TORONTO -- U.S. President Donald Trump is refusing to accept his loss to president-elect Joe Biden and is instead floating baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and “illegal†votes despite a lack of proof.
All major news networks declared Biden the president-elect on Saturday after ballot-counting tallies in the remaining battleground states showed he had an insurmountable lead and would secure enough electoral college votes. But some Trump supporters insist that the election results remain undeclared and could eventually swing in the president’s favour, either through a series of legal challenges, statewide recounts or if yet-to-be-counted ballots, such as military ballots, tilt overwhelmingly in Trump’s favour.
The reality, political experts say, is that none of those possibilities is viable. Even if Trump somehow won every undeclared state -- Georgia, North Carolina, Alaska and, by some news organizations’ counts, Arizona -- he’d still be 11 electoral college votes shy of the 270 needed to win.
Trump’s campaign has filed a dozen lawsuits in at least five battleground states where he lost alleging a range of unsubstantiated claims, from voter fraud to problems with mail-in voting. Republican strategist Cory Crowley pointed out that Trump’s legal strategy relies on a highly improbable series of events.
“Only if he could get state supreme courts in four states -- most likely Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan -- to say that, for some reason, they’re going to throw out tens of thousands of votes,†Crowley told CTVNews.ca in an interview Tuesday. “That would be the only way, and it would have to happen in all four of them.â€
The chances of that happening, Crowley says, are “zero.â€
“Several of these states are run by Democrats anyway. What incentive do they have to help him?â€
Trump’s campaign has vowed to push for recounts in Wisconsin, where Biden won by more than 20,000 votes, and Georgia, which the Associated Press hasn’t declared but Biden leads by more than 12,000 votes, or 0.25 per cent. Georgia does not do automatic recounts, but a candidate can request one if the margin is less than 0.5 per cent.
Recounts almost always change the final vote count, but only by a very small number. For instance, in 2016, a recount in Wisconsin changed the final results by 131 votes in Trump’s favour, accounting for .00004 per cent of the final tally.
“Recounts rarely change the results,†Crowley said. “Typically a big swing is a couple hundred.â€
WHY ARE VOTES STILL BEING COUNTED?
Votes are still being counted across the U.S., and states have until Dec. 8 to settle any outstanding disputes. After that, members of the electoral college meet on Dec. 14 to formally cast their votes, which will officially declare the winner.
In any given U.S. election it can take weeks for states to finish tabulating ballots. This year, the unprecedented surge in mail-in voting has meant that the process is taking even longer. Several battleground states, including Pennsylvania, weren’t allowed to open mail-in ballots until election day.
Wayne Petrozzi, a professor emeritus of politics from Ryerson University, said the added labour of removing mail-in ballots from envelopes, then removing them from a second secrecy envelope, and then checking the ballot by hand is painstaking work.
“You had some counties where they had two staff. That was it. And they had to follow meticulous protocols,†Petrozzi told CTVNews.ca on Tuesday.
The Associated Press, which called the election for Biden after five days of ballot counting, said the surge in mail-in voting is to blame for the slower-than-normal count.
“The election, in many ways a referendum on Trump’s poor management of the virus, led to widespread use of mail voting for the first time in many states,†of how it called the election.
In some of the more competitive states, such as Georgia, Trump’s supporters remain optimistic that an influx of military ballots could provide a sudden, unexpected boost to lift Trump over Biden.
The reason news organizations felt comfortable projecting victory for Biden was because he was ahead by such a margin that these outstanding votes, including military ballots, simply wouldn’t be enough to close the gap. Data analysts could also look at where in each batch of outstanding votes was coming from to better understand how the missing votes might lean, based on voter trends.
“It’s not corruption. It’s historical data,†Petrozzi said.
COULD THE U.S. SUPREME COURT INTERVENE?
Weeks before the election, Trump pushed through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court despite outcry from Democrats who called the 11th-hour appointment unfair.
Some Democrats have raised concerns that Trump could harness the highest court in the land, which now has a 6-3 conservative majority, to somehow throw out ballots for Biden and hand Trump a second term.
Both Crowley and Petrozzi both agree that possibility is negligible.
"You would never see the Supreme Court step in and say we’re going to pick one of the two of you,†Crowley said. “It’s just not possible. They might be asked some legal questions potentially, but even then, those will be very specific as to whether certain ballots will count. But overall, elections in the U.S. are almost entirely governed at the state level, so the Supreme Court has very little jurisdiction anyway.â€
For a case to make it the Supreme Court, it would need to be referred by one of the lower-level courts.
“There is nothing that suggests any appeal in any of the states mentioned could end up requiring a referral to the Supreme Court. So Amy Coney Barrett may not be of any help to him in this area,†Petrozzi said.
WILL TRUMP CONCEDE?
Trump has not conceded the election and has reasserted in a series of tweets that he actually won, alleging “ballot corruption†and
Trump has pushed for what he called “illegal votes†to be cast aside, insisting that he would’ve won the election if only “legal votes†were counted. Among those “illegal†votes Trump alleges are mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania post-marked by Nov. 3 but received after election day. The state allows mail-in votes cast by election day to be received up until Nov. 6.
In 2016, Trump similarly said he would’ve won the popular vote over Hillary Clinton had it not been for millions of “illegal votes.†A commission he put forward later found no such evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Trump also alleged that people cast extra votes in battleground states Michigan and Pennsylvania using the identities of dead people. there is no evidence of this happening, and experts say allegations of dead voters come up regularly due to issues such as human error, problems with software or voter confidentiality issues.
Regardless, Trump’s attacks have received support from top Republicans, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who said Trump is “100 per cent within his rights†to challenge the election results, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said there will be a smooth transition “to a second Trump administration†in 2021.
Crowley, who works as a Republican strategist, said he believes Trump will eventually throw in the towel.
“I think eventually he’ll have no choice and it’ll be very embarrassing for him if he loses at the electoral college and just gets tossed out on his ear. At some point, you want to go out on your own terms,†he said.
But Petrozzi doubts that Trump will ever accept defeat.
“I don’t see it happening. I think it’s quite likely the processes will grind out to an untimely end. No ray-of-sun-in-the-dawn-of-a-new-morning kind of stuff. That’s for TV,†he said.
“It’ll grind to an end, the electoral college votes will get cast, and that’ll be it.â€
With files from The Associated Press
