Could Trump still win? No is already lost

Five days after television stations and other major news organizations awarded Joe Biden the presidential election, President Donald Trump continues to claim he “will win.”

here false.

Biden’s margins of victory in the major battlefield states he has captured – 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, 54,000 votes in Pennsylvania and 148,000 votes in Michigan – are far behind. above the thresholds votes that have been modified during previous counts.

Even in Georgia, where officials are bracing for a rmanual counting Among the ballots, Biden leads by 14,000 votes, a margin that is unlikely to be reversed.

(Biden also leads by 11,000 votes in Arizona, but election officials there still count absent votes which arrived by mail).

The New York Times And other media didn’t pick Biden as the presidential winner, but they just did the math: the former vice president won enough states with enough votes, so much so that Trump didn’t cannot overcome these deficits through court challenges or recounts.

“He does not have no possibility to reverse the result, it’s just impossible, ”said Gerry McDonough, a Democratic election lawyer who worked for the vice president’s legal team. Al gore in the Florida count in 2000.

“I’m an accounting attorney here in Massachusetts and I get requests from people all the time and they say, ‘I’m only 50 votes late and we’re sure there were these bad participants.’ I won’t take a case like this. “

Florida’s 2000 count was made after George W. Bush take an unofficial lead of just 1,784 votes over Gore the morning after election day; his final margin of victory in the state was 537 votes.

The largest margin to be overturned in a recent recount came during the 2008 Minnesota Senate race, when the 215-vote margin for the senator was overturned. Norm Coleman, the outgoing Republican, becoming a head of 312 votes for Al Franks, the Democratic candidate, after a court ruled that hundreds of absentee votes rejected in error.

In the days after the election, Trump and his key aides and some supporters claimed that voting in key states was characterized by fraud crawling, but they have not yet documented any evidence of widespread embezzlement.

Election officials from all 50 states told the New York Times this week they had no knowledge no fraud or other electoral irregularities in their States.

Every day that passes without Trump providing the court with proof of electoral fraud increases his legal chances, Democratic and Republican lawyers have said.

“The way for him to win is to be able to back his rhetoric and find enough fraud and wrongdoing in enough states to overturn his results,” said Ben Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who worked for Bush during the elections. 2000 elections and who retired. year and turned against Trump.

“So far they have completely failed at this and, based on their court appearances, they’re not even close. “

With no ability to change the popular vote outcome in the contested states, lawyers said Trump’s legal strategy, in its current form, appeared to be an attempt to delay certification de Biden as the winner by state election officials, which could raise the issue of the nomination of constituency delegates to Republican-controlled state legislatures.

Even this theory is based on the fact that one in a hundred legal banking series is carried out simultaneously in multiple states, which would undoubtedly provoke widespread public outrage at the reversal of the results of a defined election.

“It’s the kind of thing you wake up to thinking in the middle of the night. It would really blow the roof if they tried to steal an election like this,” McDonough said.

“If people were so blatantly ignoring the fundamentals of democracy, God knows what would happen, how people would react to it.”

Most states are set to certify their election results and declare the winners by the end of November – a process that could lead to more official tally this month, but also to formal conclusions on the results.

“At some point, it becomes clear, even to the president’s most ardent supporters, that there is no way,” said Lanhee Chen, who was the policy director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012.

c. 2020 The New York Times Company