Are we really going to reject democratic elections to soothe Trump's ego?
Donald Trump lost the presidency by the same electoral vote margin with which he won it. Maybe; the outcome is still somewhat uncertain in Arizona, though it seems likely that Trump lost that state, too. In total, he will probably have lost five states he won four years ago, while losing the popular vote by millions more.
Yet the Trump administration and the Trump campaign, such as it is, are insistent that things are far from settled.
Nearly every hour since midnight Tuesday, the campaign or the Republican Party has sent out an email insisting that “patriots need to step up” financially and that they are fighting for the “integrity” of an election tainted by fraud. They have no concrete examples of said fraud, elevating the same handful of claims — for instance, that some incomplete ballots were included in discarded mail in September — that the emails have hyped since last week. Trump’s surrogates are by now well practiced at breathlessly complaining about how observers were barred from watching ballots be counted, complaints which hinge on the fact that additional observers were not allowed to crowd vote-counting facilities. In court, the campaign has admitted that there were observers representing the campaign’s interests.
The reality is that there is no credible evidence that the election was tainted by any significant fraud — and certainly not enough to have swung the results of contests in which President-elect Joe Biden leads by tens of thousands of votes. International observers invited by the administration to oversee the voting have praised how it was conducted, reserving their concern solely for Trump’s after-the-fact allegations that something sketchy happened. State officials in charge of conducting the elections have not indicated that any significant fraud occurred — if any fraud occurred at all.
Yet, again: Here we are.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/10/are-we-really-going-reject-democratic-elections-soothe-trumps-ego/
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