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      'It has to stop': Georgia Republican says Trump's election rhetoric will lead to violence – video

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      Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling, has criticised President Donald Trump for not condemning threats of violence against election workers in the state. Sterling, a Republican official who oversees voting systems in Georgia, called on Trump at a news conference to ‘stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence’. He warned that ‘someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed, and it’s not right’William Barr: no evidence of voter fraud that would change election outcomeBarr says no evidence of fraud that would change US election outcome – live Continue reading… More

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      William Barr: no evidence of voter fraud that would change election outcome

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      William Barr said on Tuesday the US Department of Justice has not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.The attorney general’s comments come despite Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the election was stolen, and his refusal to concede to President-elect Joe Biden.Shortly after the comments were made public, the White House pool report said the attorney general had been seen to enter the building.Trump did not immediately comment. But campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in a statement: “With the greatest respect to the Attorney General, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud.”Barr made his comments in an interview with the Associated Press. US attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up complaints and information, he said, but have uncovered no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said.Barr has been one of the president’s most ardent allies. Before the election, he repeatedly raised the notion that mail-in voting could be vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans feared going to polls.Last month, Barr issued a directive to US attorneys allowing them to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the election was certified, despite no evidence at that time of widespread fraud.That memorandum gave prosecutors the ability to go around department policy. Soon after it was issued, the department’s top elections crime official announced he would step aside because of the memo.A Trump team led by Giuliani has been alleging a widespread conspiracy by Democrats to dump millions of illegal votes into the system – with no evidence.They have filed multiple lawsuits in battleground states alleging that partisan poll watchers did not have a clear enough view in some locations and therefore something illegal must have happened.The claims have been repeatedly dismissed including by Republican-appointed judges. Republicans in some battleground states have followed Trump in making unsupported claims.Trump has railed against the election though his own administration has said it was the most secure ever. He recently allowed his administration to begin the transition to Biden, but has still refused to admit he lost.The issues Trump’s campaign and its allies have pointed to are typical in elections: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots to be miscast or lost.Attorney Sidney Powell has spun fictional tales of election systems flipping votes, German servers storing US voting information and election software created in Venezuela “at the direction of Hugo Chávez” – the Venezuelan president who died in 2013.Powell was removed from the Trump team after threatening to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” court filing.Barr said: “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the [Department of Homeland Security] and DoJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”Barr said people were confusing the use of the federal criminal justice system with allegations that should be made in civil lawsuits. He said a remedy for such complaints would be a top-down audit by state or local officials, not the DoJ.“There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all, and people don’t like something they want the Department of Justice to come in and ‘investigate’,” Barr said.He said first of all there must be a basis to believe there is a crime to investigate.“Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations and those have been run down; they are being run down,” Barr said. “Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. They have been followed up on.”Giuliani and Ellis insisted they had “gathered ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states” and had “many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud”.“As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DoJ,” they said, adding: “Nonetheless, we will continue our pursuit of the truth through the judicial system and state legislatures.” More

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      Trump lawyer: ex-election security chief Krebs should be 'taken out and shot'

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      Joe DiGenova condemned for ‘mob attorney’ remark made on podcast shown on conservative Newsmax TVUS politics – live coverageA former head of US election security who said Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden was not subject to voter fraud should be “taken out at dawn and shot”, a Trump campaign lawyer said. Related: Trump’s fraud claims undermine democracy, ex-US election security chief says Continue reading… More

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      Wisconsin and Arizona certify Biden wins in yet another blow to Trump

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      Joe Biden’s victories in the US presidential election battlegrounds of Arizona and Wisconsin were officially recognised on Monday, handing Donald Trump six defeats out of six in his bid to stop states certifying their results.The finalised vote counts took Biden a step closer to the White House and dealt yet another blow to Trump’s longshot efforts to undermine the outcome.The certification in Wisconsin followed a partial recount that only added to Biden’s nearly 20,700-vote margin over Trump, who has promised to file a lawsuit seeking to undo the results.“Today I carried out my duty to certify the November 3rd election,” Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, said in a statement. “I want to thank our clerks, election administrators, and poll workers across our state for working tirelessly to ensure we had a safe, fair, and efficient election. Thank you for all your good work.”Trump is mounting a desperate campaign to overturn the results by disqualifying as many as 238,000 ballots in the state, and his attorneys have alleged without evidence that there was widespread fraud and illegal activity.Trump paid $3m for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties, the two largest Democratic counties in Wisconsin, but the recount ended up increasing Biden’s lead by 74 votes.Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, said in a statement on Monday: “There’s no basis at all for any assertion that there was widespread fraud that would have affected the results.”Kaul noted that Trump’s recount targeted only the state’s two most populous counties, where the majority of Black people live. “I have every confidence that this disgraceful Jim Crow strategy for mass disenfranchisement of voters will fail. An election isn’t a game of gotcha.”And even if Trump were successful in Wisconsin, where he beat Hillary Clinton four years ago, the state’s 10 electoral college votes would not be enough to undo Biden’s overall victory, as states around the country certify results declaring him the winner.Trump’s legal challenges have also failed in other battleground states, including Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. States are required to certify their results before the electoral college meets on 14 December.Earlier on Monday, Arizona officials certified Biden’s narrow victory in that state. Biden won by about 11,000 votes, a slim margin, although a significant victory nonetheless as in past election cycles Arizona has trended reliably toward Republicans. The 2020 election is over again, with certifications today in Arizona and Wisconsin. After last week’s certifications in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. all of the states where Trump has launched spurious claims against the outcome have now certified Biden’s victory.— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) November 30, 2020
      Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, and Republican governor, Doug Ducey, both vouched for the integrity of the election before signing off on the results.“We do elections well here in Arizona. The system is strong,” Ducey said.Hobbs said Arizona voters should know that the election “was conducted with transparency, accuracy and fairness in accordance with Arizona’s laws and election procedures, despite numerous unfounded claims to the contrary”.Biden is only the second Democrat in 70 years to win Arizona. In the final tally, he beat Trump by 10,457 votes, or 0.3% of the nearly 3.4m ballots cast.Even as Hobbs, Ducey, the state attorney general and chief justice of the state supreme court certified the election results, Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis met in a Phoenix hotel ballroom a few miles away to lay out claims of irregularities in the vote count in Arizona and elsewhere. But they did not provide evidence of widespread fraud.Trump phoned into the meeting and described the election the “greatest scam ever perpetrated against our country”. When he mentioned Ducey’s name, the crowd booed. He accused the governor of “rushing to sign” papers certifying Democratic wins, adding: “Arizona won’t forget what Ducey just did.”Trump also berated Ducey on Twitter, asking: “Why is he rushing to put a Democrat in office, especially when so many horrible things concerning voter fraud are being revealed at the hearing going on right now.”For his part, Ducey, who has previously said his phone’s ringtone for calls from the White House is “Hail to the Chief”, was seen in a viral video clip receiving a call with that ringtone but rejecting it without answering.Trump’s denials of political reality have left him increasingly isolated as a growing number of Republicans acknowledge the transition and Biden moves ahead with naming appointments to his administration.There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. In fact, election officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities.Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told CBS’s 60 Minutes programme on Sunday: “There is no foreign power that is flipping votes. There’s no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.” More

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      Trump losing Twitter followers since election – as Biden gains them

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      Donald Trump has been losing Twitter followers since he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden – while the Democratic president-elect has been adding them.According to Factbase, a website dedicated to tracking Trump’s public utterances, the president has lost 133,902 followers since 17 November while the president-elect has gained 1,156,610.In a Sunday tweet, CNN host and media reporter Brian Stelter said that while Twitter followers were “surely not the most important metric in the world”, it was “still worth noting: for the first time since 2015, Trump is consistently losing followers”.Factbase, he pointed out, had “measured small declines for 11 days in a row”.Trump has 88.8 million followers, to whom he continues to tweet baseless claims of electoral fraud and all-out conspiracy theories surrounding his loss to Biden.His most recent message at the time of writing accompanied video of a crowd at a rally and said: “NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION!”Trump has complained about his treatment by Twitter, alleging it is biased against conservatives. Many observers expect that once he leaves office, the site will stop giving him the benefit of the doubt regarding his false and inflammatory messages.Biden has 20.2 million followers.On Monday morning, his most recent message read: “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, and listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” More

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      Trump's claims of fraud aim to 'scare people', says ex-head of US election security

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      Donald Trump and his allies are “undermining democracy” with evidence-free claims of fraud and conspiracy, the former head of US election security said on Sunday, discussing the effort he led before he was fired by the president.“What I saw was an apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people,” Chris Krebs told CBS 60 Minutes.Trump called the interview “ridiculous, one-sided [and] an international joke”, as he continued to tweet conspiracy theories and baseless claims of electoral malpractice.Trump lost the electoral college to Joe Biden by 306-232, the result he said was a landslide when it was in his favour over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden is more than 6m ahead in the popular vote and won the support of more than 80m Americans, the most of any presidential candidate.Trump belatedly allowed the transition to proceed but has not conceded defeat, despite his team having won one election-related lawsuit and lost 39.Relaying baseless claims to reporters over the Thanksgiving holiday, the president did say he will leave the White House if the electoral college is confirmed for Biden. It votes on 14 December, a result certified on 6 January. Inauguration day is 20 January.Krebs, 43, was fired as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) two weeks after election day. Two days after that, at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani gave a press conference in which he and then team member Sidney Powell pushed Trump’s false claims.“It was upsetting,” Krebs told CBS.“It’s not me, it’s not just Cisa. It’s the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working nonstop, 18-hour days, for months. They’re getting death threats for trying to carry out one of our core democratic institutions, an election. And that was, again, to me, a press conference that … didn’t make sense. What it was actively doing was undermining democracy. And that’s dangerous.”Trump tweeted in response, part of a stream of Sunday night messages.“There is no foreign power that is flipping votes,” Krebs said. “There’s no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.”Claims by Trump lawyers of interference from Venezuela or China were “farcical”, he said, adding: “The American people should have 100% confidence in their vote.”Polling, however, shows a majority of Republicans believe the president. Krebs defended state officials who Trump, and subsequently his supporters, have targeted.“It’s in my view a travesty what’s happening right now with all these death threats to election officials, to secretaries of state,” Krebs said.“I want everybody to look at Secretary [Kathy] Boockvar in Pennsylvania, Secretary [Jocelyn] Benson in Michigan, Secretary [Barbara] Cegavske in Nevada, Secretary [Katie] Hobbs in Arizona. All strong women that are standing up, that are under attack from all sides, and they’re defending democracy. They’re doing their jobs.“Look Secretary [Brad] Raffensperger in Georgia. Lifelong Republican. He put country before party in his holding a free and fair election in that state. There are some real heroes out there. There are some real patriots.” More

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      Five factors that helped US democracy resist Trump's election onslaught

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      [embedded content]
      It is not clear yet whether US democracy “survived” the 2020 presidential election unscathed.
      If Donald Trump’s playbook of seeking to undermine a legitimate election becomes standard Republican practice for future elections – refuse to concede, make false claims of fraud, fan the flames of conspiracy, sue everywhere and refuse to certify any win by the other side – then American democracy might already have sustained a fatal wound.
      But Trump has not succeeded in stealing the 2020 election, despite his historic attempt to do so, in what analysts call the most dangerous frontal assault on US democracy since the civil war era. The two states upon which Trump’s plot most hinged, Pennsylvania and Michigan, certified their results in Joe Biden’s favor earlier this week. The presidential transition is at last under way.
      But while the election exposed key areas where American democracy is failing, it also highlighted structural features that make national elections in the United States hard to steal, no matter how determined the would-be despot or how complicit his party colleagues.
      Here is a select list of those features:
      1 Decentralization
      No central authority oversees US elections. National elections are broken down by 50 states and the District of Columbia. Elections within each state are run in turn by counties and by precincts within counties. People vote locally, in thousands of jurisdictions; ballots are tallied locally; and the results are reported locally, and then added up in the public eye. The sheer number of people involved defies both coordination and conspiracy.
      On election night, the tributaries of local results become streams, and then flow together to form rivers, and then become a flood. No president or any other figure has the power to stop the result. While every national election is stained by voter suppression measures and strained by human error and voting irregularities, the totality of the vote, and the transparency of its accumulation, constitutes an overwhelming force.
      2 Turnout
      A persistent symptom of weakness in US democracy has been low voter turnout. Less voter participation means less representative government. But turnout was a bright spot in 2020. Before this November’s election, no presidential ticket had ever notched 70m votes – Barack Obama got 69.5m in 2008. In 2020, Trump’s tally was building toward 74m – while Biden had surpassed the incredible total of 80m, with many ballots from the majority-Democrat New York state yet to be reported.
      The previous benchmark for total votes cast for the two major parties in a presidential election was about 130m. Astoundingly, the 2020 election is on track to record almost 20% more votes than that for the Republican and Democratic tickets. As a uniquely polarizing and inescapable figure in politics, Trump appears to have been a huge driver of turnout, both for and against.
      3 Integrity and transparency
      Despite Trump’s false assertions, US presidential elections are not subject to widespread fraud, miscounts or other significant irregularities. This is in part thanks to the tireless work of activists and no thanks to routine attempts at voter suppression.
      No significant instances of fraud emerged from the 2020 election, conducted over more than a month with an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots cast amid a pandemic. No Trump lawyer dared impute election fraud in court, despite the lies filling Trump’s Twitter feed.
      A hand recount of about 5m ballots in Georgia inconsequentially moved the overall result by about 1,200 votes – a typically small recount result. A recount is also under way in Wisconsin, which Biden won by more than 20,000 votes. State officials reported no significant changes in the overall tally after a fourth day of recounting.
      4 The courts
      From melting hair dye to Four Seasons Total Landscaping, Trump’s legal team has been much-derided. But in key states, the campaign also hired top-flight lawyers from firms such as Jones Day and Porter Wright Morris & Arthur. On the whole these lawyers have fared miserably, winning only one minor case out of 43 in six states, while losing 35 cases so far, according to a running tally maintained by the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias.
      The judges who threw out Trump campaign cases include Trump appointees. Judge Steven Grimberg in the northern district of Georgia booted a complaint by a Trump elector seeking to block certification of the state’s vote. “I didn’t hear any justification for why the plaintiff delayed bringing this claim until two weeks after this election and on the cusp of these election results being certified,” Grimberg wrote.
      Before the election, another Trump appointee, Judge J Nicholas Ranjan, threw out a Trump complaint in Pennsylvania challenging mail-in ballots. And district judge Matthew Brann of Pennsylvania, a former Republican party official and Federalist Society member, sternly jettisoned a separate Trump campaign challenge filed after the election.
      “This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence,” Brann wrote. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
      5 The media
      Apart from Congress, the media is one of the least-loved institutions in the United States, abused with glee from the White House on down. And the American media has been terribly crippled by the loss over the last decade of countless local outlets that offered irreplaceable, knowledgable coverage of local events. Pseudo-media propaganda services such as Breitbart, One America News, Newsmax and Parler, financed by conservative billionaires, represent ominous new entries on the media landscape given invaluable support by Trump.
      But strong and independent media, afforded powerful protections by the first amendment, remain a vital feature of US democracy. With no central authority over US elections, it falls to the media to project a winner. Where the intimidation of voters or poll workers is reported, it falls to the media to shine a light. Where false accusations about election fraud are spread by the president, it falls to the media to investigate and explain what is true and what is false.
      Trump grew enraged when Fox News called the state of Arizona for Biden early on Wednesday after the election. But in doing so, the network – in its election-calling operations, at least – demonstrated its independence and investment in the truth. The Associated Press worked for years to maintain and upgrade its elections operations while committing to unprecedented transparency in 2020 in explaining how its elections reporting worked. Other media outlets demonstrated similar will and resolve in waiting to call states until the result was plain but then calling them definitively when it was. More

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      Trump rails at judges as another court rejects his lawyers' claims of voter fraud

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      A day after Pennsylvania’s highest court had thrown out a lower court’s order preventing the state from certifying results from the 3 November US elections, Donald Trump blasted the judges’ decision.
      Saturday’s case – which had attempted to throw out 2.5m mail in votes in the crucial state – was the latest of dozens of failed lawsuits by Trump’s lawyers, with judges castigating his lawyers for failing to present evidence of fraud.
      With states certifying results, Trump has an ever dwindling route to contest the election as Joe Biden pushes on with preparations for his inauguration as president on 20 January and recruits the team for his administration.
      However, on Sunday in his first media appearance since losing the presidential contest to his Democratic rival, the president phoned into Fox News to blame the courts for his campaign’s so far unsuccessful legal challenges, which are based on a series of debunked conspiracies alleging widespread voter fraud.
      “We’re not allowed to put in our proof. They say you don’t have standing,” Trump told Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures.
      “We have affidavits, we have hundreds and hundreds of affidavits,” Trump added, noting he’d “file one nice, big beautiful lawsuit” without providing any details on the supposed “tremendous proof” attorneys have.
      In the 20 days since polls closed, Republicans and Trump campaign officials have leaned into claims, without evidence, that some states allowed voters to turn in ballots after election day.
      His interview comes after weeks of legal challenges from the Trump campaign in battleground states including Pennsylvania, where the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the law allowed for challenges to Pennsylvania’s year-old mail-in voting law.
      The defeat on Saturday followed Friday’s decision by a federal appeals court to dismiss a separate challenge to the Pennsylvania result and back a district judge who likened the president’s evidence-free and error-strewn lawsuit to “Frankenstein’s monster”.
      The president’s legal team, led by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, had also demanded recounts in states like Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, alleging that vote-counting machines were rigged in an elaborate scheme in which even the justice department, FBI and the federal court system were complicit.
      But none of these claims are true. In fact, Trump’s own legal team has never formally challenged elections results in any state court under through substantiated claims of fraud.
      According to the Washington Post, the last-ditch effort has attorneys within the campaign describing – Trump’s legal advisor as increasingly “deranged.” One close adviser told to The Postthat Trump was like “Mad King George” going around the White House ‘muttering, “I won. I won. I won.”
      Meanwhile, Milwaukee county completed its recount and certified its results on Friday, just 10 days after the Trump campaign filed a recount request for there and Dane county, the state’s two Democratic strongholds with large Black populations.
      After nearly 400 uncounted ballots were found, Biden actually increased his margin of victory – gaining an 257 additional votes to the president’s 125 additional votes. Once Dane county certifies its results, the state will move forward in its final certification process.
      In response, Trump tweeted that the recount was not an effort to find mistakes in the tally, but about “finding people who have voted illegally” – again invoking discredited conspiracies that his campaign has “found many illegal votes”.The outgoing president has yet to concede the 2020 election, even as Biden, now president-elect, announces cabinet appointments and his agenda for his first 100 days in office.
      After Biden crossed the 80m-vote threshold – a more than 6m vote lead – Trump demanded Biden prove that the votes he received in the election were not “illegally obtained”, which there is no legal requirement of any winning official to do before taking office.
      There have been a number or reports, based on anonymous official sources, that Trump is weighing up a run in the 2024 presidential election, including a report by the Daily Beast that he is thinking of announcing his campaign during Biden’s inauguration. More