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Almost two weeks after Joe Biden was thrown the winner in the US election, Donald Trump continues to refuse to concede victory. Does the president have a plan to reverse the outcome?
The president’s legal strategy to challenge the election result seems to be falling on deaf ears in the courts. After filing dozens of lawsuits, Trump’s team has yet to score a significant victory or present evidence of widespread fraud.
His senior lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said Thursday that the campaign he was going to withdraw his lawsuits in Michigan, a state Biden won by more than 160,000 votes.
In Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State announced he would certify the election result, which gave Biden a lead of just over 12,000 votes after the state conducted a manual recount of nearly 5 million votes.
As the doors to his re-election remain closed, the president appears to be shifting his strategy to turn the results of an unlikely legal tactic into a political decision. riskier.
A Simple Guide to Trump’s Strategy
Here’s what Trump can hope to do:
- Block the vote certification process in as many states as possible, either through legal action or by encouraging Republican officials to oppose the result.
- Convince Republican-controlled legislatures in states where Biden firmly won to dismiss popular vote results as corrupt due to widespread fraud.
- Then the legislature allocates the votes of that state’s electoral college, which are cast by so-called voters on December 14, to Trump instead of Biden.
- Do this in enough states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, for example, for Trump to exceed his 232 electoral votes and hit the 270 vote mark. Or, at least, force Biden to drop from 306 electoral votes to 269, which would be a tie and leave the fate of the election in the hands of the House of Representatives, where Trump would have the advantage.
What is Trump doing to achieve this?
The first sign Trump was pressuring some states to ignore the current vote tally came after the country’s press reported that the president called in Republican officials who initially refused to certify the election result. Detroit, Michigan’s largest city.
For two senior party officials, among thousands of election officials from across the United States, speaking directly to a president was highly unusual. In the end, they reversed their decision to block the process and, after Trump’s call, expressed regret. for going back.
These indications became clear evidence of intent when Republican leaders in the Michigan legislature accepted an invitation from the president to visit the White House on Friday.
Some keys
- To become President of the United States, it is not necessary to win a majority of the popular vote but to obtain at least 270 of the 538 votes of the Electoral College.
- The candidate who wins the popular vote in a state usually takes all the electoral votes in that territory.
- Florida, for example, has 29 electoral votes. Texas, 38 years old. The candidate who reaches 270 wins the election.
The news was accompanied by reports that Trump is determined to find other ways to pressure lawmakers in key states to review and possibly overturn his election results.
What has traditionally been a mere formality in normal elections – the bipartisan certification of total votes by state – has become on the last battlefield of the president’s attempts to stay in power for the next four years.
Could Trump achieve his goal?
Trump’s chances of success are very, very slim. For starters, the president is expected to reverse the results in various states, where Biden’s lead ranges from tens of thousands of votes to more than hundreds of thousands. This year 2020 is not 2000, when everything was decided in Florida.
Additionally, many of the states Trump’s legal team targets Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada have Democratic Party governors, who will not sit idly by while this all happens.
In Michigan, for example, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could fire the state’s current electoral council and replace it with one willing to certify Biden’s victory.
(Additionally, Michigan’s Republican congressional leaders pledged to go “the normal process” and said they had no information to suggest that the outcome in Biden’s favor could change, even after meeting Trump at the White House. N of E).
Democratic governors could respond by appointing their own pro-Biden voters to compete with those chosen by the Republican legislature, leaving Congress to decide which group to recognize.
In any case, that’s not to say that Biden followers aren’t affected.
While the possibility of all of this happening is at the level of Earth struck by a giant meteorite or someone being struck by lightning as they win the lottery, to take the victory from them would be a political cataclysm in this regard. moment. that the remote possibility of it is enough to make the Democratic ranks shudder.
Is Trump’s Strategy Legal?
Trump has spent much of his time in the White House undermining presidential norms and traditions. And it looks like his last days at work will be no different.
However, the pressure that Trump exerts on election officials and state legislatures is an unprecedented or controversial act, doesn’t mean it’s illegal.
In the early days of the nation, state legislatures had broad powers over how to decide their electoral votes, and to this day there is still no constitutional obligation for them to comply with the results of the popular vote. .
Since then, legislatures have circumscribed this jurisdiction by allocating their votes based on the results of the popular election, but the basis of the original system is still intact.
If the president is successful in convincing a legislature to act (in his favor), Democrats are likely to raise legal objections. The law, both at the national level and in each State, is diffuse, because this type of case has rarely been the subject of litigation.
Could states change the law on how they organize their elections retroactively? Quiz. But the final verdict will depend on the judges.
Has anyone tried this before?
The last time a close election involved a voter dispute was in 2000, when Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush clashed. It was a battle in one state, Florida, where the difference between the two candidates was a few hundred votes. In the end, the United States Supreme Court took part in and shut down any further scrutiny, and Bush became president.
For an election contested in several states, one would have to look much further into 1876, with the contest between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tildon.
In this case, the disputed results in Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida meant that no candidate was able to secure a majority in the electoral college.
The stalemate ended the House of Representatives elections, which ultimately favored Hayes, who, like Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016, had won fewer votes nationally than his opponent.
What if Donald Trump refuses to resign?
If the president’s attempts to overturn the election results fail, at 12:01 a.m. on January 20, Joe Biden will take office as 46 President of the United Stateswhether Trump recognizes his victory or not.
At that point, the country’s secret service and military are free to treat the former president as they would any unauthorized person on government property.
“What he’s doing is outrageous,” Biden said at a press conference Thursday.
“Extremely harmful messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy works.”
Even if the president fails, his apparent devastating strategy Challenging the election results sets a precedent and, according to polls, undermines the confidence of many Americans in the country’s democratic system and institutions.
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