Election 2020: Day 19

While we’re well into the “states certifying election results” phase of the 2020 Presidential election, Trump continues to refuse to concede, whereas Biden is planning to start naming Cabinet picks the day after tomorrow.

Georgia recently completed what it referred to as a risk-limiting audit of the election results, which entailed a full hand recount of 5 million ballots. The hand recount reduced Biden’s margin over Trump from 0.26% to 0.25%. As a result, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state and governor have now certified the results, although the Trump campaign have requested a further recount. Confusingly, their recount request explicitly articulates a desire to re-inspect signature matching on mail-in ballots, which is literally impossible to do again at this point, but was already done twice as part of the initial processing of ballots.

Michigan’s state board of canvassers, which has 2 members from each party, is scheduled to vote tomorrow to certify the election results. However, the federal and state Republican parties have sent a letter requesting a two-week delay to allow for “a full audit and investigation into potential voter fraud.”

Pennsylvania is supposed to certify its election results tomorrow. Yesterday a federal judge dismissed the Trump campaign’s attempt to block that from happening, although today the Trump campaign has appealed to the 3rd Circuit.

The Trump campaign had decided to pay for a recount in Wisconsin, but saved $5 million by only requesting the recount in the two large Democratic-leaning counties (Milwaukee and Dane). Now they are apparently seeking to disqualify all absentee ballots that were cast in person in those counties before election day, on the grounds that state law was not followed with respect to the paperwork for people requesting such ballots. Wisconsin is not scheduled to certify its results until December 1st.

All of this would be somewhat funny, were it not for the fact that Trump’s antics seem to have convinced tens of millions of Americans that Biden was not legitimately elected, despite no presentation of evidence to support that view. A poll conducted Nov 12th to 16th stated that 32% of Americans believe Biden only won due to fraud, with another 2% volunteering that they don’t believe Biden will actually be declared the winner; among Trump votes, those numbers went up to 77% and 4%. The same poll said that 44% of Americans, and 88% of Trump voters, felt that not enough information was yet known to know who won. (Recall that the news organizations had declared the race for Biden on Nov 7th.)