US Election 2020: Georgia recount completed, CONFIRMS Biden victory

2.4k

View
comments

Hundreds of supporters of President Trump gathered outside the State Capitol in Georgia on Thursday for a ‘stop the steal’ rally for the second day in a row as the state is set to certify that Joe Biden won its 16 electoral college votes.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Thursday that a hand audit of ballots in the state was complete and had confirmed Biden as the winner of the November 3 election in the state.

An audit was launched after unofficial results showed Biden leading Trump by about 14,000 votes.

‘The audit confirmed that the original machine count accurately portrayed the winner of the election,’ the secretary of state’s office said in a statement on Thursday evening.

Raffensperger is expected to formally certify Biden’s victory on Friday.

Trump, who has claimed without evidence that there were widespread irregularities and fraud in states that he lost to Biden, including Georgia, can still request a recount in Georgia after the results are certified because the margin of victory was less than 0.5 percent.

Earlier on Thursday, rallygoers dressed as Uncle Sam and waved pro-Trump and American flags while demonstrating in Atlanta on Thursday.

The attendees denounced the alleged ‘widespread fraud’ that resulted in Biden being declared the winner of the state.

Among those to address the crowd were Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and far-right commentator Nick Fuentes.

The protesters chanted ‘do not steal the elections,’ ‘We want Trump,’ and ‘Stop them masks.’

Another protest is scheduled for Saturday at the State Capitol in Atlanta.

Despite the allegations by Trump and his supporters, no evidence indicating a conspiracy to fix the election for Biden has been uncovered. 

It was up to Raffensperger to select the race to be audited, and he said the presidential race made the most sense because of its significance and the tight margin separating the candidates.

Because of that small margin, Raffensperger said a full hand recount was necessary.

Votes that hadn’t previously been counted were found in several counties during the audit, which required recertification of the election results in those counties.

In Floyd County, more than 2,500 ballots were discovered during the audit that hadn’t previously been scanned, and the secretary of state’s office had called for the firing of the county’s chief elections clerk, Robert Brady.

The county elections board on Thursday voted to issue a written reprimand to Brady and, because it was his second written reprimand within six months, to fire him in accordance with county policy, board member Melanie Conrad said in an email.

Several other counties found memory cards with votes that hadn’t been uploaded and counted prior to the audit.

Going into the hand tally, Biden led Trump by a margin of about 14,000 votes.

The previously uncounted ballots discovered during the hand count will reduce that margin to about 12,800, election officials said.

The Associated Press has not declared a winner in Georgia, where Biden led Trump by about 0.3 percentage points.

There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides that option to a trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points. 

It is AP’s practice not to call a race that is — or is likely to become — subject to a recount.  

‘It’s hard to fathom how Donald thinks’: Biden calls Trump’s plan to pry away Michigan’s electoral college votes ILLEGAL and says ‘he must know’ he has lost 

President-elect Joe Biden suggested on Thursday that President Trump‘s moves to try to get Michigan legislators to try to throw the state’s electoral votes his way was illegal and slammed the president’s actions as ‘hard to fathom.’

Biden measured his words and took long pauses when asked about Trump’s post-election moves – minutes after Trump’s legal team came out to allege a ‘massive’ election fraud amid efforts to get courts to toss out hundreds of thousands of votes in Philadelphia and Detroit.

‘I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won,’ Biden said.  He also blasted Trump’s refusal to allow for a formal transition to begin as spelled out in a federal law on the transition period.

He spoke after reports that Trump plans to bring Michigan state Republican leaders to the White House, after a Wayne County canvassing board certified the results but its two Republican members then provided affidavits seeking to rescind their votes. 

It pointed to a White House effort to try to get state officials to overrule the popular vote in states that voted for Biden. Biden beat Trump in Michigan by more than 150,000 votes.

The apparent effort to lean on Republican legislators followed reports earlier Thursday that Trump had phoned the two Republican officials who resisted certifying the vote in Wayne County, home to Detroit and one of the nation’s greatest concentration of black voters.

‘I just – It’s hard to fathom how this man thinks,’ Biden said. ‘It’s hard to fathom. I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won. He’s not going to win and we’re going to be sworn in January 20th. 

‘I just you know, far from me to question his motive but it’s just outrageous what he’s doing,’ he said.

He called Trump the ‘most irresponsible president in American history.’ 

Biden, who spent decades in the Senate, regularly cites his own rule about questioning rivals’ motivations. He spoke on a day when Trump’s motives are not in much doubt: he wants to peel away states that went for Biden to try to erase his 306 vote win in the electoral college. 

‘What the president’s doing now is really it’s going to,’ he said, his voice trailing off. He called it ‘another incident where he will go down in history as one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history.’

Then he called it ‘not even within the norm at all. There’s a question whether it’s even legal.’

‘We won Michigan. It’s going to be certified,’ Biden said. 

Biden also got asked about the administration’s refusal to reach a formal assessment that Biden is the winner, which would commence a formal transition with meetings between Biden’s aides and agency staff. 

Biden said the administration’s refusal to meet with his team about COVID-19 and planning for distribution of a vaccine would ‘put lives at risk.’  

Trump loses three cases in one day: Judges toss GOP election lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania as president’s lawyers continue cries of voter fraud and insist he can still win 

Trump and his allies lost court rulings in three states on Thursday in their effort to stop Biden from taking office, underscoring their dwindling options even as they continued to claim a viable path to victory.

In Georgia, a judge appointed by Trump denied a request by Lin Wood, a conservative lawyer, to halt certification of Biden’s victory in the state. 

The lawsuit alleged Georgia election officials improperly changed the process for handling absentee ballots.

‘To halt the certification at literally the eleventh hour would breed confusion and disenfranchisement that I find have no basis in fact and law,’ said US District Judge Steven Grimberg in Atlanta during a court hearing.

Meanwhile a state judge in Arizona also tossed a Republican-backed lawsuit seeking to stop Phoenix officials from certifying Biden as the winner – and said the suit could not be reworked and brought again.  

And in Pennsylvania, a state judge rejected the Trump campaign’s bid to invalidate about 2,200 ballots in Bucks County, near Philadelphia, over purported defects such as missing ‘secrecy envelopes’.

The trio of losses came as Trump’s legal advisers, led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, drilled down on their unsubstantiated voter fraud claims and laid out what they said was a path to victory during a fiery press conference in Washington on Thursday. 

Trump’s strategy for retaining power is focused increasingly on persuading Republican legislators to intervene on his behalf in battleground states Biden won, three people familiar with the effort told Reuters.

The campaign’s efforts have become increasingly frantic following a string of defeats in the past week as more than a dozen of its cases across multiple states were denied or pulled.  

The judge who handed down Georgia’s ruling on Thursday appeared to acknowledge the mounting desperation, calling the suit that Wood filed in his capacity as an average voter ‘creative’, but saying that didn’t give him a basis to sue.  

‘There is no doubt that the right to vote, even an individual’s right to vote is sacrosanct,’ Judge Steven Grimberg in the Northern District of Georgia said. But, he added, that ‘doesn’t mean that individual voters have the right to dictate’ how their vote is counted. 

Wood’s suit seeking to stop the certification of votes accused Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of harming him as a voter by agreeing to a March settlement agreement on signature matching in ballots.  

Georgia’s assistant attorney general Russell Willard dismissed Wood’s claims as an attempt to ‘change the rules at the end of the game in order to alter the score’.  

Willard also said that ruling in favor of Wood would result in ‘the largest disenfranchisement in Georgia since the abolition of the poll tax and the vestiges of Jim Crow’.   

Judge Grimberg sided with Willard, noting how Wood waited eight months to challenge Raffensperger’s March settlement agreement until after the election was called for Biden.  

‘It is well established that garden-variety election disputes do not rise to the level of a constitutional deprivation,’ the judge said. 

‘The fact that the candidate or candidates that this plaintiff voted for… did not prevail in an election does not meet the legal standard of harm, much less irreparable harm.’ 

Georgia is set to certify that Biden won its 16 electoral college votes on Friday, after Raffensberger announced that a hand-audit of ballots had confirmed the results. 

Disenfranchisement was also at the center of Thursday’s ruling in Pennsylvania, where the Trump campaign sought to exclude more than 2,000 ballots for technical reasons. 

Judge Robert Baldi of the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas ordered local election officials to count all of those ballots because there was no evidence of fraud.  

‘It must be noted that the parties specifically stipulated in their comprehensive stipulation of facts that there exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots,’ Judge Baldi wrote in his ruling. 

‘There is nothing in the record and nothing alleged that would lead to the conclusion that any of the challenged ballots were submitted by someone not qualified or entitled to vote in this election.

‘At no time did Petitioners present evidence or argument to the contrary.’  

The Trump campaign still has one federal lawsuit pending in Pennsylvania, but the judge overseeing that case expressed skepticism about the lawyers’ arguments earlier this week. 

The Arizona case that was thrown out on Thursday had been filed by the state’s Republican party, which had asked Judge John Hannah to order a new audit of ballots in Maricopa County, where the majority of Arizonans live, arguing it had been conducted in a manner that violated state law.

Judge Hannah did not explain why he was denying the request but said he would issue a lengthier decision soon.

The Arizona Republican Party said in a statement that it had sought ‘judicial clarification’ of a law relating to determining a sample for a post-election audit of ballots. 

The statement said the dispute should be clarified through future legislation.

The Biden campaign praised Judge Hannah’s decision, calling the lawsuit ‘frivolous and rightfully dismissed’.  

‘Arizona’s election was well-run and transparent, and far-right fringes of the Arizona Republican Party should stop trying to undermine Arizonans’ faith in free and fair elections,’ said Geoff Burgan, communications director for the Biden campaign in Arizona.