From NBC News Online:
Even before the final votes in the 2020 election were tallied, President Donald Trump sent his attorneys to court alleging voter fraud.
When it became clear that he had lost to President-elect Joe Biden, his claims — and his campaign’s court filings — accelerated. Trump attacked cities with large shares of Black voters, who had come out in force for Biden, while his lawyers baselessly alleged a global conspiracy and filed dozens of suits in six states.
The legal strategy failed in court after court — not a single incident of voter fraud has been proven in the lawsuits — but experts warn the narrative is laying the groundwork for disenfranchisement of voters across the country.
“I don’t actually think that all of this leads to a different result in January, but I am really afraid about what Donald Trump is currently doing to the country for February and beyond,” said Justin Levitt, an election law expert and professor at Loyola Law School who worked at the Department of Justice during the Obama administration.
Despite the large body of evidence that American elections are secure from both hacking and widespread voter fraud, federal and state politicians are already proposing new laws that will make it harder to vote.
“We’re already seeing trial balloons of new measures to restrict access to voting, and I expect that this false narrative of voter fraud is going to be used as an excuse in many other places to try and drive an anti-voter agenda going forward,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law.
In Georgia, a traditionally red state that Biden flipped blue this year by more than 12,000 votes, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has proposed several major election changes, including adding a voter ID requirement to mail-in voting and making it easier to challenge a voter’s stated residency.
“Close elections sow distrust,” Raffensperger said on Nov. 20, announcing that a hand recount had shifted Biden’s margin of victory in the state but had not changed the outcome. “People feel like their side was cheated.”
A second recount followed in the state, affirming the same result. Another Republican official in his office, Gabriel Sterling, later forcefully condemned the president and other Republicans’ rhetoric around a “stolen” or “rigged” election, which he said has incited harassment of election officials and death threats.
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