Preserving American Values

I have not seen any article that brings together all the different actions Trump undertook in his effort to change the 2020 election results.  And so I wrote this post.

After losing the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies filed a record of 62 suits contesting election processes, vote counting, and the vote certification process in 9 states.  Interestingly, despite all the talk by Trump and his allies about fraud, most cases made no mention of fraud.  He lost each and every case that he brought to challenge the election results.

He and his allies also asked for recounts or audits in five states—a total of 8 requests (Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin).  In each instance, the election results were confirmed.  That is to say, there was no fraud.

Not only did Trump try to expose fraud and was told there was none, he himself tried, in one well-publicized incident, to have a state election official falsify the results.  In Georgia, he called the Secretary of State and asked him to find enough votes to declare Trump the winner, instead of Biden.  His specific recorded words were, “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have… Fellas, I need 11,000 votes, give me a break.”

When these efforts did not succeed, Trump advisors came up with the idea of having fake electors certify that he had won their state’s election and have those certificates passed on to V.P. Mike Pence in his role of chairing the certification process in Congress.  A total of 84 face electors in seven states signed such certificates. However, on January 5, Pence made clear he did not think he had the discretion to reject electoral college certifications and so he would not participate in this fraud.

We all know what happened after that.  On January 6, Trump urged his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, where the certification of the election results was to take place that day, and thus disrupt the process.

This is not a man who wants to ensure secure election results. This is a man who wants to engineer election results in his favor and will do anything to achieve that end.