The election has not yet taken place but Republicans are already contesting the result. For months, Donald Trump has continued to attack Democrats, whom he describes as “a bunch of cheats.” “They’re going to cheat. They’re cheating. All they want to do is cheat,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin. “That’s the only way they’re going to win. And we can’t let it happen.” He proclaims everywhere that he will win hands down, citing certain polls, many sponsored by conservatives, which put him in the lead, to show that his victory is inevitable. If he loses, it is because of massive fraud, he assures.
More than 130 legal actions
The former president is repeating the tactics of 2020. Four years ago, he refused to admit defeat and accused the Democrats of rigging the election to prevent him from remaining in power. In the process, with his allies, he launched more than 60 legal challenges to try to change the results. They were all, except one on a minor issue, rejected by the courts, which found the accusations of electoral fraud inadmissible. Several of Donald Trump’s lawyers behind this offensive were subsequently disbarred or faced legal action for their manipulation attempts. Even today, a majority of Republican voters remain convinced that the election of Joe Biden was usurped…
The new thing is that the former president did not wait until the day after the election to mobilize. He and his followers have recruited an army of renowned lawyers to launch more than 130 lawsuits in recent months, a record, often based on conspiracy theories. Individuals convinced of Donald Trump’s victory in 2020 have intensified their efforts. “Four years ago, they were disorganized and improvised,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. Today, their initiatives are well-funded, strategic and focused.”
Appeals in key states
These appeals, mainly in key states, attack all aspects of the electoral process. They first seek to disqualify certain voters. Thus, they tried, unsuccessfully, to block the votes of Americans living abroad. Donald Trump repeats, without evidence, that the electoral rolls are full of names of undocumented immigrants, even if non-American citizens voting illegally in the United States are exceedingly rare. In several states, the Republicans therefore purged their electoral lists. In Alabama, 3,000 people suspected of not having nationality were excluded, in Virginia 1,600… However in this state, it seems that no foreigner is among the 1,600 individuals removed from the lists. Rather, these are American citizens who made errors when registering or did not regularize their change of status.
Most courts did not admit this “cleaning” a few weeks before the election. The Supreme Court, however, has just authorized Virginia to continue its purge. The Republicans also attack polling station staff, whose impartiality they question. In particular, they request the presence of more observers from their camp. They won their case in the city of Detroit (Michigan) but not in neighboring Wisconsin. They are also trying to suppress the counting of certain postal ballots, posted before the election but arrived after. In Pennsylvania, they tried to disqualify mail-in ballots that weren’t put in two envelopes, as the rule requires. Without success. On the other hand, they managed to prevent students at the University of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, from using their digital university ID cards to vote.
In most cases, their complaints are rejected by the courts. But Donald Trump and his allies don’t care. Their goal is not to win their case. They want to accumulate so-called incriminating evidence that they will then use to claim that the presidential election was manipulated. “Most of the Republican Party’s legal actions target facts that are not illegal. This explains why they lose so many appeals, summarizes Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer associated with Kamala Harris’ campaign. Their goal is to undermine confidence in the elections.” If Donald Trump loses, his base, convinced that his victory was “stolen” from him, will, he hopes, support his efforts – legal or not – to contest the results and potentially take power.
The ex-president is working hard to discredit the electoral system and sow doubt about its integrity. He shares videos created by Russian propaganda where we see, for example, a Haitian with several identity cards who boasts of having voted several times in Georgia. And this is not the only “fake” circulating… Moreover, Donald Trump distorts and amplifies incidents to denounce fraud. In two Pennsylvania counties, officials discovered a series of possibly fraudulent voter registration forms. Donald Trump seized on the information and claimed that fake ballots had been found. “They have already started cheating [dans le comté] from Lancaster, he proclaimed. All the ballots were signed by the same person.” According to David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, “there have been remarkably few problems so far with early voting.” In all, some 160 million Americans vote Tuesday, November 5 in 10,000 jurisdictions with tens of thousands of employees and volunteers involved in the process, he explains. “There will always be small incidents, some intentional like in Pennsylvania where it seems. there may have been fraud on the electoral lists. But officials spotted him. This shows the effectiveness of the system.”
Democrats prepare to counterattack
Most worrying for experts are the Trumpists’ attempts to give the commissions in charge of elections more power to block the validation of the result. The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics has identified 35 county commission members who, since 2020, have delayed or refused to validate the vote by citing false irregularities. In Georgia, in August, the conservative-controlled State Board of Elections issued several highly controversial rules. It imposed a manual counting of votes once they were scanned by a machine, which would delay the announcement of the winner. She also put in place two measures allowing county officials to object to the certification of the vote. The judge rejected the rules, calling them “illegal and “unconstitutional.”
For their part, the Democrats are not remaining inactive. They prepared to counterattack in the event that Donald Trump declared himself the winner before the end of the count or launched, as is predictable, many recourses to prevent the victory of Kamala Harris. They recruited hundreds of lawyers in each state, under the leadership of Dana Remus, a woman who already led candidate Joe Biden’s legal team in 2020. And they have already successfully opposed the decisions taken by the Commission in Georgia, for example. “[Les Républicains] started earlier. Us too. We have been preparing continuously since 2020,” Dana Remus said on CNN.
Election officials across the country are also better prepared than they were four years ago to handle potential chaos. And Congress passed a law in 2022 which makes it more difficult to block the validation of the presidential results by elected officials in Washington on January 6. But even if, so far, the courts have hardly ruled in their favor, pro-Trump people continue to hatch all kinds of scenarios to ensure victory. Andy Harris, a representative from Maryland, suggested that Republican elected officials in North Carolina not wait to count the votes on November 5 but give the 16 votes of their electors to Donald Trump in advance. All this, according to him, for practical reasons. The Republican-voting west of the state was devastated by Hurricane Helene and voters, he feared, might not be able to get to the polling stations…
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