The harm is elevating unfounded claims of a stolen election leading millions of people to believe something was actually stolen from them at a time when partisanship and distrust of people with different political views is already at a boil. It’s reckless and irresponsible.

I think Trump's legal team was completely incompetent

However to believe there was no legit legal claims in an election where the rules where being rewritten on the fly often times with no legislative oversight at all by governor executive fiat is completely delusional

What? A bunch of cases were declined because the laws were written months in advance about it and only now they sue claiming unfairness.

There are reasonable questions about the rules, process and procedures used in the last election.

There was a lot that was done over the last year that eroded trust in this election, the objections on the day of the electoral count being the final perfunctory domino.

Trust in a system has to be earned, and the way that we go about setting the rules for voting, counting valid votes, and reporting the count has been frankly a very chaotic process. It’s no doubt millions of people doubt the outcome.

But this isn’t really anything new. In 2016 50% of Democrats believed that it was somewhat or highly likely that Russians directly altered vote totals to elect Trump.

Harry Reid said there’s “no question” in his mind that Russian hackers covertly altered the 2016 vote count. “I think one reason the elections weren’t what they should have been was because the Russians manipulated the votes. It’s that simple.”

I hope you are being willfully disingenuous with those arguments. Parsing words in just the right way to make a partial point does not count as compelling evidence for your alternate reality.

Not at all. Here’s a good example, from AG of PA Josh Shapiro;

> @RepFredKeller LIE: PA officials violated the law in regards to signature verification on mail-in ballots.

FACT: Our Election Code-which a Republican-controlled state legislature revised in 2019-does not provide for rejecting mail-in ballots based on signature verification.

https://twitter.com/joshshapiropa/status/1347063329404178432...

I don’t see how this is supposed to build trust that the election was run fairly and securely, in fact quite the opposite.

My point is not to debate specific failures. My point is it’s the responsibility of the systems and processes in place in the electoral system to instill trust in the populace that there is no fraud in the voting or the counting.

Instead, people were lied to about how votes would be cast, lied to about how votes would be counted, and the rules were changed arbitrarily in many places up to the final days and even hours of actual voting.

Again, my point is not how much fraud was actually present. But you can have a system people mostly trust even if they don’t like the outcome, or you can do things like not even checking the signature on millions of mail-in ballots.

Signature checking is stupid and pointless. Disenfranchising someone because their signature doesn’t match some record on file is ridiculous. The signature verification itself has many many issues on its own.

The problem is stating without evidence that the signatures are absolutely fraudulent. The claims made by Trump and the GOP over the last decade about voter fraud are to blame.

The president and his cronies have repeatedly claimed in public that they have evidence of massive fraud. They have not even attempted to claim any of these in court, where these claims would have been immediately discovered as outright fabrications.

Also, Trump has sought to buy out election officials with 'gifts', has cajoled and petitioned various others to ask for votes to be thrown out or 'discovered', has tried to convince congressmen and senators to overturn the result of the vote, has cobtemplated invoking marshal law and redoing the election and so on.

In all of this he has been successful in conning a large number of people that the most important democratic institution, the vote, has been stolen from them by the federal government and several states. They were convinced enough that they tried attacking Congress to force it to overturn the results.

If these are not aspects of an attempted coup, I don't know how they should be interpreted.

> While none of his objections had any legal merit, what exactly is scary in principle about using the law as it written to contest the results of an election?

But that's not what happened. What really happened was that Donald Trump and his lawyers repeatedly committed perjury and barratry by deliberately filing cases that were either false or meaningless.

Any petitioner acting in good faith needs their day in court.

There are already penalties in law for people who attempt to abuse the court system for their own benefit and these penalties need to be applied with maximum force to the Trump administration and their legal "professionals".