Joe Biden won Michigan and Georgia, but thanks to the Trump team’s constant efforts to overturn the results in those states, we get to watch Biden win again and again. The Michigan State Board of Canvassers met Monday to certify the vote in the state, as they were required to do. This should have been a total formality, a meeting we didn’t even know was happening because it was so pro forma. Instead, one of the two Republicans on the four-member board announced in advance he’d vote against certifying the election while the other was silent about his intentions.
In the end, that second Republican, Aaron Van Langevelde, denied Democratic elections lawyers another chance to win in court by recognizing that they “have a clear legal duty to certify the results of the election,” and voting to do just that, making it a three-to-one vote to uphold the extremely clear result of the election. Biden, after all, won the state by more than 150,000 votes—far more than Donald Trump’s 2016 margin in the state.
It’s not just Michigan.
Biden won the first count of the votes in Georgia. Then he won the hand recount. Then Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp certified his win. Now, thanks to a request from the Trump campaign, there’s going to be a machine recount starting Tuesday morning to be completed by the end of the day on Dec. 2.
A few votes may change here and there, but given that the votes have already been counted twice and certified by Republicans, Biden’s lead of over 12,000 votes will stand. He will win the state a third time, or fourth if you want to count the certification as a win. Boy, Trump’s team sure wants to drive home that Biden really, really, really for sure won Georgia, huh?
Team Trump is butting up against the will of the voters, trying to knock it down in state after state. That the effort is failing is important—and the way it’s failing is sometimes hilarious—but make no mistake that it’s an assault on democracy itself, and an attempt to keep Trump’s supporters convinced that Trump is the election’s true winner. That’s dangerous.