In Nevada, attorney Joey Gilbert raised money to pay for a $190,000 recount that still showed him losing the GOP nomination for governor by 26,000 votes. In Colorado, county clerk Tina Peters raised $256,000 to pay for a recount that showed she gained 13 votes total in her bid for the party nomination for Secretary of State, but still lost by more than 88,000 votes. Both candidates continued to claim they had actually won the election even as recounts showed they came nowhere close.
The refusal of candidates or campaigns to believe they could ever be defeated in an election is a dangerous development for American democracy, said Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona voting official who is now a senior adviser to Democracy Fund.
“What we see now is people just don’t believe they lost because they’re constantly being fed these lies about the legitimacy of the process,” Patrick said. The call for recounts “keeps their base engaged, ginned up and donating,” she added.
Seems like the norm these days is just to refuse to concede, force a recount, gain maybe double-digit votes if lucky while still losing by 5-digit, and keep on calling the election illegitimate. Even in the PRIMARY.
It keeps the base engaged and donate, at the expense of trust in our democracy.
BTW, is this a Republican thing? Or has Democrat been doing this too?
Kansas abortion vote: Why recount with such a large margin?
Kansas has begun a partial hand recount of this month’s decisive statewide vote in favor of abortion rights
abcnews.go.com
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