In the uncertain lead-up to the Nov. 3 election, major news networks joined partisan Democrats in cautioning that it may be weeks—if not months—before a winner was known.
That estimate presumed to take into account not only the extra time needed for tallying absentee ballots—an ongoing process for some states, including North Carolina—but also the resulting recounts and legal challenges that were long anticipated.
Despite the likelihood that Pennsylvania’s final result will be scrutinized by the US Supreme Court, the state wrapped its initial count on Saturday, moving Democrat nominee Joe Biden unofficially past the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to clinch the presidency.
Like clockwork, anti-Trump operatives who once insisted upon post-election restraint dutifully played their part with a bait-and-switch declaration that Biden was now the president-elect.
Yet, the high court is almost sure to revisit the case that it had put on hold prior to the election—to determine whether Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Democrat election officials violated the Constitution by circumventing the state’s GOP legislature in revising election rules.
President Donald Trump signaled as much in responding to the cable-news usurpation on Saturday.
“We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed,” Trump said in a statement, according to LifeNews.com. “The simple fact is this election is far from over,” he said.
Trump noted that Biden had not yet been officially certified even in states where the voting procedures were not in dispute.
“Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor,” he said.
“In Pennsylvania, for example, our legal observers were not permitted meaningful access to watch the counting process,” Trump continued. “Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media.”
In addition to Pennsylvania, Trump has pushed for a recount in Wisconsin—where a suspicious and statistically improbable bump in the wee hours of Wednesday morning gave Biden a margin of 20,000 votes over Trump, who had led considerably until Milwaukee‘s absentee votes were counted.
In Georgia, the secretary of state said an automatic recount would occur due to the narrow margin. Trump still appeared to be leading in the state, with a possible influx of oversees military votes on Friday potentially adding to his balance.
And despite some networks, notoriously led by Fox News, having declared Arizona for Biden, additional vote-dumps continued as of Friday, with Trump’s campaign expressing confidence that they would break in his favor.
Michigan, meanwhile, seemed to be catapulted back into play after a late-Friday revelation that a software glitch in several counties had switched at least 5,000 GOP votes to Democrats.
Although Biden was leading Trump in Michigan with just over 146,000 votes—meaning a swing of 10,000 would not make a dent—the glitch story appeared to be growing, with some preliminary reports indicating the same problematic software had been used in many other battleground states.
Michigan’s Republican House Speaker Lee Chatfield called on patience from both sides as the legislature announced it would hold hearings on the alarming development and its implications for election integrity.
“Every single legal vote needs to be counted, regardless of who cast it or who they voted for,” Chatfield said in a statement.
“And then the candidate who wins the most of those votes will win Michigan’s electoral votes, just like it always has been,” he added. “Nothing about that process will change in 2020.”
Big questions also remained in Nevada and North Carolina, both of which egregiously implemented last-minute election rule changes to favor the Democrats in power, allowing them—among other things—to delay their final tallies until next week while continuing to accept absentee votes.
In Nevada, Trump’s legal team hinted at evidence that thousands of ineligible voters—including some who were no longer living—may have participated in the election in Clark County, surrounding the Las Vegas metropolitan area. Democrats in the state mailed ballots, unsolicited, to everyone on its outdated voter lists, resulting in evidence of many carelessly discarded ballots, double voting and other issues.
As of Saturday, North Carolina remained in the red column, but that appeared almost certain to change under the supervision of Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper and state Attorney General Josh Stein. Among the Tarheel State’s irregularities likely to be examined was its sudden shift from saying 100 percent of precincts had reported to claiming that only 94 percent had completed their counts.
Like in Pennsylvania, Cooper also faced considerable legal objections from the state’s GOP legislature, who said the board of elections had never consulted it about the special coronavirus provisions, even though the General Assembly had already passed its own legislation to address the emergency pandemic needs for administering the vote.
The state BOE’s two Republican members also resigned in protest, saying they had been duped into agreeing to settle a lawsuit with a Teamsters-backed activist group, believing that the false measures would do more to safeguard election integrity than to undermine it.
The road for both candidates remained both hopeful and uncertain on Saturday as Biden and his allies sought to gaslight and psychologically manipulate their supporters into thinking the four-year saga of Trump’s first term had finally reached its resolution.
In order to claim victory, Trump would need to hold both Georgia and North Carolina in the final count, as well as prevail in the Pennsylvania court case and flip one of the other states prematurely declared for Biden.
Those reckless declarations, in turn, may increase the chance that a reversal will further undermine public confidence in the institutions. It may also lead to further violence from radical pro-Marxist and anti-government groups who have spent much of the past five months engaged in rioting in the streets of several major Democrat-run cities.
Biden, in the meantime, will begin his apparent overtures of transition with a much weaker hand than his party had expected due to Republicans’ better-than-expected performance at every level in the general election.
However, his hope that the media can do the heavy lifting in persuading the public of his victory seems far less likely given the outcome, after months of projections about his double-digit leads and an inevitable blue wave failed to come into fruition.
Trump’s supporters, who have quietly indulged and endured the endless stream of crises brought on by the Left’s opposition to the president, may yet again surprise by proving to be far less charitable or compliant in what they perceive as a clear affront, not only to the president himself, but to the Constitution and the institutions of American democracy.
