The media industrial complex doesn’t declare the president. The electoral college does, and not for about a month. This simple fact seems to have been forgotten by the entire world.
I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion, as usual on HN, where pointing out facts contrary to the desired narrative are unwelcome. Even dispassionately describing the political process is apparently partisan now.
Enough have finished to give Biden 270 electoral votes.
> there will be recounts in others,
Those aren't going to change results. At a state presidential level, a recount might adjust a margin of victory by ~1,000 votes. The margins in those states that have been called are above that level.
> a few lawsuits alleging improprieties have been filed
And several of them have failed summary judgement because the Republicans couldn't build enough of a case to sustain them.
Now, you can just stick your fingers in your ears and call 71 million people stupid, or you can recognize that for the health of the democratic system, it’s best to investigate any anomalies. This shouldn’t be a controversial opinion, but apparently in these hyper partisan times, it is.
And those claims have no merit.
Any valid claims of anomalies will be investigated.
Claims without proof should be dismissed. This shouldn't be a controversial opinion, but apparently when one side is hyper partisan, it is.
If I were confident that a month of preemptive investigations would lead to greater confidence, I'd be all in favor. But this seems unlikely, because so many of the people pushing for investigations have already declared the only result they'll accept. What seems much more likely is a repeat of 2000, where trust in the electoral system is shattered, and a huge chunk of the losing party starts to argue that any election which didn't go their way was corruptly stolen from them.
To allege that there was sufficient fraud to overturn the results of this election requires fraud to exist at over 1000× the rate it has normally existed. Consequently, the evidence needed to sustain this allegation should be 1000× as prevalent. However, the claimed evidence is no better than it usually is. You get the same, tired complaints about things like out-of-state mail ballots from people who forget that students and military (and indeed the sitting president!) are legal residents of states they do not presently physically reside in.
[1] The number of allegedly fraudulent ballots in that race is close to the margin of victory for the Republican candidate, but my guesstimate is that if the fraud hadn't happened, then the Republican still would have won, just by a very close margin.
Also, finding errors has already overturned numerous representative races. This is a factual thing. It’s not Donald Trump throwing a fit.
The people saying there are no legitimate issues to investigate are delusional and it’s dangerous for democracy.
Source?
And, that's not a story detailing fraud. A Republican put in the results incorrectly, a Democrat noticed the error, and it was corrected, changing the results of a local election from a Democrat winning to a Republican winning.
If the Democrats were really looking to perpetuate fraud, they could have just turned a blind eye to the error. But they didn't. Because this is America, and here, right matters.
And as I mentioned, historical fraud rates for mail-in votes is on the order of 1 in 10s of millions. This includes states that conduct their entire election by mail, e.g., Oregon.
> Also, finding errors has already overturned numerous representative races. This is a factual thing. It’s not Donald Trump throwing a fit.
Which ones? You're saying it so authoritatively, you should be be able to provide a precise, verifiable list to back up your claims.
One such example:
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2020...
“A Republican city clerk supervised a vote count that wrongly gave victory to a Democrat, after which a Democratic county clerk's staff caught the error and requested a correction from the Republican city clerk, handing the win to a Republican.”
This kind of thing happens every election and it’s rare that it has even this much impact at the local level. It’s never been anywhere near the level of impacting a lead like Biden has in multiple states.
Trump needs to invalidate a city’s worth of people in PA AND tens of thousands of AZ, GA, and NV votes to win. There’s not even the slightest evidence of fraud on that scale and the stuff they’re doing trying to invalidate military ballots might get them into triple digits but they need 5-6 digit changes.
Edit: here’s a great example - they’re litigating in Maricopa county over at most a couple hundred votes, and there’s no expectation that all of them will go their way. Trump is behind by 14k votes in Arizona so even if they got a total win they’d need to do this many dozens of times.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2020/1...
The _vast_ majority of those 71 million aren't claiming that there's a problem. Certainly, there are some conspiracy theorists amongst them, and I'd be comfortable calling them stupid, yes.
It is possible that the preliminary counts will be changed before the official counts are declared, but ever since the mass adoption of optical scan ballots after the debacle of 2000, recounts just haven't moved the dial enough to affect the presidential election.
The losing side this year is extremely butthurt about having lost the election, and is filing lawsuits to contest it. However, these lawsuits are so without merit that they aren't even surviving summary judgement, which is an amazingly low legal bar to clear. Saying you had video evidence of a poll worker brutally murdering anyone who voted for Trump would be sufficient justification to survive summary judgement, to give you an idea of just how low a bar it is.
Expecting anything other than the counts as they are at the end of canvassing to be certified is basically declaring sedition at this point.
Nothing is official-official until December 13, so he has the right to pursue whatever remedies he wishes in the meantime, but the lack of trust he is fomenting right now, today, is harmful to America, and that's running counter to long-established norms.
The reason his cases keep getting dismissed is there isn't any evidence of election fraud.