BRUCE EVANS • Guest Opinion
I can’t imagine what an Atlantic Canadian audience must think of what’s going on in the post-election battles south of the border.
I’m sure that most of your news — originally sourced from the likes of CNN and MSNBC, filtered through the liberal lenses at CBC and CTV — would have you believe that Joe Biden has been anointed by now and the moving trucks should be rolling up to the back door of the White House.
That’s not how it works. Despite the media race to trumpet results, there is a formal process for declaring the winner of a presidential election, and nowhere in the legislation does it mention a role for a “Decision Desk” at any media outlet. Please keep in mind that the election process is determined on a state level; the basics are generally consistent, but dates and procedures differ state to state.
Each state certifies its results for selection of Electoral College electors on its own legislated schedule, Dec. 8 being the deadline. Most states will certify by Nov. 30. The states most in the news for contentious results, with certification dates in parentheses, are Michigan and Pennsylvania (both on Nov. 23). Georgia’s deadline is today (Nov. 20).
On Dec. 14, the Electoral College meets to cast its votes. On Jan. 6, Congress certifies those results and a president gets inaugurated on Jan. 20.
Enter the wild cards.
There have been numerous recounts in various jurisdictions. As usual, these have yielded a few hundred vote variations here and there, but nothing to overturn initial results.
But now something wicked this way comes! On Nov. 19, a cadre of Trump lawyers held a news conference to preface a case for widespread and nefarious vote-count manipulation through Dominion voting machines and Smartmatic software. They were long on innuendo and short on details.
The allegation is that two companies, with suspect foreign ownership and operations, manipulated vote counts to a significant degree (300,000 in Michigan and 700,000 in Pennsylvania) to counter a Trump landslide.
Being a Trump supporter, I would like to believe these allegations are true. Being an American patriot, it would appal me to have those allegations proven true.
Trump’s legal team has gone all-out with respect to the allegations, albeit teasingly. They have kept the evidence asymptotically close to the vest.
Some may dismiss Rudy Giuliani as a dancing bear for the Trump camp. I disagree with the characterization, but understand its general acceptance. Sidney Powell is a different animal. She is a serious and tremendously skilled appellate litigator, a force of legal nature.
All that notwithstanding, the legal rubber has to meet the road. Now, if not sooner.
Bruce Evans was born, raised and educated in Atlantic Canada — Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia. After a Dal MBA, he had a career in project finance in several cities — Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, New York and L.A. — with a variety of international (Canadian, Japanese, French and Australian) financial players. He is happily retired in Arizona, volunteering, walking a dog named Charli and working to get a golf handicap moving south.
