Miranda Devine: Joe Biden’s election win will always be questioned

Claims that Donald Trump is acting like a dictator or fighting a lost cause obscure very real problems in the way the vote was conducted, leaving an America divided, writes Miranda Devine.

Former US President Barack Obama had the hide this week to liken his successor, Donald Trump, to a “dictator” who was “delegitimising not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally”.

Obama told Sixty Minutes: “There are strong men and dictators around the world who think that ‘I can do anything to stay in power. I can kill people. I can throw them in jail. I can run phony elections. I can suppress journalists.’ But that’s not who we’re ­supposed to be.”

That’s rich, considering it was Obama, as the Wall Street Journal points out, whose administration spied on journalists, including Fox News’ James Rosen and 20 Associ­ated Press reporters, whose phones were secretly monitored.

It was Obama who authorised drone strikes which killed 300 civilians overseas.

Former US President Barack Obama is very hypocritical to criticise Donald Trump for acting like a dictator. Picture: Chandan Khanna/AFP

And it was Obama whose administration spied on the Trump campaign, framed General Michael Flynn as a Russian agent and set in train the Russia collusion hoax which hobbled Trump’s presidency for three years.

So, spare us the moral lectures, Mr Obama.

Barack Obama’s hypocrisy is of a piece with a Democratic party which has spent four years trying to railroad Trump out of office and now complains he is “delegitimising” Joe Biden by pursuing constitutionally sound legal avenues to contest the results of a close election.

Democrats spent four years investigating the Russia collusion hoax cooked up by Hillary Clinton to cover her email scandals.

Trump deserves four weeks to challenge election irregularities in certain swing states, which worry half the country.

Dodgy election counts are being challenged in the courts. Picture: Megan Varner/Getty Images

As Trump campaign lawsuits wend their way through the courts, with limited success, a small bombshell erupted in Georgia yesterday, when about 2600 uncounted votes, mostly for Trump, were discovered during a hand recount of machine votes. There were 1643 new votes for Trump and 865 for Biden, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

It’s nowhere near enough to overturn Trump’s 14,000 deficit in the state, but it does feed into lurid but unverified claims from Trump lawyer Sidney Powell that Dominion Voting Systems machines used in parts of Georgia and 27 other states have been hacked to move Trump votes to Biden.

Trump also has alleged on Twitter that Dominion machines might have deleted 2.7 million votes meant for him.

Dominion and the Department of Homeland Security have rejected the claims but Powell claims she will soon present “staggering” evidence that will prove otherwise.

US President Donald Trump believes well over 2 million votes meant for him may have been accidentally deleted from voting machines. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

She told Fox News this week that Dominion “was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela, for Hugo Chavez, and then shipped internationally to manipulate votes for purchase in other countries ­including this one … I mean we are talking about hundreds of thousands of votes.

“President Trump won this election in a landslide. It is going to be ­irrefutable.”

While most media have derided Powell’s claims, there is a long history of fraud complaints from all sides of politics about Dominion and other electronic voting machines. Princeton University mathematician Andrew Appel, who testified in Congress two years ago about problems with the machines’, is loath to get ­involved in politics.

But he said in a statement that “all voting machines can be hacked … One way or another, the software in any voting machine can be (fraudulently) replaced.”

However, he said, “vulnerabilities are not the same as rigged elections, especially when we have paper ballots in almost all the states”.

Half the US believes Joe Biden is an illegitimate President as the country tears itself apart. Picture: Terry Pontikos

Dominion’s election-management software in Antrim County, Michigan, for instance, is “badly ­designed” so that “votes for Trump may be mistakenly uploaded as votes for Biden. Dominion calls that ‘human error.’ I call it bad software design that fails to make consistency checks on its input”.

Fortunately, he says Antrim County has hand-marked paper ballots that can be audited by hand, so it was able to correct the error.

Appel says the best solution is to stick to paper ballots, as Australia has done.

In any case Trump campaign lawyers have to persuade judges, not just public opinion, before December 14, the constitutional deadline for ­electors to cast the decisive vote for president.

Without a knockout blow in court, it will be President Joe Biden living in the White House come January 20, albeit with an air of illegitimacy hanging over him.

It looks as if Joe Biden will move into the White House on January 20. Picture: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

But it’s not Trump’s fault that ­millions of voters don’t trust the ­integrity of this election.

The real culprits are Democrats who opportunistically changed election rules at the last minute, under cover of the pandemic, with their ­armies of lawyers filing multiple lawsuits to weaken voter ID laws and weight the scales in their favour.

The result in a close election is widespread doubt.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph