Trump Makes Last-Ditch Effort To Overturn Election

There is no doubt about it: President-Elect Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election fair and square. Yet, make no mistake: President Donald Trump continues to deny the election results, refusing to concede the election. He has filed lawsuit after lawsuit to try and get courts to throw out hundreds of thousands of legally cast ballots and tried to attempt to change the results of the election so much that it may amount to a coup.

Now, in case you don’t know how the American election system works, in essence, the people don’t vote directly for the president. The people vote for how they would like their state’s electors in the Electoral College to vote for president (check out our guide). This means that electors can sometimes vote faithlessly, which means to vote against the statewide popular vote winner. So far, there has never been enough faithless electors to sway the outcome of an election. Some states have passed laws that punish faithless electors, and this has been upheld by the Supreme Court in Chiafalo v. Washington earlier this year.

According to Article II, Section One, Clause Two of the Constitution, electors are chosen by state legislatures. This is where the president’s antics to overturn the election make sense, and why he still hasn’t given up yet.

Some states have already affirmed the winner of the presidential election in the states by having the secretary of state by certifying the votes. States which have done this at the time of writing include Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming. By certifying the votes, the state has already granted its electors to the statewide winner, so there is no hope for Trump in any of these states.

However, some other battleground states, like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, haven’t yet certified their votes. This, at least in Trump’s view, allows him to try and convince Republican-held state legislatures to ignore the popular vote winner and appoint electors that will vote for him, in essence creating a coup.

Now, obviously, it would be hugely unlikely that any of these attempts succeed, as it is against federal law to change election law after an election occurs—if the states were going to appoint different electors (inconsistent with the law), it would need to have been done prior to the election. Therefore, for GOP lawmakers to attempt this would mean committing a federal crime just to delegitimize the results of a fair election for one man.

The fact that trying to force legislatures to install electors loyal to him is illegal doesn’t seem to have stopped him from trying, though. In Michigan, a state in which Biden won by over 154,000 votes, Trump is pressuring the vote-certification board, consisting of two Democrats and two Republicans, to delay certification by causing a deadlock. Now, this exact issue came into scrutiny just a week ago when vote certifiers in Wayne County (Detroit) tried not to certify the ballots there (they eventually bowed down to public pressure a few hours after choosing not to certify). However, there shouldn’t be too much to worry about, as even if the board refuses to certify Michigan’s votes, the courts are sure to step in (the Democrats are almost guaranteed to file a lawsuit) by certifying the votes according to their constitutional duty.

In Pennsylvania, a Trump-appointed judge threw out one of the last remaining significant lawsuits by the Trump campaign to throw out potentially hundreds of thousands of legally cast ballots. Most large counties there, like Philadelphia County, is expected to meet on Monday to certify votes, and we can probably expect the state to certify votes later on, too. The state’s Republican U.S. senator, Pat Toomey, congratulated Joe Biden’s victory and declared that he would be the next president. Though the state’s legislature Republican caucus has voiced support for Trump’s attempts to throw out the results of a fair election (this should be sounding alarm bells left, right, and center), Pennsylvania will probably, in spite of delays, certify its votes for Joe Biden.

With Arizona’s Maricopa County (Phoenix) certifying its votes for Joe Biden (60 percent of the state’s population lives in Maricopa), Joe Biden’s lead has been solidified in this state. This came just after the state court threw out GOP-led lawsuits to delay certification of results there.

With Wisconsin judges throwing out unfounded Trump lawsuits, again, despite Trump trying to force recounts and delay the results again and again, Biden should see no issue in having the state certify its votes.

Even though Trump continues to try and delay the certification of results (this could hurt the GOP in the January Georgia Senate runoff elections which will decide Senate control), his attempts to overthrow a fair election have already been rejected time and time again by the courts. No matter his demands on Twitter, Joe Biden is officially the 46th President of the United States, and no amount of Trump’s complaints will change that.