"Law and Order" means following the law in an orderly way. It is time for election law to bring things to a close.
The text on my phone from the Trump campaign this morning reads "Biden did NOT win!"
Sadly, it is clear now that the President does not share my commitment to law and order in the good administration of both voter law and judicial review. While I strongly spoke in support of the President's right to pursue legal cases to prove his point, the time has come to stop supporting his denial of the election, and to condemn those who continue to enable his destructive delusions of victory.
Tomorrow, November 23, 2020, Michigan and Pennsylvania will certify their election results, joining AZ and GA. This will close the door to any further legitimate legal path for President Trump to contest the election. Every meaningful court case to this point has failed, with repeated judicial rulings clearly spelling out that it is both lack of evidence and spurious interpretations of the law that led to those conclusions. Certifications have been done by Republicans and Democrats. Presiding judges have been both Republicans and Democrats. The accusations are false. Truth has spoken.
What happened is simple: in the context of pandemic, and with the benefit of experience of the primary season, most local electoral jurisdictions deliberately and proactively increased access of registered voters to exercise their right to vote. This was done through rule changes for all registered voters, and were different in different counties - as is their right. At the same time, both the Trump and Biden campaigns hit the ground with massive voter registration campaigns and urged their voters to vote differently: Trump in person and Biden by mail. As a previous post delineated ("When we will know"), most states required counting in-person ballots first, and mail-in ballots second. This resulted in the "red mirage" of an initial lead by Trump, followed up with a slow and unavoidable counting of mail-in ballots which went more for Biden. Simple, understandable, and predictable. No allegation of fraud by "late ballot dumps" makes sense, compared to the simple truth. No evidence of such behavior has been brought to court in any state, despite the ranting press conferences by the Giuliani team. The election was honest and open.
Trump's surrogates keep talking about the 72 million voters for Trump: "more than has ever been cast for any sitting President" as if that mattered. They believed that their rallies and ground game had brought forward millions of voters who didn't show up in the polls and the early night numbers seemed to validate that bias. But the Democrats, without rallies, had been doing the same - and much more successfully. Bidens 78-79 million votes blew the top off the system, and confirmed the national polling of the past year: Trump had only a 42 percent approval rating. Most people did not want him back.
Trump lost the election, and it is not a surprise. His approval rating for the past year has remained below the historical threshold for re-election in the last hundred years. The agita in the nation rallied voter turnout on all sides. As a result, we got a huge statistical sample, and it played out truly.
As of this morning, Trump is still sending emails and texts fundraising for his private unspecified PAC: "Save America" with the title "Biden did NOT win!!"
Save America, indeed.
