committee of the National Association of Governors at the Queen Theater on November 19 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. Biden and his advisers continue the transition process to the White House. Joe Raedle / Getty Images / AFP

WILMINGTON (AP) – President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday accused Donald Trump of blatantly damaging democracy as the incumbent pushed ahead with a campaign to reverse his electoral defeat through claims of fraud and personal outreach to the electoral authorities.

Trump is 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.

When asked about Trump’s calls with officials in Michigan, which Biden won in the Nov. 3 election by 155,000 votes, Biden said it was “another incident in which he will go down in history as one of the most irresponsible presidents of the world. the history of the United States “.

“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.”

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.

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 once-unknown Republican board who wants to withdraw his certification of the election results in the Democratic-majority 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’s margin of victory in Michigan is more than 10 times that of Trump when he won the state in 2016.

More accusations by Trump camp

Georgia is preparing to publish the results of a manual recount of its five million ballots that is expected to show that Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the southern state in nearly three decades.

Trump sent his attorney Rudy Giuliani to give a press conference Thursday in which he read affidavits alleging fraudulent election activity in several states and said the campaign would file a new lawsuit in Georgia.

Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, also blatantly accused Democrats of being “criminals” who committed massive fraud in various battlefield 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 may or may not have been hair dye snaking through it. side of his face.

As 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, Biden’s original margin of victory was just over 14,000 votes.

The manual count that began last week and ended Wednesday night narrowed that gap slightly to more than 12,700 early Thursday.

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.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who like Sterling is a Republican, said there was no widespread electoral fraud.

“I don’t think the overall results will change at the end of the day,” Raffensperger told CNN.

The laser-like focus in Georgia isn’t just about counting. 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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