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WASHINGTON: A key state on the battlefield in the 2020 U.S. presidential election is expected to affirm Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump on Thursday (Nov. 19), marking another setback for the efforts. scattered from Trump to stay in power.
Georgia’s top election official, a Republican, has said a labor-intensive manual recount is unlikely to erode Biden’s initial 14,000-vote margin enough to give Trump a victory in the state.
That would leave Trump with fewer and fewer options as he tries to overturn the results of an election in which he got 5.8 million fewer votes than Biden nationwide.
To stay in office, Trump would have to overturn the results in at least three large states to change the Electoral College results state-by-state that determines the winner.
Biden has garnered 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232.
Trump’s campaign has had little success so far.
In Wisconsin, election officials said an ongoing partial recount in the state’s largest Democratic-leaning counties would likely only add to Biden’s 20,000-vote margin.
The Trump campaign may request another recount in Georgia after that state certifies its vote count, which is expected to be on Friday.
In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump’s lawyers have met with a string of defeats, arguing that those states should declare Trump the winner, despite unofficial results showing Biden ahead by 158,000 votes and 83,000. votes respectively.
Those legal motions, peppered with factual errors, have been dismissed by the Biden campaign as “theatrical” not based on sound laws.
Several prominent law firms withdrew from the operation, leaving Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani at the forefront of the efforts.
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State and federal election officials, as well as outside experts, have said that Trump’s argument that the election was stolen from him by widespread election fraud has no basis in fact.
However, it appears to be affecting the public’s trust in American democracy.
A Reuters / Ipsos opinion poll released Wednesday found that roughly half of Republicans believe Trump “rightfully won” the election.
Arizona’s top election official, Katie Hobbs, said she and her family had received violent threats. Hobbs, a Democrat, asked Trump to stop questioning the result.
Trump himself has no public events scheduled for Thursday. He has largely remained in the White House and has been out of the public eye since the election.
His administration has so far refused to recognize Biden as the winner, delaying funding and security clearances to ease the transition from one president to another before the inauguration on January 20 next year.
Biden said Wednesday that the delay prevented his team from planning new efforts to combat a third wave of COVID-19 infections, which is putting immense pressure on the US healthcare system.
