Today, Explained - No coup for you!

Episode Date: December 9, 2020

Joe won. And won. And won. Rudy can fail. And fail. And fail. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. It was about a month ago that the major news networks, all of them, declared Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. the winner of the 2020 presidential election. And he's won a bunch of times since then. He's won little legal battles. He's won big ones. And as of just today, every single state in this union has certified its election results. But the outgoing president is having a tough time being the biggest loser. He's dispatched an elite legal strike force to challenge Biden's victory in court and even in farce.

They didn't bother to interview a single witness. You cannot make this shit up, but you can explain it. Andrew Prokop has been covering the failed coup and the flatulence for Vox. Flatulence? And despite how embarrassing this is, it's worth spending some time on because for some people out there, this isn't over yet.

It is not over. In at least Trump's own mind and the mind of his supporters. He is still fighting the result. And where specifically is the fight? So they were playing whack-a-mole to an extent because Trump would have had to flip three states results at least to actually win. So he ended up exploring attempts to dispute the results in several states. But I think there are three that are particularly worth focusing on where we did see some advances in those efforts. And those three states are Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.

So we can't play the we can't play the jingle. Well, I guess not. But do a new one. Add Georgia to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. Let's go through the three of those and talk about the approach in each state, starting with what? Pennsylvania, let's say. So the call of Pennsylvania, that was the deciding call that put Biden clearly over 270 electoral votes and gave him the victory. So Pennsylvania became a big target. There was this issue there with the state's Republican legislatures choosing not to count the mail votes early. By state law, ballots received by mail cannot be opened and counted until election day tomorrow.

City leaders say that means getting a tally of mail-in ballots will easily take several days. So that sort of presented an opportunity for Trump to argue, hey, something looks weird here. We were up by nearly 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania. I won Pennsylvania by a lot. And that gets whittled down to, I think they said now we're up by 90,000 votes and they'll keep coming and coming and coming. They find them all over. There's something wrong, even though that argument was totally baseless. So Trump's team, eventually led by Rudy Giuliani, really focused on Pennsylvania in trying to dispute these results. Giuliani held a now infamous press conference at the Four Seasons Philadelphia. The people you see behind me are just a few of about, I'd say, 50 to 60 poll watchers who will all testify that they were uniformly...

Actually turned out to be four seasons total landscaping. Still not entirely clear what happened there. I will ask that he be disciplined for that. So the lawsuits were flying in Pennsylvania from Trump's team. Eventually a federal judge who was actually a Republican, a member of the Federalist Society, though he was appointed by Obama, he ended up dismissing the Trump team's lawsuit where Rudy Giuliani personally argued in court, just saying there was nothing to it. It was totally baseless, a really scathing opinion there. The judge in this case, Matthew

Brand, tearing apart the claims by the Trump team called this latest case that he has dismissed like Frankenstein's monster, haphazardly stitched together. But Giuliani pressed onward. They held what was billed as a hearing of Pennsylvania state legislators, but it was not an official hearing at the legislature. It was just a bunch of legislators getting together and having Rudy talk to them. Again, the same sort of stuff claims that observers from Trump's side were excluded from watching the votes being tallied, which have been shown not to be true. Those ballots could have all been for Joe Biden.

They could have all been for someone else. They could have had no identifying data. They could have been from the same person. Claims that mail ballots were fraudulent. Again, no fraud has been proven at all. Just trying everything that would stick. And the Supreme Court of the United States made it official last night that none of it would stick. First of all, what about Michigan? Ground zero for the flatulence. What exactly

happened there? So Michigan wasn't even close, really. Biden won by nearly three percentage points. But it became a target for Trump's team because of the particular way that the state certifies its results. They have local boards of canvassers in each county and a statewide board of canvassers. Each of these boards has four members, two Republicans and two Democrats. So what we saw happen was that the Wayne County Board of Canvassers that was in charge of certifying the results for Detroit, at first they deadlocked. With a two to two vote, the vote went along party lines with Republican members voting to not certify the election. The Democrats voting yes, certify. The two Republican members of the board said they couldn't certify the results because

there were problems. And the problems they cited were not at all convincing. They talked about discrepancies between the poll books, the list of names of voters who voted, and the number of votes that were actually counted. Maybe that sounds bad, but when you look at the number of discrepancies there were, it was quite small, just like a couple of people sometimes in certain precincts. And, you know, that is much more suggestive of clerical error, of simple mistakes than some kind of massive fraud scheme that would be sufficient to explain why Biden won the state by almost 3% margin. So those two canvassers faced a lot of backlash.

And actually, within a few hours, they had reversed course and decided that they would certify the results anyway in Wayne County. But then they got a call from the president. The president of the United States? Exactly, that guy. And he was very proud of what they did.

He was very happy that they were standing up for him. Then shortly after Trump called them, they said, oh, we shouldn't have reversed our opinion. We state legislature to step in and appoint electors that would give the state's electoral votes to him rather than Biden. He, in fact, invited the leaders of both chambers of the Michigan statehouse to Washington, D.C., and they met with him at the White House. And then they went to the Trump Hotel afterwards and were up late drinking there. Very normal. Very normal stuff. But they exited the meeting and said that they are not going to do anything to overturn the results. They said, we just use this meeting to ask for more coronavirus relief help in Michigan. And things are just going to proceed as planned with the electoral votes.

Thanks for the drinks. What they did do was they held a hearing last week where Rudy Giuliani and some other interesting characters showed up to make pretty fanciful claims of vote fraud. And you're being generous on interesting characters showed up to make pretty fanciful claims of vote fraud. And you're being generous on interesting characters. Wasn't one of them like arguably maybe drunk? How many registered voters are on there? Do you even know the answer to that?

No, I guess I'm trying to get to the bottom of this here. Zero. Zero. There's zero. So my question then is if the— Guess how many—wait. What about the turnout rate? 120%. Let's let Representative Johnson ask his question. I can't speak to whether this person may or may not have been inebriated, but she was certainly acting in a bizarre manner in talking back and making all

sorts of strange assertions. And we should note that one of Giuliani's witnesses said some pretty offensive things about Chinese people. A lot of people think all Indians look alike. I think all Chinese look alike. So how would you tell? And we don't want to flog a dead fart, but this was also where Rudy let himself go. Witness. I guess that brings us to Georgia. Yeah. So Georgia, this was very unusual situation here. Even more unusual than the other. Well, the dynamics in each of these states are special in their own way. So what happened in Georgia is that that whole state is run by Republicans. There's no Democratic governors, as in Michigan and Pennsylvania. There is a Republican secretary

of state, Brad Raffensperger, and a Republican governor, Brian Kemp. And so Georgia was extremely close, less than a percentage point difference between Trump and Biden, they ended up doing a statewide hand audit of their vote totals and a statewide recount of their vote totals, none of which changed the outcome. Trump has berated Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp, who did certify the results in Georgia, and his base of voters, there have been death threats to these officials. There have been all sorts of pressure. Brad Raffensperger told The Washington Post that GOP Senator Lindsey Graham asked him if political bias could have led poll workers to accept absentee ballots with signatures

that do not match. According to The Post, Senator Graham seemed to suggest that Raffensperger find a way to throw out legal ballots. And one of the top officials in the state, Gabe Sterling, gave a press conference where he gave a withering rebuke of President Trump and Republican leaders for not condemning these violent threats against election workers. Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up. And if you're going to take a position of leadership,

show some. All of this didn't end up affecting the outcome in Georgia, which has certified its results three times, in fact, which has certified its results three times, in fact, after the hand audit and the recount, they certified Biden's win. This team behind all of these legal challenges in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, they've called themselves an elite legal strike force. What's their track record? Have they have they secured the outgoing president any wins? So they filed dozens of lawsuits. And according to Mark Elias, who's a Democratic lawyer who has been tracking all of these lawsuits, the current record is one win and forty nine losses. Does the president have any real route to a victory here?

I think it was always a very long shot for him to expect to overturn the results, given the way they shook out and needing to do so in three separate states. I think if he had any shot, it was probably to somehow block certifications or to get the state legislators to step in and appoint different electors. And that just hasn't worked out for them. None of those things are happening. That's not to say that he has thrown in the towel yet or that the results are completely set in stone at this point. So we should probably talk about what comes next. After this message. Thank you. cut our AuraFrame so make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message,

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NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or Andrew, what's the next step in this election process? operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Andrew, what's the next step in this election process? When is this completely, finally, ultimately done? So what happens next is that on Monday, December 14th, the Electoral College will actually cast its votes. These are the 538 actual people who have been chosen

to be part of the Electoral College based on the results in the states. And they're going to meet separately in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. But this is not expected to be a particularly dramatic scene because Biden's chosen electors were appointed in states that Biden won and Trump's chosen electors are appointed in states that Trump won. Is there any chance that, you know, these so-called like faithless electors go rogue and don't vote the way their states did? There's a chance that a handful of them will. In 2016, we saw a surprisingly large amount of faithless electors, nowhere near enough to change the outcome, especially because Trump had won 306 electoral votes and Clinton had won 232. So if Trump lost a few electoral votes, he'd still be well above the 270 he needed.

Now, interestingly enough, it's actually the same exact margin of electoral votes. Biden has won 306 and Trump has won 232 now. So Biden also has this large cushion. He would have to have 37 electors defect to push him under 270 electoral votes. And that's totally unprecedented. And the reason especially that that's not going to happen is that the electors are chosen specifically because they are staunch partisans. Now, there were some mistakes in choosing them in 2016. That was a weird year. There were Clinton-Sanders tensions that screwed up some of the Democratic choices. There were Trump versus the establishment tensions that screwed up some of the Republican

elector choices. But my guess is that this year, the parties have done a much better job at making sure that the people they chose as electors will actually vote the way they are supposed to. And once that happens, this goes to Congress to be certified. And is there any chance for congressional shenanigans around the time of certification? So Congress's role in the process is that on January 6th, the new Congress will meet and officially count the Electoral College votes. This is supposed to be purely ceremonial.

They count the votes and that chooses the next president. However, there is at least one Trump supporter in the House of Representatives who is going to file a challenge to the results in certain states that Biden won and say that Trump deserved to win them. Deserve? Isn't this just about who actually won? Well, you know, he's claiming that there's fraud, illegal votes, that that's all been proven rather than being a fictitious conspiracy theory and that therefore Trump should just be declared the winner.

This is Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama. In my judgment, if only lawful votes cast by eligible American citizens are counted, President Trump handily won the Electoral College and second term as president. I'll spare you the drama and say that this isn't going to work. Thank you. But to explain why it's not going to work, we have to go through how it will actually play out. So the first thing Mo Brooks needs to do is he needs to find at least one senator to back his challenge, a challenge from only members of the House goes nowhere. If one senator backs the challenge, though, which is entirely possible, then what happens is that the joint session of Congress splits up and they take separate votes on whether the challenge should succeed.

But the challenge only does succeed if both houses of Congress vote that it should succeed. And that won't happen because Democrats will control the House. So basically, any congressional challenge is going nowhere. So when that's all said and done, in theory, it's all certified in January. What will this have all said about the integrity of our elections? I mean, the guy who won the popular vote and the guy who won the most electoral votes won and all of these election shenanigans, they failed. So did our election sort of stand up to these vast attempts to discredit them? I think there's an optimistic take and a pessimistic take. The optimistic take is that none of what Trump did worked. His efforts to block certifications didn't work. His efforts to

get state legislatures to appoint his own electors and states Biden won didn't work. His efforts to get judges to step in and hand him the election didn't work. And, you know, that might be a reason to feel good about our system. It's also been notable that even though there have been a scary amount of Republicans who have been embracing Trump's conspiracy theories and backing his efforts to dispute the election. Basically, any Republican in a state with a position of authority over these results has not gone along. That includes Governor Kemp and Secretary of State Raffensperger in Georgia. That includes the governor of Arizona. That includes the state legislature leaders in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Now, some of those politicians have said, oh, Trump has a point to be worried about this or

that. But what they haven't done is used their actual authority from their position to try to steal the election for Donald Trump. At most, they've thrown him a few rhetorical bones. And so if it's something about their institutional role that's constraining them, then that really is an example of how, you know, things may seem bad, but in reality, the system might be stronger than you give it credit for. All right, that's the optimistic take. Let's do the pessimistic one. So the pessimistic take is that, you know, a lot of Republicans have gone along with Trump's nonsense here a lot. And the scariest part of all this is probably that this is all unfolding when when the result isn't even that close.

It was pretty close in a bunch of states. But as I said before, it would take flipping three states to give Trump the victory. And that always seemed very unlikely to happen. It was always a stretch. But what if the election was closer? What if it was just one state? What if the margin in that one state was much closer? closer. Would we really see these Republican officials in these important institutional roles doing the right thing? Or would we see them maybe giving in to the partisan pressure? I grant you that that is very scary and certainly the pessimistic view, but I feel like something beyond a hypothetical is scarier still here, which is that the outgoing president and his acolytes in Congress and the conservative and who knows, alt-right media have convinced millions of Americans that this election was stolen from them. That's a reality. And it's going to be shaping the politics of the Biden administration for years,

if not quite half, but a big chunk of the country does not believe he was legitimately elected, that believes the election was stolen for him. You know, I think what what Trump's defenders would respond by saying is that, well, there are lots of Democrats who didn't believe that Trump's election was legitimate. They would say that Russia interfered. They would say that, oh, it was all James Comey's fault for flipping the outcome by releasing that letter about Hillary Clinton's emails. They would say that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. So Trump shouldn't be considered legitimate for that reason. And, you know, there were massive protests. The Women's March was the day after Trump's inauguration. So he also started off with a big chunk of the American people

believing he wasn't really a legitimate president. So, you know, we have survived these four years of the Trump administration despite that. And hopefully we will survive the Biden administration as well. I certainly hope so. Yes, me too. Okay. Hopefully we will not die. I don't want to ever die.

Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent, hopefully the first person at Vox to get the vaccine. I'm Sean Ramos-Burm. This is Today Explained.