By: Tayhana Taylor, World News Editor
Members of the Republican party, including President Donald Trump, have made continuous efforts to accuse the Democrats of conducting voter fraud in the states where President-Elect Joe Biden led in the voter counts. Despite the threats from Trump’s campaign to sue and claims that the ballot-counting protocols were not followed in some states, none of these allegations have been confirmed by authorities yet.
President Trump declared that he won the election “by a lot” and that he won the 71,000,000 “legal votes.” This statement is misleading as there is no official statement that he surpassed President-Elect Joe Biden in the ballot-counting process.
The lengthy vote-counting period in key states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan provoked members of the Republican party to assume that the period was prolonged because the Democrats were trying to “steal the election.”
The Republicans claimed that in Pennsylvania, there were no observers allowed in the counting rooms. On Nov. 7, Trump tweeted, “THE OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED IN THE COUNTING ROOMS…BAD THINGS HAPPENED WHICH OUR OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE.” A reporter from Fox News cleared up this accusation by disclosing that Republican poll watchers were present in the counting rooms alongside the Democrats.
Absentee voters were given the opportunity by local election officers to fix their faulty ballots. The Washington Post reported that in Pennsylvania, Republicans sued to prevent the local election officers from disclosing the names of voters whose absentee ballots had errors. Failure of the Republicans to prove to the court why this process should be stopped led to the lawsuits being proven ineffective.
Georgia was also one of the states where election disputes took place. There have been reports that Trump’s campaign team filed a lawsuit the day after the election against the Chatham County Board of Elections. Trump’s campaign alleged that a Republican poll watcher observed a poll worker breaching the protocols for unprocessed absentee ballots. Yet again, the lawsuit was unsuccessful. The judge deemed Trump’s team’s stance invalid since it failed to provide sufficient evidence that the county’s election board violated ballot-counting protocols.
In Arizona, there were claims that overvoting took place through a tabulation machine; poll workers allegedly instructed voters to push a button on the tabulation machine. According to the Washington Post, Arizona’s State Secretary, Katie Hobbs, said that these accusations were attempts by the Trump allies to delay the counting process.
PolitiFact reported that in Clark County, Nevada, “President Donald Trump’s campaign and Republicans in Nevada are questioning the integrity of the 2020 election, claiming that there ‘appear’ to be thousands of people who voted illegally.” The Trump campaign lawyers wrote to the U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr, claiming that citizens voted improperly in Clark County. This claim had no corroboration of non-residents casting ballots in the county. The claims have yet to be proven as facts.
In Michigan, the Republicans filed two lawsuits alleging that fraud occurred in the ballot counts. The Republicans lost both suits due to failure to provide evidence. They also requested that the judge delay certifying the election results in Detroit because they contended that not all votes were properly counted. The Republican representatives could not, however, provide Judge Timothy M. Kenny with any affidavits or specific eyewitness evidence to substantiate their assertions.
But what could have or will happen if the accusations were proven to be true?
“There are serious consequences for voter fraud (but not many consequences for claiming voter fraud), including massive fines and many years in prison,” said Frank Orlando, Director of Saint Leo University’s Polling Institute. Orlando further disclosed that, “The odds are very much against President Trump being able to find enough fraud in the states he would need to win.”
