WILMINGTON, United States, Nov 20, 2020 (AFP) – US President-elect Joe
Biden on Thursday accused Donald Trump of brazenly damaging democracy, as the
incumbent’s campaign to reverse his election loss through fraud claims was
dealt another blow with a recount in Georgia.
Trump was behind “incredibly damaging messages being sent to the rest of
the world about how democracy functions,” Biden told reporters in his home
state of Delaware.
Trump has refused to accept his loss on November 3, despite his opponent
getting over six million more votes.
Biden also won the Electoral College votes that ultimately decide who takes
the White House by 306 to 232, flipping five states that went to Trump four
years ago.
That includes Georgia, where a hand recount of its five million ballots
confirmed Thursday that Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate
to win the southern state in almost three decades.
The recount showed Biden had won by 12,284 votes, according to figures
posted on Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger’s website — slightly
fewer than the approximately 14,000 he originally led by.
After initially making baseless claims of widespread fraud, Trump has
appeared to shift his strategy to asking states to overrule the will of
voters.
In Michigan, Trump placed a telephone call to a Republican on a once-
obscure board who wants to withdraw her certification of the election result
in a heavily Democratic county that includes majority-Black Detroit.
“He was checking to make sure I was safe after seeing/hearing about the
threats and doxxing,” Wayne County Board of Canvassers chairwoman Monica
Palmer told the Detroit Free Press, referring to personal information posted
about her on social media.
Trump also reportedly invited Michigan Republican lawmakers to the White
House, even as his campaign withdrew a federal lawsuit that asked the courts
to block final certification of the state’s results.
Biden won Michigan on November 3 by 155,000 votes, a margin of victory more
than 10 times higher than Trump’s when he won the state in 2016.
Asked about Trump’s calls with officials there, Biden said it was “another
incident where he will go down in history as being one of the most
irresponsible presidents in American history.”
“It’s hard to fathom how this man thinks,” Biden said. “I’m confident he
knows he hasn’t won, is not going to be able to win and we’re going to be
sworn in January 20th.”
– More accusations by Trump camp –
Earlier Thursday Trump had dispatched his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to give a
news conference where he read affidavits claiming fraudulent voter activity
in multiple states and said the campaign would file a new lawsuit in Georgia.
Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, brazenly accused Democrats of being
“crooks” who committed massive fraud in several battleground states “to steal
an election from the American people.”
“It changes the results of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne
County,” said Giuliani, who repeatedly wiped sweat from his brow and at one
point had a dark liquid which may have been hair dye snaking down the side of
his face.
As Giuliani and other Trump lawyers outlined claims that included charges
of communist involvement, the president — apparently watching on television
— took to Twitter to applaud them for laying out “an open-and-shut case of
voter fraud.”
Chris Krebs, the top US election security official who was fired by Trump
after calling the election the most secure ever, wrote on Twitter that the
news conference was “the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in
American history” and “possibly the craziest.”
– Recount ‘did its job’ –
In Georgia, some discrepancies were found in Republican leaning counties,
according to Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system manager who helped
monitor the so-called risk-level audit.
“The good part was, the audit did its job. It found those tranches of
votes,” he told Fox News.
The issues, which were chalked up to human error and not fraud, included
memory cards that were not scanned in Douglas and Walton counties, more than
2,700 missing votes in Fayette County, and 2,600 ballots from Floyd County
that were not scanned.
Raffensperger, who like Sterling is a Republican, said prior to the results
being released that there was no widespread voter fraud.
The focus on Georgia is not just because of the recount. The state’s two US
Senate races are going to runoffs on January 5 that will determine control of
the chamber and Biden’s ability to push through his agenda.