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    Trump one of the 'most irresponsible presidents' in US history, Biden says – video

    US president-elect Joe Biden says Donald Trump will go down in history as one of the ‘most irresponsible presidents in American history’, labelling his challenges to the election results ‘incredibly damaging’. Biden said he was not concerned that Trump’s refusal to concede the election would prevent a transfer of power, but added it ‘sends a horrible message about who we are as a country’.
    Biden condemns Trump as one of the ‘most irresponsible presidents in American history’ More

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    The dead voter conspiracy theory peddled by Trump voters, debunked

    Late last week, Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier declared on social media that he had unearthed definitive proof of widespread voter fraud in Detroit. He pointed to an absentee ballot cast by “118-year-old William Bradley”, a man who had supposedly died in 1984.
    “They’re trying to steal the election,” Fournier warned in a since-deleted Facebook post, though the election had already been called for Joe Biden by every major news network days before.
    But the deceased Bradley hadn’t voted. Within days, Bradley’s son, also named William Bradley, but with a different middle name, told PolitiFact that he had cast the ballot. That was confirmed by Michigan election officials, who said a clerk had entered the wrong Bradley as having voted. Though the living Bradley had also received an absentee ballot for his father, he said he threw it away, “because I didn’t want to get it confused with mine”.
    The false claim that the deceased Bradley had voted in the 3 November election is one of a barrage of voter fraud conspiracy theories fired off by Trump supporters across the country during recent weeks, and all have been debunked while failing to prove that widespread irregularities exist.
    Instead, the theories often reveal Trump supporters’ fundamental misunderstandings of the election system while creating a game of conspiracy theory whack-a-mole for election officials.
    “We are confident Michigan’s election was fair, secure and transparent, and the results are an accurate reflection of the will of the people,” secretary of state spokesperson Tracy Wimmer told the Guardian.
    Bradley was only one of dozens of allegedly dead Michigan voters who were found to be alive. Trump supporters pointed to Napoleon Township’s Jane Aiken, who they claimed was born in 1900, and cited an obituary as evidence that she was deceased. But the township’s deputy police chief investigated and found the obituary to be for a different Jane Aiken.
    Police told Bridge Magazine that the Aiken who cast the ballot is “94 years old, alive and well. Quite well, actually.”
    Meanwhile, CNN examined records for 50 Michiganders who Trump supporters claim are dead voters. They found 37 were dead and had not voted. Five are alive and had voted, and the remaining eight are also alive but didn’t vote.
    The Michigan secretary of state cited several reasons for confusion. Though election officials across the country purge dead people from voter rolls annually, some are missed and remain as registered voters. Occasionally a worker will accidentally enter a vote by a living person as being cast by a dead person with a similar name.
    The voting software in Michigan also requires a birthday for each voter. If a clerk doesn’t have it, then 1/1/1901 is used as a placeholder until the clerk can find the accurate birthday. Rightwing conspiracy theorists pointed to multiple examples of residents with that birthday voting.
    Among them was Donna Brydges, a 75-year-old Hamlin Township resident. In a phone call with the Associated Press this week, she confirmed she’s alive and passed the phone to her husband so he could do the same. He added: “She’s actually beat me in a game of cribbage.”
    Michigan election officials, “are not aware of a single confirmed case showing that a ballot was actually cast on behalf of a deceased individual,” the secretary of state wrote on its website.
    Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Trump supporters like Representative Matt Gaetz claimed 21,000 dead people in the state “overwhelmingly swung for Biden”.
    In reality, the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation had filed an 15 October federal lawsuit claiming 21,000 dead people were on the rolls, and asked a judge to order them to be removed before the election. A judge found that more than half of the voters had already been removed, questioned PILF’s intentions and methodology, and didn’t require the state to take action.
    The dead voter theory is only one one of the several conspiracies Trump supporters have used to cast doubt on election results.
    In Pennsylvania, a postal worker who claimed to have heard a supervisor directing staff to backdate late-arriving ballots recanted his allegation once he was visited by postal service investigators. In Arizona and Michigan, Trump supporters filed a lawsuit claiming that votes were tossed out because they had used Sharpie markers to fill out their ballot, but quickly dropped it.
    Several viral videos also purported to reveal suspicious activity. In Detroit, Trump supporters claimed a video showed someone bringing late-arriving mail in ballots into a vote-counting center. In reality, it was a WXYZ Detroit cameraman wheeling his equipment in a wagon. Meanwhile, a video that Eric Trump claimed showed 80 Trump ballots being set on fire was proven to be false – the ballots were sample ballots.
    The Trump campaign also claimed that recent federal lawsuits would prove widespread voter fraud with hundreds of pages of testimony from poll watchers and ballot challengers in Michigan. Almost all of them have failed in court so far.
    Though Trump and his supporters have claimed thousands of dead people voted in Michigan, only one allegation was included in the lawsuits. Warren, Michigan resident Anita Chase wrote in an affidavit that her deceased son, Mark D Chase, who had died in July 2016, was marked in the secretary of state’s online voter tool as having voted in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
    But the secretary of state said Anita Chase had identified one of two other Mark D Chases registered to vote in Michigan – a ballot had not been cast in her son’s name. In their response to the affidavits, Detroit election officials lambasted the Trump campaign over such errors: “Most of the objections raised in the submitted affidavits are grounded in an extraordinary failure to understand how elections function.” More

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    Facebook and Twitter CEOs face Senate hearing over handling of 2020 US election – video

    The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook appear before a US Senate hearing to testify about allegations of anti-conservative bias and their handling of the 2020 election. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg face questioning for the second time in as many months, with Republican lawmakers alleging – without evidence – censorship of conservative views
    Twitter and Facebook CEOs testify on alleged anti-conservative bias More

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    Lindsey Graham condemned for allegedly pressuring Georgia to toss out ballots

    Democrats and political observers were quick to condemn the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, after it was reported that he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to exclude ballots in the state’s presidential recount.
    In a tweet, Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar called the alleged approach “insane and illegal”.
    Hakeem Jeffries, a US representative from New York, asked: “Did Lindsey Graham illegally pressure the Georgia secretary of state to rig the election after the fact? The justice department should find out.”
    Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said: “For the chairman of the Senate committee charged with oversight of our legal system to have reportedly suggested that an election official toss out large numbers of legal ballots from American voters is appalling.”
    Graham, from South Carolina, should resign his role as chair of the judiciary committee, Bookbinder said.
    Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Georgia by just under 15,000 votes, the first time the state had gone for a Democrat since 1996. A hand recount was ordered, and is expected to be completed by 20 November.
    It is unlikely to change the result. If it did, the state’s 16 votes would not change the overall result in the electoral college, which Biden won 306-232. The threshold for victory is 270.
    Nonetheless, Trump refuses to concede defeat and continues to peddle debunked conspiracy theories regarding voter fraud and electoral irregularities which election officials from both parties have dismissed as baseless.
    Raffensperger told the Washington Post Graham had indicated he should find ways to toss out legal mail-in ballots.
    “It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.
    Counties administer elections in Georgia, making Raffensperger powerless to do what Graham apparently wanted.
    “It was just an implication of, ‘Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out,’” Raffensperger told CNN.
    Graham told the Hill the claim was “just ridiculous” and that “if he [felt] threatened by that conversation, he’s got a problem.
    “I actually thought it was a good conversation,” the senator said, adding that he was “surprised to hear [Raffensperger] characterized it that way”.
    On Tuesday, Graham said he had spoken to election officials in several battleground states, where a dwindling group of Trump allies continue to push his baseless claims.
    “Yeah, I talked to Arizona, I talked to Nevada,” Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill.
    He was forced to clarify that he had spoken to the Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, not Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state, after she said she had not spoken to Graham.
    Raffensperger has faced mounting criticism from his own party for defending the state’s electoral process. He told the Post he had received threatening messages from “people on [his] side of the aisle”, demanding that he “better not botch” the recount.
    Georgia’s two senators, David Perdue and Kelley Loeffler, have called for his resignation. Both face tight run-off elections.
    Graham’s alleged approach to Raffensperger prompted widespread criticism in the mainstream media.
    Writing for the Post, the conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin asked why Graham “would need to know this information and decide directly to contact Raffensperger.
    “Federal and/or state law enforcement should get to the bottom of this, requiring both parties to the conversation, and any witnesses, to preserve evidence. Graham’s actions have called into question his willingness to uphold the sanctity of elections.” More

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    How Trump’s presidency turned off some Republicans – a visual guide

    After four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, many voters who typically vote Republican turned against him.
    For example, in Winnebago county, Wisconsin, about 72% of voters cast their ballot for the Republican House candidate – either Glenn Grothman or Mike Gallagher, depending on where they live. But just 52% cast their vote for Trump.
    This happened in county after county: Trump performed worse than other Republicans on the ballot. Here’s how Trump performed in each county compared with the Republican House candidate on the same ballot:
    House v Trump 2020 map
    This is why Trump lost the election, but why Republicans gained seats in the House.
    To be clear, Trump also underperformed other Republicans in 2016. But since the last election, the gap between Trump and other Republicans grew in all kinds of communities in the US. In other words, the election wasn’t just about Democrats rejecting Trump by turning out in record numbers. It was also about Republicans and independents who preferred the Republican party – but just without Donald Trump.
    White Republican counties turned away from Trump
    Trump’s appeal in 2016 was especially salient in very white counties, where he actually outperformed Republican House candidates.
    But this time around, Trump underperformed in these areas – and he did even worse everywhere else.
    Race chart
    For example in Christian county, Illinois, where about 95% of the population is white, Trump won about 73% of the votes. But the Republican house candidate, Rodney Davis, did 10 percentage points better.
    Meanwhile, Trump severely underperformed Republican House candidates in places with more people of color, which tend to be metropolitan areas. But these places aren’t a monolith. In fact, in a few areas with more people of color, Trump actually outperformed the House candidate.
    For example, in Zapata county, Texas, a predominantly Hispanic area near the southern border, Trump won with 53% of the votes. But the Republican House candidate, Sandra Whitten, lost by nearly 20 points.
    We can see that distribution in this chart showing how Trump did in every county:

    Still, the overarching takeaway is that even the Republican base in racially homogeneous parts of white America moved away from Trump this election.
    Trump lost ground with Republicans in metropolitan areas
    Metropolitan areas tend to skew Democratic, but there are still a huge number of Republicans. In those areas, Trump underperformed the House candidate with those voters by four points in 2016. This time around, he underperformed by more than 12 points.
    urban/rural chart
    This tracks with the data on how Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Democrats made huge gains in the suburbs of big cities, like Philadelphia and Milwaukee. But not only did they get big turnout there; many Republicans also didn’t vote for Trump.
    Meanwhile, in rural areas Trump actually performed better than he did in 2020.

    But if Republicans are doing electoral math here, just 8 million presidential voters live in what this analysis categorizes as rural counties. Even though Trump won those areas by 3.5 million votes, it’s only a fraction of the amount by which Trump underperformed in more populous areas.
    Trump did far worse than Republicans down-ballot in areas with more college degrees
    One of the biggest determinants of how an area voted was the portion of the population that has a college degree.
    In places with more degrees, Trump largely kept up with ballot Republicans in 2016. In 2020, that gap widened.
    Education chart
    For example in Madison county, Mississippi – a Jackson suburb where nearly half the residents over 25 have college degrees – Trump won 58% of the vote. But the Republican House candidates in the county got 73% of the vote.
    Meanwhile, in the parts of America with the lowest rate of college degrees, Trump did quite well compared with the Republican House candidate. In fact, in the majority of these counties, which tend to be more rural, Trump actually outperformed down-ballot Republicans.

    One caveat of this analysis is that it uses county-level data, which means some of the nuances in larger counties are left unexplored. These metropolitan areas are categorized as having more college degrees. But these areas also have high levels of inequality, which means there are also a lot of people who don’t have high-school diplomas.
    Trump may have less appeal – but Trumpism isn’t gone
    This data hardly means Trumpism is fading away in the party.
    After all, Trump is trying to stage a coup by insisting he won an election that he clearly lost – and many Republicans officials are staying silent or parroting his argument. In addition, 70% of Republicans agree with Trump and they say the election was not “free and fair” despite no evidence backing up this claim.
    Still, what this means is that four years of Trump pushed away a significant swath of Republican and independent voters.
    So how do Republicans perform without Trump on the ballot? The first test will be in the Georgia special elections in January which will determine the balance of the US Senate. Even though Trump lost Georgia by a few thousand votes, both House and Senate Republicans outperformed Trump – and could do so by even bigger margins in the special election without Trump weighing them down. More