Nine days after America voted, Joe Biden is moving forward with his transition to the presidency, announcing his choice for White House Chief of Staff, while President Trump continues to mount legal challenges.
The President still refuses to concede and many key Republican leaders support that decision, still not acknowledging that Biden is president-elect
Meanwhile, at least four Republicans in the Senate, eight in the House and four GOP governors are accepting that Biden won - congratulating him, as are most world leaders. But close to half the country thinks this election is still undecided and in dispute.
Matthew Weil is the Director of the Election Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington that was founded by four former Senate Majority Leaders from both parties to promote bipartisanship permanently since March 1.
Weil said that even though the Election Day results are not the final results, it is more common than not that as votes continue to be counted, the leading candidate in each state becomes the confirmed winner.
Weil also said that he is concerned about President Trump’s role in the nation’s electoral process.
“It’s a huge problem,” Weil said. “Recent surveys over the past week have shown that over 70% of Republicans don’t trust that the system is fair. That always happens – the party who loses finds the process to be unfair, but these unfounded claims of irregularity or bias in the process, those aren’t true. And certainly he has a big and powerful megaphone. And to be saying that, to be undermining our entire electoral process, which is going to result in no change to the outcome, doesn’t serve democracy very well at all.”
Weil said that at the end of the day, fraud is not a major problem in the election process.
“In any process we have 160 million ballots being cast and counted by humans. There is going to be some problem, there’s going to be some cases where people have voted fraudulently,” Weil said. “But even when we’ve done extensive research, we don’t find any systematic fraud in our system. And one of the reasons why it’s taking so long to count the votes is because of all those security features and checks on the ballots to make sure only eligible ballots are counted.”
Weil said that one of the big reforms that states should apply in future elections is counting absentee ballots as they are received, instead of waiting until Election Day.
“It would have allowed states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to have results maybe even on election night, instead of the days afterwards,” Weil said. “And the reason why that’s important is because we knew this period after Election Day when there is a void and when the counting process is going to be exposed to the entire public, many which do not understand – that was going to be a risk.”
He added that even if Joe Biden is officially announced as the 46th president of the U.S., President Trump will not leave the scene quietly.
“I think we should expect to see President, or former President, Trump out there rallying his troops,” Weil said. “I don’t think he’s going anywhere. I think he’s going to be a leader of his segment of the party.”
