Home / General / Open plans to steal elections are bad even if they fail

Open plans to steal elections are bad even if they fail

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Ari Berman has a good summary. Biden seems to have enough of a cushion to make stealing the election impossible, but they fact that Trump and some Trumpites are still trying is still bad:

But these are hail-Mary lawsuits that are unlikely to succeed or make a meaningful difference in the vote count.

In Georgia, for example, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Chatham County claiming that 53 mail ballots arrived after Election Day and should be thrown out, based on the testimony of a GOP poll watcher. But election officials said the ballots arrived before the deadline, and the lawsuit was quickly dismissed on Thursday.

Similarly, Trump went to court in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, to claim that voters should not be given a chance to fix problems with their mail ballots. But a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush was skeptical of those claims. “I do not understand how the integrity of the election was affected,” said Judge Timothy Savage. And only 93 votes fall into that category, a number very unlikely to affect the outcome of the election in Pennsylvania, where Biden is expected to be leading by 100,000 votes or more after the outstanding votes are tallied.

In Michigan, which has already been called for Joe Biden, the Trump campaign wants to stop the counting of votes because Republican poll watchers were not allowed to monitor the collection of mail ballots from drop boxes. Those ballots were collected by trained election officials and there is no evidence of improprieties. On Thursday afternoon, a Michigan judge denied Trump’s motion to stop counting ballots.

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Indeed, Trump is using the lawsuits to amplify his false claims about how ballots are counted, which are encouraging his supporters to resort to intimidating actions, like angry crowds chanting “stop the count” in Detroit or attempting to disrupt the counting of ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona.

That raises the scary prospect that even if Trump loses these cases in court, as seems likely, he will still succeed in his larger goal of delegitimizing the election, which may make it harder for Trump and his supporters to accept a peaceful transfer of power. 

The Michigan suit — which made no sense on any level — was particularly entertaining:

These are clowns, but very dangerous clowns.

Meanwhile, this is actually not good:

Some states (like PA) wanted to start counting early and were the victim of Republican sabotage intended to help Daddy Trump’s election theft plans. But there are also Democratic-controlled states where there seems to be just a genuine lack of urgency or interest in doing timely vote counts. Honestly this is the rare thing that Florida is right about — the fact that Republicans are using delays to sow confusion should make clear that timely counts are good thing. The western vote-by-mail states should strongly consider getting ballots out earlier and having the deadline for receipt be Election Day, for example.

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