It's been obvious that for months Trump planned to try to steal the election if he lost. He encouraged his fans to risk their lives going to the polls in person rather than voting by mail, so that those who did vote by mail would be predominantly Democrats. He has constantly cast doubt on the validity of voting by mail. He appointed Louis DeJoy as United States Postmaster General in June of this year, who promptly put in place procedures that slowed the mail. He is currently trying to get republican election officials to subvert the election in his favor.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-local-elections-arizona-7174555c2545f8afb69f0ce2ac0b2156
By ZEKE MILLER, COLLEEN LONG and DAVID EGGERT
Nov. 20, 2020
President Donald Trump sought to leverage the power of the Oval Office on Friday in an extraordinary attempt to block President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, but his pleas to Michigan lawmakers to overturn the will of their constituents appeared to have left them unswayed.
Trump summoned a delegation of the battleground state’s Republican leadership, including the Senate majority leader and House speaker, in an apparent extension of his efforts to persuade judges and election officials to set aside Biden’s 154,000-vote margin of victory and grant Trump the state’s electors. It came amid mounting criticism that Trump’s futile efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election could do long-lasting damage to democratic traditions.
Trump’s efforts extended to other states that Biden carried as well, amounting to an unprecedented attempt by a sitting president to maintain his grasp on power, or in failure, to delegitimize his opponent’s victory in the eyes of his army of supporters.
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Some Trump allies have expressed hope that state lawmakers could intervene in selecting Republican electors, as the president and his attorneys have pushed baseless allegations of fraud that have been repeatedly rejected in courtrooms across the country. It was with that in mind that Trump invited the Michigan legislators. He was also said to be considering extending a similar invitation to lawmakers from Pennsylvania.
“The president could be calling Republican legislators and others to the White House to try and squeeze them,” tweeted former Trump national security adviser John Bolton. “Republicans at all levels — state, county, election boards, legislatures — must resist this political pressure.”
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Trump’s play for Michigan was among a series of last-ditch tactics in battleground states that his team is using to challenge his defeat. They also have suggested in a legal challenge that Pennsylvania set aside the popular vote there and pressured county officials in Arizona to delay certifying vote tallies. There have been multiple lawsuits in battleground states that have failed so far to reverse any votes.
In two Democratic-leaning counties in Wisconsin that are recounting votes, Trump’s campaign sought to discard tens of thousands of absentee ballots that it alleged should not have been counted.
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Former Bush administration official Christine Todd Whitman called Trump’s efforts “the actions of a third-world dictator. It is not who we are as Americans, and we do not want the public coming away from this thinking this is the norm. There is no basis for trying to overturn this.”
The increasingly desperate and erratic moves by Trump and his allies have no reasonable chance of changing the outcome of the 2020 election, in which Biden has now received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history and has clinched the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win.
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