Majority Rules

 Historic Election Must Stand

Legal Challenges Must Fail

We just witnessed history being made. More Americans voted in this presidential election than ever before. Former Vice-President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris received more votes than any other presidential ticket in American history. They currently have more than a five million vote lead over President Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. 

The Biden-Harris ticket is projected to receive 279 Electoral College votes and have slim leads to capture even more once Arizona and Georgia complete their tallies. Should they win both states, their Electoral College tally will exceed 300 votes, far more than the 270 required to win the White House.

Against these substantial, some say insurmountable, numbers, Trump and his ever-dwindling number of supporters continue to make baseless claims that Democrats stole the election. Social media is rife with conspiracy theories and false claims of wide spread voter fraud and election procedural irregularities in several of the states Biden won. 

To further stir the pot and try to convince us Trump actually won the election, his legal team filed lawsuits seeking to overturn the results in several battleground states while administration officials refuse to start the legislatively required transition process giving access to the Biden-Harris transition team.

Funny thing about going to court, you have to bring provable facts supported by legally admissible evidence coupled with sound legal theories in order to obtain relief. So far, Trump’s team has failed to convince a single judge to grant relief that might lead to changing the result of the election.

Legal observers tell us that Trump’s claims of sweeping voter fraud have only been supported by anecdotal reports by individual voters or poll observers in scattered voting locations. 

During a Pennsylvania court hearing reported by the Associated Press, the judge asked a Trump campaign lawyer of he found any signs of fraud in the 592 ballots being challenged. The answer was, “no.” In Michigan, one of Trump’s lawsuits was dismissed because it contained “inadmissible hearsay within hearsay.” Trump’s appeal from that decision was dismissed because the appeal was “defective.” 

Trump’s team gave up in Nevada when it asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss their appeal seeking to stop mail ballots from being counted. A Federal lawsuit seeking to stop the counting of mail-in ballots in Las Vegas failed to convince the judge to immediately issue an order to stop the counting. 

Trump’s team won one case in Pennsylvania. They convinced a judge to disqualify a small number of ballots where the voters failed to confirm their identification by November 9th. The number of ballots disqualified was not enough to change the result of the election which Biden won by more than 53,000 votes. They won another challenge and were allowed to move their observers closer to those processing mail-in ballots. 

Litigation in Georgia raised a new theory that the use of Sharpie pens, whose ink can leak through the ballot paper and onto the reverse side, caused ballots to be illegally rejected. Unfortunately, the Trump team could only produce affidavits from a few voters who saw their marks bleed onto the back side of their ballot. None established that their ballots were rejected and election officials testified that voters would be allowed to case new ballots if their original ballot was rejected by the machine used to count their votes. Trump legal actions in Georgia alleging that ballots were received after the voting deadline were dismissed by the court when his lawyers could not produce proof of their claims. 

The New York Times contacted election officials in all 50 states seeking evidence of fraud in the presidential election. Not one offered any evidence of wide-spread voter fraud and most indicated the elections in their state was fair and the process transparent.

Trump has failed to produce any credible evidence to back up his claims of voter fraud. None of those lawsuits, if successful, would produce results that would change the outcome of that state’s election. Trump’s most sweeping arguments against elections that allow voters to choose between mail-in and vote-in-person methods for casting a ballot run counter to established voting rules passed in most jurisdictions. 

It is interesting to note that Trump’s team is only challenging election results in states that he lost. There were similar surges in mail-in balloting in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa and Montana which Trump won, yet we see no claims of voter fraud in any of them, even though Republican candidates down ballot lost in several elections. 

Trump has been able to raise a lot of money from those unwilling to accept his defeat. The fine print in GOP solicitations for these defense funds notes that significant portions of donations will be used to retire campaign debt.  These efforts are also seen as an attempt to stroke Trump’s ego and allow him cover to resist efforts towards a transition of power. 

An even more serious threat is found in the efforts to convince legislators in Republican controlled states to direct their state’s Electoral College votes to Trump even though he lost the popular vote there. Our own State Rep. Joe Sanfelippo from New Berlin publicly announced support for nullifying Wisconsin election results or requiring our Electoral College electors to cast Wisconsin’s votes for Trump, a blatantly illegal move disavowed by his GOP committee chair.

I have always believed we live in a democracy where elections are decided by a majority of the votes cast by eligible voters. I hope that remains true and that Trump and his enablers’ attempts to maintain their power illegally are rejected.