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    Donald Trump's malignant spell could soon be broken | Jonathan Freedland

    Barring a twist inconceivable even by the standards of 2020, we will soon know the result of the US presidential election – and it will almost certainly be a cause for rejoicing. Donald Trump, the man who has haunted the world’s dreams and sparked a thousand nightmares, has all but lost. On 20 January 2021, he will probably leave the White House – or be removed if necessary. The Trump presidency, a shameful chapter in the history of the republic, will soon be over.
    True, it is taking longer than we might have liked. There was to be no swift moment of euphoria and elation, an unambiguous landslide announced on election night with a drumroll and fireworks display. Instead, thanks to a pandemic that meant two in three Democrats voted by slower-to-count mail-in ballots, it’s set to be a win in increments, a verdict delivered in slow motion. Nor was there the hoped-for “blue wave” that might have carried the Democrats to a majority in the US Senate (though there is, just, a way that could yet happen). As a result, it will be hard for Joe Biden to do what so urgently needs to be done, whether that’s tackling the climate crisis, racial injustice, economic inequality, America’s parlous infrastructure or its dysfunctional and vulnerable electoral machinery. And it is glumly true that even if Trump is banished from the Oval Office, Trumpism will live on in the United States.
    And yet none of that should obscure the main event that has taken place this week. It’s a form of progressive masochism to search for the defeat contained in a victory. Because a victory is what this will be.
    Recall the shock and disgust that millions – perhaps billions – have felt these past four years, as Trump sank to ever lower depths. When he was ripping children from their parents and keeping them in cages; when he was blithely exchanging “love letters” with the murderous thug that rules the slave state of North Korea; when he was coercing Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, or else lose the funds it needed to defend itself against Vladimir Putin, the high crime for which he was impeached; when he was denying the reality of the coronavirus, insisting it would just melt away, thereby leaving more than 235,000 Americans to their fate and their deaths – when he was doing all that, what did his opponents long for? The wish, sometimes uttered to the heavens, was not complicated: they wanted Trump’s defeat and ejection from power. Few attached the rider that it would only count if the Democrats could also pick up a Senate seat in North Carolina.
    Nor does it seem as though any defeat for Trump will be tentative or partial, even if the delayed result might make it feel that way. Joe Biden crushed him in this contest. He beat him in the popular vote by a huge margin, four million at last count, with that figure only growing as the final result is tallied. Yes, in a high-turnout election, Trump got more votes than he did in 2016 – but Biden got more votes than any presidential candidate in history, more even than the once-in-a-generation phenomenon that was Barack Obama.
    What’s more, Biden looks to have done something extremely difficult and vanishingly rare, taking on and defeating a first-term president. That would ensure that Donald Trump becomes only the third elected president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to try and fail to win re-election. Trump would take his place alongside Jimmy Carter and George Bush the elder in the small club of rejected, one-term presidents. As it happens, both those men were gracious in defeat and admirable in retirement, but Trump won’t see them that way. He’ll regard them as stone-cold losers. And he’s about to be one of them, his place taken by a decent, empathic man with the first ever female vice-president at his side.
    It’s worth bearing all that in mind when you hear the predictable complaints that Biden was too “centrist”, or that Bernie Sanders would have done better. It could be argued that Biden outperformed the rest of his party, pulling ahead even as Democrats lost seats in the House and failed to make great gains in the Senate. Note that Trump’s prime attack line – that “far left” Democrats were itching to impose “socialism” on America – cut through in this campaign, clearly alarming Cuban and Venezuelan voters in Florida, for example. But it was a hard label to stick on a lifelong pragmatist like Joe Biden: most Americans just didn’t buy it.
    What it adds up to is not perhaps the across-the-board repudiation of Trump and the congressional Republicans who enabled him these past four years. But it does count as an emphatic rejection of what Trump did as a first-term president – and, if it holds, the prevention of all the horror he would have unleashed if he had won a second.
    It means that a majority of Americans have said no to the constant stream of insults, abuse and lies – more than 22,000 since Trump took office, according to the Washington Post. They have said no to a man who was a misinformation super-spreader, who called journalists “enemies of the people” and denounced inconvenient truths as “fake news”. They have said no to a man who suggested people should guard against Covid by injecting themselves with disinfectant; who dismissed science in favour of Fox News; who dismissed the word of his own intelligence agencies, preferring conspiracy theories picked up on Twitter.
    They have said no to a president who saw white supremacists and neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville in 2017, and declared that they included some “very fine people”. They have said no to a man who referred to one black congresswoman as “low IQ” and suggested four others, all US citizens, should “go back home”. They have said no to the man who refused to disavow the far-right groups who worship him, telling those racist extremists instead to “stand back and stand by”. They have said no to the man who trashed America’s allies, who withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement, and who grovelled to every strongman and dictator on the planet.
    The next few weeks will be perilous. Trump will not concede; he will continue to deny the legitimacy of this result. His performance on Thursday night was perhaps his lowest and darkest yet, groundlessly telling Americans they could have no faith in their most solemn democratic rite: the election of a president. As he leaves, he will scorch the earth and poison the soil.
    But all of that is to remind us why it was so essential, for America and the world, that he be defeated. And why, even though it may have arrived slowly and without the fanfare so many of us wanted, this will be a moment to savour. A dark force is being expelled from the most powerful office in the world – and at long last, we can glimpse the light.
    • Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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    Donald Trump's baseless vote fraud claim opens cracks in Republican ranks

    [embedded content]
    In his Wednesday evening address, an increasingly desperate Donald Trump continued his assault on the democratic process by lying about widespread voter fraud.
    “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” he told the nation.
    But it’s now clear that some in his party aren’t buying it. Almost immediately, current and former GOP elected officials blasted the president for sowing discord and lying about the ballot counting process.
    The Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger tweeted that the president’s lying “is getting insane” and pleaded with his party to “STOP Spreading debunked misinformation”.
    Meanwhile, the Texas congressman Will Hurd tweeted: “Every American should have his or her vote counted.”
    “A sitting president undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous & wrong, it undermines the very foundation this nation was built upon,” he wrote.
    A clear division line is emerging in the GOP – while sycophants like the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, and the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, have continued to parrot the president’s false claims, many are breaking with Trump.
    That includes the revered GOP strategist Karl Rove, who on Wednesday morning said the mass fraud that Trump is alleging “isn’t going to happen” in America.
    “Some hanky-panky always goes on, and there are already reports of poll watchers in Philadelphia not being allowed to do their jobs,” Rove said. “But stealing hundreds of thousands of votes would require a conspiracy on the scale of a James Bond movie. That isn’t going to happen. Let’s repeat that: that isn’t going to happen.”
    While Republican rebukes of the president are refreshing for many Democrats, it only comes as Trump’s re-election campaign appears doomed. Biden took the lead in Georgia hours after the Wednesday address, and the Democratic challenger is on pace to flip Pennsylvania.
    As the president concluded his speech, former representative Carlos Curbelo called for “Republicans to stand up for our democracy at this hour”.

    Carlos Curbelo
    (@carloslcurbelo)
    By “illegal votes” it seems @potus is referring to votes cast by mail which disproportionately benefitted his opponent this election. Those votes are not in any way illegal. Important for all public leaders, especially Republicans, to stand up for our democracy at this hour.

    November 5, 2020

    Still, in Michigan, Trump supporters alleging fraud on Thursday marched outside Detroit’s TCF Center where ballots were counted the day before. Meanwhile, the Trump acolyte and Senate candidate John James is refusing to concede in his apparent loss to Senator Gary Peters, and is demanding an investigation.
    But as Republicans baselessly claim fraud publicly, at least one GOP official involved in the ballot counting process has said behind closed doors that voter fraud isn’t an issue. Stuart Foster, a top state Republican official who trained ballot challengers in Michigan, told trainees just days ahead of the election that he was “confident with our election system”.
    Foster can be heard making the comments in a recording of the training session leaked to the Guardian.
    “I’ll get myself into trouble here. I basically made the comment like, so if fraud was so prevalent, then did the Democrats forget to do it in 2016? They just forgot to do it?” he said. “I mean, Trump … barely won. And it’s not because he didn’t win. [Democrats] just didn’t show up. Did they just forget? Fraud was so prevalent, but they just forgot to do it?”
    Other Republicans in the state are now publicly breaking with the administration. Congressman Paul Mitchell insisted that every vote should be counted.
    “Anything less harms the integrity of our elections and is dangerous for our democracy,” he said. More

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    When will we know the US election result – and why the delay?

    Donald Trump’s repeated claims to have won the US presidential election while votes remain to be counted have focused the spotlight once more on one of the big uncertainties of the 2020 race: when will we know the final result?
    It could take days, weeks or even months, depending on what happens.

    What usually happens?
    US presidential elections are not won by the national popular vote. The winner in each state collects its electoral college votes – and needs a total of 270 to take the White House.
    In most elections the result is clear – although not officially confirmed – by the end of the night. Major American media outlets “call” each state for one of the candidates. While not based on the final vote count, that projection is almost invariably accurate.
    This means an accurate tally of electoral college votes can be made and a winner declared. In 2016, that happened at 2.30am in Washington when Trump reached the required 270.
    Why is that not happening this time?
    Mainly because of the Covid-19 pandemic, large numbers of voters – about 68% of the total, compared with 34% in 2016 – cast their ballots early, including by post.
    Counting postal votes is slower because voter and witness signatures and addresses must be checked, and ballots smoothed out before being fed into counting machines. Some states start that verification process long before election day, meaning the count itself can get under way as soon as polls close.
    There was no early processing in multiple key battleground states this year, however, because Republican-led state legislatures refused urgent requests from local elections officials to pass new laws to allow extra time for ballot processing. Such a refusal in Pennsylvania produced enormous backlogs in cities such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, which has gone from counting about 6,000 mail-in ballots in 2016 to more than 350,000 this year.
    Which states are we talking about?
    Five states have yet to be called: Alaska, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Several news organizations, including the Associated Press and Fox News’ decision desk, have called Arizona for Joe Biden. The Trump campaign is arguing, however, that call was made too early.
    Alaska will end up in the Republican column with near certainty.
    The race is extremely tight in Georgia. Biden pulled ahead of Trump by 1,097 votes on Friday morning, with 99% of votes reported, according to Edison.
    The Democratic challenger is ahead in Nevada, with only Democratic-leaning late postal ballots left to tally. But by state law, ballots postmarked on election day can be counted as long as they are received by 5pm on 10 November, which means counting in the state could continue through the weekend.
    In North Carolina, while Trump is the clear favourite, the state accepts postal ballots until 12 November – although that is expected to make little difference. State officials have said a full result would not be known until next week.
    Biden took the lead in Pennsylvania on Friday morning. He’s been winning the mail-in ballot counts by huge margins, and could very well take the state. Pennsylvania officials say they expect most votes will be counted by later on Friday.
    What else is complicating matters?
    Roughly half of all states will accept postal votes that arrive after election day as long as they carry a postmark of no later than 3 November, so postal delays may mean some ballots are not processed until days later: Pennsylvania has said results will not be considered complete until the deadline of Friday.
    There has also reportedly been an increase in the number of provisional ballots cast by people who asked for a postal vote but then decided to go to the polling station in person instead. These need careful checking to make sure no one has voted twice.

    The really big unknown: a disputed result
    In the 2000 race, the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, famously lost Florida by just more than 500 votes out of a total of nearly 6m, costing him the election. After a disputed recount and a supreme court ruling, George W Bush was declared the winner.
    More than 300 lawsuits have already been filed over alleged breaches of electoral law in the 2020 election, according to reports, and more can be expected over accusations of postal voting irregularities and changes to voting rules due to the pandemic.
    Trump and his campaign have this week already sued to halt vote-counting in Pennsylvania and Georgia (which have not yet been called by Associated Press) and Michigan, which the AP called for Biden. Judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly dismissed the campaign’s lawsuits on Thursday.
    Trump’s campaign has also requested a recount in Wisconsin, which AP called for Biden.
    There is no evidence the campaign’s legal challenges will have a bearing on the election result under the law. More

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    Trump, McCain, Bush and Carter: different reactions to bad election results – video

    Speeches from candidates conceding defeat in past US elections have been resurfacing after Donald Trump’s latest address as the 2020 result looms. Speaking from the White House on Thursday, Trump falsely referred to legally cast mail-in ballots as illegitimate, and made unsubstantiated claims that pollsters got results ‘knowingly wrong’ and that the election was being stolen
    Trump doubles down on false election result claims as Biden calls for calm
    US election live coverage More

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    ‘The risks are now off the table’: Wall Street looks forward to Biden presidency

    Wall Street is supposed to hate uncertainty but as the fight over the presidential contest continues, investors couldn’t be happier.
    If, as appears likely, Joe Biden wins, he will become the first president since George HW Bush to enter office without control of both the House and Senate – an outcome that indicates at least two years of legislative gridlock.
    It’s a scenario Wall Street appears to love. One that may give Republicans in the Senate little incentive to enact a new, larger coronavirus stimulus package that Democrats have hoped for and the power to block tax increases, big spending programs and tougher regulations.
    Stocks jumped again on Thursday, the first time since 1982 that the Dow and S&P 500 rose at least 1% on four straight sessions, giving the stock indices their biggest weekly gains since April, with the Dow up 7.1% week, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq up 7.4% and 9% in the week to date.
    Oliver Jones, senior markets economist at Capital Economics, told the Guardian: “There’s definitely some relief that things like tougher tax policy, tougher corporate reforms look to be off the table without Democrats having more control over Congress.
    “Essentially, it’s going to look more like a continuation of the status quo, which is the outcome favoured by most firms,” Jones added.
    Brad McMillan, chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial Network, attributed some of the gains to the election’s smooth running and, notwithstanding legal challenges, the likelihood of an imminent outcome.
    Looking forward, McMillan told the Guardian, markets were encouraged by prospects that a Biden administration’s more progressive, high spending proposals are less likely to get through a politically split legislature.
    “Biden’s economic plan included substantial new corporate taxes and capital gains taxes, all of which would have been very disruptive to the market,” McMillan said. “The risks from a blue wave and a Green New Deal are now off the table.”
    Wharton professor of finance Jeremy Siegel also welcomed the result, even as the final outcome of the presidential election remained unresolved. “Truthfully that combination is excellent for the economy and it’s excellent for the markets,” Siegel told CNBC on Wednesday
    Market enthusiasm for a split government has historical roots going back decades. In 2018, after voters handed control of the lower chamber to Democrats in the midterm elections, markets soared.
    “The better-performing periods are periods where the houses were split in terms of leadership,” financial adviser Mellody Hobson noted at the time.
    Since Tuesday, markets have also been buoyed by the prospect of government infrastructure spending that could also pump billions of taxpayer dollars into an overhaul of the nation’s energy and transportation systems.
    For big tech, which is facing antitrust investigations under the Trump administration, the political scenario could also be rosy. Ahead of the election, FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) stocks, in particular, showed jitters after months of impressive pandemic gains.
    “The Street appears to have gotten the ‘Goldilocks election outcome’ for tech stocks with no ‘blue wave’ expected (Senate staying red) and a likely Biden White House now on the horizon,” said Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities in an investors note on Thursday.
    “With the Republicans likely to control the Senate, the chances of major legislative changes to antitrust law now is off the table in the eyes of investors which posed the biggest risks to tech stalwarts with a ripple impact across the sector,” Ives added.
    Ives said the likely election outcome was a “green light to buy tech stocks” and predicted that big tech stocks could rally another 10% to 15% into year-end. “We continue to be bullish on owning the secular growth stories for 2021,” he wrote. More

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    CNN’s John King and his ‘magic wall’ keep viewers entranced

    As the US election has dragged on and people remain glued to their screens, a new type of celebrity has emerged: the results analyst. And none has been more popular than CNN’s John King.
    King, CNN’s chief national correspondent since 2005, has been a nearly constant presence for viewers, fronting the broadcaster’s “magic wall” tirelessly through the week.
    With the coronavirus pandemic leading to vastly more postal votes, which take longer to process than in-person ballots, analysts such as King and MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki have become the must-watch stars of the small screen. The Los Angeles Times has said King’s indefatigable efforts and insight have made him the election’s “MVP”.
    King, who said he managed just two-and-a-half hours’ sleep on election night and four hours on Wednesday, has fronted The Wall at every election since 2008. A giant interactive touchscreen that allows CNN anchors to see up-to-date voting detail by district and to analyse every possible voting permutation, The Wall has come into its own as this year’s vote count drags on.
    The 59-year old has fronted The Wall for 12- to 14-hour shifts on-screen, dissecting updates county by county and state by state, and informing viewers of the changing “pathways” for Donald Trump and Joe Biden to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to make it to the White House. More

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    Biden takes lead in Pennsylvania and Georgia as he inches closer to beating Trump

    Joe Biden, the US Democratic presidential challenger, has reached what appears to be a tipping point in the contest for the White House, taking the lead in Pennsylvania and Georgia as the tally of postal ballots continued to skew heavily in the Democrat’s favour.
    With a Biden victory looking assured, CNN reported that a “national defence airspace” would be established above the Democratic candidate’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, meaning he would begin to receive the protection of the US military, the first trappings of the presidency.
    But a smooth transfer of power still looked far from certain. Donald Trump and a handful of loyalists continued to allege election fraud, without any evidence. Biden was reported to be seeking to rally prominent figures from both parties to endorse the legitimacy of the election, at a nervous moment for US democracy.
    After whittling down a substantial lead for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on election night, Biden’s vote count passed the president just before 9am, building up a narrow edge of 6,737. Many of the roughly 130,000 votes yet to be counted in the state are in Democratic areas, and Democrats make up a disproportional share of postal ballots.
    Winning Pennsylvania would also win the presidency, no matter what happens in the other states remaining undecided, but Biden also had the advantage there.
    In the early hours of Friday morning in the US, Biden had moved to a 1,096-vote advantage in Georgia with thousands of ballots still left to be counted – many in counties where the former vice-president was in the lead.
    The Georgia secretary of state reported late on Thursday there were about 10,000 ballots still to be counted in the state, a must-win for Trump in order to keep any chances of re-election alive in the race for the 270 electoral college votes that will determine the presidency.
    Biden’s lead over Trump in the nationwide popular vote stretched to over 4m, as he amassed a record 73.7m, but the president’s tally of 69.7m was the second highest in US political history – reflecting the fact that while Trump seemed doomed to defeat, Trumpism will remain very much a force.
    As Biden closed in on victory on Thursday night, he urged calm after an inflammatory and falsehood-filled Trump address from the White House where the president once again claimed he had won.
    The latest voting figures accelerated increasingly frantic efforts by Trump and his campaign to undermine confidence in the election, threatening a rash of litigation amid unfounded claims of election rigging.
    “This is a case when they are trying to steal an election, they are trying to rig an election,” Trump said from the podium of the White House briefing room.

    “If you count the legal votes, I easily win, Trump wrongly claimed. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.
    “If you count the votes that came in late, we’re looking at them very strongly, a lot of votes came in late,” he said.
    Several TV networks cut away during his remarks, with anchors saying they needed to correct his statements. However, two loyalist senators, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas, appeared on Fox News to echo Trump’s claims, in the absence of evidence that illegal or late votes were being counted, or that the election is being stolen. Graham whose loyalty had been questioned on Twitter by the president’s son, Don Jr, pledged $500,000 towards the president’s legal fees.
    Reports from inside the White House said the president had no plans to concede the election even after the votes are fully counted.
    From his Delaware headquarters Biden sought to project national leadership, beginning his remarks by talking about the surging coronavirus infection rates, and appealed for patience with the electoral process, after it emerged the US Secret Service was sending extra officers to Delaware to join his security detail.
    “I ask everyone to stay calm. The process is working,” Biden said. “It is the will of the voters – no one, not anyone else – who chooses the president of the United States of America.”
    In the south-west, Biden maintains slim advantages in Arizona and Nevada. In Arizona, his lead narrowed to about 47,000 early on Friday and in Nevada he was ahead by about 11,500 votes.
    Trump had seen his lead steadily shrink in Georgia, a southern state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton in 1992, as officials worked through tens of thousands of uncounted votes, many from Democratic strongholds such as Atlanta.
    While Biden’s victories in the upper midwest put him in a strong position, Trump showed no sign of giving up. He was back on Twitter at about 2.30am on Friday, insisting the “US Supreme Court should decide!”.
    While many high-profile Republicans have not commented on Trump’s latest remarks, several GOP lawmakers denounced his baseless allegations about fraud, with Paul Mitchell, a Michigan congressman, saying that every vote would be counted, adding that “anything less harms the integrity of our elections and is dangerous for our democracy”.
    Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois GOP congressman, tweeted: “Stop spreading debunked misinformation … This is getting insane.” More

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    Trump's last-ditch US election lawsuits not going well for president, experts say

    Donald Trump’s campaign has filed a slew of last-ditch lawsuits this week in what seems to be a clear effort to try to drag out vote counting and create a cloud of uncertainty over an election he is on the verge of losing. But legal experts have noted that the lawsuits appear to be long shots and even if successful, they would not change the outcome of the race.
    The Trump campaign is taking legal action in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada – all battleground states Trump has either lost (such as the state of Michigan) or faces a tough fight to win. In each case, his campaign has loudly trumpeted the filings of suits with allegations that include counting late-arriving ballots, campaign observers not having adequate access to poll counting, and invalid votes being tabulated.
    So far, the legal battle is not going well. The Trump campaign lost two suits on Thursday in Michigan and Georgia.
    “They all seem to have no merit whatsoever,” said Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who focuses on elections. “I think the goal is to sow discord and distrust and undermine the people and the integrity of the election. I think giving them additional air time just plays into that theory.”
    Trump has repeatedly called for halting the vote counting process as Joe Biden continues to close in on Trump’s vote totals in Pennsylvania and Georgia. The totals are shifting because Democrats overwhelmingly voted by mail. Counting those votes can take longer than processing in-person votes because election officials have to verify information on ballot envelopes and then physically remove them from their envelopes before they are counted. In Pennsylvania, officials were prohibited by state law from starting to count ballots until election day, leading to a lengthy count.
    On Thursday, Trump’s campaign also announced a suit in Nevada over alleged irregular votes, but it offered no concrete evidence for its claims. The campaign also lost in two of the suits it filed. In Georgia, a judge dismissed a case in Chatham county in which the campaign alleged 53 ballots that missed the deadline to be counted were mingled with valid ballots (the campaign did not have evidence the small group of ballots actually arrived late and election officials testified the ballots arrived on time).
    In Michigan, a judge dismissed a suit from the campaign that alleged poll observers were not being given “meaningful access” to ballot counting and that campaign observers should be given recorded video footage of drop boxes. The judge said there was not a legal basis requiring officials to turn over surveillance footage and that the state had already issued an order requiring observer access, according to the Detroit Free Press. The judge also said officials had already completed counting, so the request was moot.
    [embedded content]
    “It could be reflex. On most people, if you hit their patellar tendon with a small rubber mallet, you get a knee jerk. With Trump, it’s possible that if you hit his patellar tendon with a small rubber mallet, you get a lawsuit,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
    “It could be a misguided sense that this sort of litigation will cast enough doubt on the election process that it somehow ends up in a declaration by the courts that undoes the will of the people (in the event that the count doesn’t go his way),” he added. “I think there are a lot of missing steps between filing a lawsuit and that final declaration.”
    Bob Bauer, a top election attorney for Joe Biden’s campaign, told reporters Trump’s suits were part of an effort to “create an opportunity for them to message falsely about what’s taking place in the electoral process”.
    Republicans on Thursday also withdrew a case challenging how certain mail-in ballots were handled in a suburban Philadelphia county. The case appeared focused on just 98 votes, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Republicans appeared poised to lose.
    Losses aside, the Trump campaign did secure an order in Philadelphia allowing observers to get closer to workers counting ballots. The decision led to a dramatic appearance by two top Trump campaign surrogates, Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, and Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager.
    Standing in front of Trump supporters waving campaign flags and holding signs that said “voting ends on election day”, the two held up a printed copy of the order and announced they were going inside for access. Counting in the convention center briefly stopped while election officials figured out how to accommodate the order, then resumed, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
    Despite lack of evidence, the messaging has hit home with some Trump supporters, who have been showing up to demonstrations at election centers across the country. One of the supporters standing outside the convention center was Elio Forcina, who traveled to Philadelphia from New York City and said he didn’t trust the local elections officials to conduct an accurate count. (There’s no evidence of fraud and officials have not reported irregularities.)
    “There’s no way of actually counting whether or not the mail-in votes are correct,” he said, even though officials have numerous procedures in place to verify ballots.
    Philadelphia officials appealed the observer decision to the state supreme court and the Trump campaign later filed a separate suit in federal court alleging they were still being denied access and asking a judge to enforce the order. But in court, a lawyer for the campaign admitted that observers had been granted access, prompting the judge to reportedly ask: “I’m sorry, then what’s your problem?”
    Douglas noted that even if the Trump campaign won its effort to increase observer access to the count, there still was not evidence of fraud or wrongdoing.
    “That’s great to have people observing the process. If it took a court order to have that kind of transparency, OK,” said Douglas. “That doesn’t mean there’s something nefarious going on that we should be concerned about.” More