In historic fashion, Americans came together, cast ballots amid a global pandemic and elected a new president and vice president, pending official certification by state election officials. The process moving forward is well-established, as the states’ electors will officially cast their votes in a few short weeks. It’s part of the glorious American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.
That’s why President Donald Trump’s speech from the White House press briefing room on Thursday evening was so alarming and reprehensible. By declaring absentee ballots lawfully cast by mail fraudulent, Trump is engaging again in anti-democratic behavior with his wrecking ball approach to representative government and the institutions that undergird it.
In doing so, he is shamelessly undermining the integrity of the American electoral process with charges of a rigged or stolen election.
Even for Trump, this is out of bounds.
Like more than 2.5 million Pennsylvanians, my family and I cast absentee ballots before Election Day. In Lehigh County, our ballots were counted in the days following Election Day, per Pennsylvania state guidelines. But Trump doesn’t want our ballots to counted, arguing they are somehow less legitimate than votes cast in-person.
However, his outlandish claim simply does not hold up under scrutiny.
In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and Republican state house leaders failed to reach an agreement to permit county election officials to process and count absentee ballots prior to Election Day. The consequence? A prolonged process post-Election Day to count all the ballots. But this process is entirely legal and fair — and calling it fraud without a shred of evidence is an assault on the American experiment.
Trump hasn’t just attacked the counting of mail-in ballots; he has attacked the integrity of the count by polls workers in Philadelphia. To be fair, Philadelphia has experienced voter fraud before. In 1994, US District Judge Clarence Newcomer removed then-sitting Democratic state Sen. Bill Stinson after he found evidence that Stinson was elected because of absentee ballot fraud. Republican Bruce Marks, who won the in-person vote on Election Day, was subsequently seated.
Thankfully, election reformers in Philadelphia and Harrisburg, the capital, have cleaned up the process since then. If you don’t believe me, just ask Republican Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, who told “60 Minutes” in Sunday night’s episode, “From the inside looking out, it feels all very deranged. At the end of the day we are counting eligible votes, cast by voters. The controversy surrounding it is something I don’t understand.”
But more to the point, if Democrats wanted to steal the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, they did a lousy job of it. According to the count at this moment, Joe Biden won Philadelphia by a smaller margin than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Shouldn’t Biden have gained more votes in the Democratic stronghold if the system were rigged against Trump?
However, Biden significantly surpassed Clinton’s margin of victory in the four suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia — Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery — by nearly 100,000 votes. Further, Biden cut into Trump’s margins upstate in Republican-dominated counties, such as Luzerne and Northampton. Are Trump and his lawyers suggesting voter fraud occurred in any of those Republican counties as well as Philadelphia?
When all the votes are counted and the results certified, it is likely Biden will have won Pennsylvania by a larger margin of victory than Trump’s 2016 total of 44,000 votes. Currently, Biden is up more than 45,000 votes — outside the margin for when a mandatory recount will take place.
It’s long past time for all GOP leaders to tell Trump — and his army of lawyers — to stand down before he does any more damage to democratic institutions and our way of life. Perhaps if the majority of the Republican Party applied pressure on Trump, he would begin to come to terms with his defeat. Foolishly, Trump suppressed his own vote by discouraging his supporters from casting mail-in ballots. This act of political malpractice may have ultimately cost him the election in swing states like Pennsylvania.
Another important factor contributing to Trump’s loss was the impactful number of moderate Republican voters and independents who likely voted for Biden, or simply skipped over the presidential race, and then voted straight Republican down ballot.
Just look at the House of Representatives. No House Republican incumbent lost a seat, and, as of now, the GOP has gained eight seats — with several races yet to be projected, a handful likely in their favor. By claiming the election was stolen, Trump is attempting to delegitimize not only Biden’s impressive win, but by extension the victorious Republican congressional candidates down ballot.
Unsurprisingly, Trump couldn’t care less how his reckless words or actions impact others, which is another reason why Americans rejected him.
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