Sore Loser

With few exceptions the results of our presidential elections have been pretty straightforward in modern times. Around 40 states lean so far one way or the other that it usually isn't necessary to wait until all the votes are counted to see who the winner is. Even in the so-called swing states, it generally doesn't require that every single vote be counted before we know who the winner is. If candidate "A" is 20,000 votes ahead and there are 10,000 votes left to count, then mathematically there is no way candidate "B" can win. Media outlets receive voting information from the states and report this information. Most of them will "call" an election based on their analysis of the numbers. They don't always agree, but the "calls" by the media are not official and no one thinks that they are. The media is reporting information that they have received from official sources. In most cases, especially this year. In addition to reporting the apparent winner, they report how many votes were cast for each candidate any how many ballots (if any) are left to tabulate. No one is making anything up. "The media" isn't deciding who the winner is. They are reporting who the winner is. This year is no different in that respect than any other election. 

Sometimes a state's votes are very close. Not only do we have to wait for all ballots to be counted, but in some cases there will be a recount to verify the count. This is not unusual. It happens sometimes. Very seldom does a recount change the winner, and the swing is hardly ever more than a few hundred votes. This year is no different in that respect than any other election. 

There are often isolated problems. Voting machine software crashes, ballots get lost, people try to vote more than once, ballots are misprinted, registered voters are purged from voter lists. It's not a huge system, it's a huge collection of systems. Not only does every state have its own election laws, but often individual counties and municipalities have their own systems. There's going to be problems. This year is no different in that respect than any other election. 

What's different this year is that we are in the midst of a pandemic where many people felt uncomfortable about voting in person, so existing mail-in and absentee voting overwhelmed the systems in many areas. The party in power worked overtime to prevent localities from making it easier to vote remotely, including slowing down the mail and blocking local changes to when mail-in ballots could be counted. Voting in person was frustrated in many jurisdictions as polling places were eliminated and additional hoops to jump through were instituted. 

What's different this year is that the President of the United States has been spending months convincing his supporters without evidence that the system was unreliable, that it was rigged against him and that any result that differed from him winning in a landslide was illegitimate. 

No surprise that once enough votes were counted to make it indisputable that the president did not win re-election, it was disputed. 

It was widely predicted that in some states the day-of votes would trend toward Trump, since his supporters were more likely to vote in person and that the mail-in ballots would trend toward Biden, since Democrats were more likely to be concerned about distancing on Election Day and therefore would vote early or by mail in greater numbers. And since in most cases early votes and mail-in ballots would not be counted until after the day-of votes were tabulated, that is exactly what happened. States that had Trump slightly ahead on Election Day evening, like Pennsylvania, little by little gave way to a Biden lead as all the votes were counted. One of Trump's propaganda points was that we should know the winner on the evening of Election Day, and of course since he knew how things would go in the swing states, attempted to get voting stopped in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin where he was initially ahead. In the states where he was slightly behind, like Arizona and Nevada, he pushed for all the ballots to be counted. 

Once Biden drew ahead in these key states, his legal team went to work filing lawsuits to get wide swaths of votes invalidated while taking to Twitter to make unsubstantiated claims (i.e. lies) about alleged election irregularities. In most cases what he was telling his supporters on Twitter was different than what his lawyers were claiming in court. Virtually every case was thrown out of court. The few cases that weren't dismissed involve vanishingly small numbers of ballots that will not change the result. 

Republicans in general are parroting Trump's line, claiming to only be concerned about election integrity, even though they were never concerned about it before and there is no evidence of a coordinated, or even significant effort to rig the election. What Trump and the Republicans are doing is an attempt, not to protect the integrity of the election, but to overturn it.