Perhaps buoyed by the ongoing farce of a recount in Maricopa County, Arizona, Donald Trump supporters are trying to push governments on local, county and state levels to undertake recounts of the November 2020 presidential election to support their conspiracy theories that Trump actually beat President Joe Biden.
Have we mentioned that Joe Biden has been in office for nearly five months, and there’s no way to oust him from office through a ballot recount? Or that he got seven million more votes nationally? Or that the election was already certified by Congress?
According to the Washington Post, people are taking to the streets in protests and to microphones in town hall meetings to offer their services to run recounts. Few, if any, have any experience in auditing or recounting an election.
A woman at a county commissioner meeting Cheboygan County, Michigan, saying that she’s a lawyer, volunteered her “forensic team” to undertake a recount, saying that she has evidence counting machines flipped votes. (Trump won the county in 2020 with 64% of the vote.)
In California’s San Luis Obispo County, scores of protesters demanded a “forensic audit” of the ballots because they question the accuracy of ballot scanning machines.
Michigan state Republican representatives have floated the idea of voting through a mandatory recount in a piece of legislation. And elections officials see this as a trend that will continue in upcoming election.
“It’s a continuation of the same forces that sought to overturn the 2020 election, undermine the counting process and interfere on Jan. 6 with the electoral college certification,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said. “These forces have now turned to local outreach. And because there has not yet been any real accountability for these bad actors trying to undermine our democracy, we are going to continue to see this activity, particularly in swing states, through 2024.”
Egging all this on is Donald Trump, a chaos agent who wants to see the world burn because he cannot accept the fact that he lost the election.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” Trump recently told a crowd attending a party at Mar-a-Lago he crashed because he thinks he’s welcome at every private party. “So we’re going to watch that very closely. And after that, you’ll watch Pennsylvania and you’ll watch Georgia and you’re going to watch Michigan and Wisconsin. You’re watching New Hampshire. Because this was a rigged election. Everybody knows it.”