President Donald Trump still has not conceded the election, though it has been weeks since his loss to president-elect Joe Biden. Having lost the electoral vote with a count of 306 to 232, and the popular vote by a difference of almost 6 million as cited by the Associated Press, the president has taken to social media to rally his supporters. 

Trump has been especially active claiming that he won on Twitter, tweeting that he “won the election!” and that he “won’t let a RIGGED ELECTION steal our country!” These statements follow months of the president doubting, without evidence, the security of mail-in voting.  

Though these claims were unfounded, and there has been little evidence to suggest any serious amount of fraud, President Trump’s fear-mongering seems to have gotten to his base. In recent polls by “YouGov” and “The Economist,” as written in a recent article by The Washington Post, only 6 in 10 Americans polled believe that Biden won the presidency legitimately, despite a lack of evidence to the contrary. This fell to 1.4 in 10 when looking just at supporters of President Trump who were asked. 

President Trump did garner 73.6 million votes, which is around a fifth of the US population and about 48 percent of the ballots cast, in comparison to Biden’s 79.6 million. While most of the country will not accept or believe the lies the president is spreading, more than half of the party in power will. 

In response, experts have raised concerns about President Trump’s refusal to concede. In an article by “FiveThirtyEight,” they wrote “the sitting president’s refusal to acknowledge electoral defeat is worrisome, as it raises the prospect that he will not uphold a core tenet of democracy. Elections determine who is in power, and those who lose surrender power peacefully.” The article continues, saying, “based on how Trump broke with democratic values as president and how he is handling the end of his presidency, America does remain a democracy, but it is somewhat less democratic than it was pre-Trump.”

Trump has also put into effect plans to contest the election. The Trump campaign has over the past few weeks filed several lawsuits in multiple states marked for Biden, alleging voter fraud and inaccurate counting of all sorts, all without a factual basis. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Trump campaign has been attempting to prevent the certification of the election results on the basis of unfair practices. A similar suit was filed in Michigan but was rejected. In Arizona, they alleged that legal votes had been rejected to Trump’s detriment. In Nevada and Georgia too there have been attempts to stop the process of finishing the electoral process. Though these attempts vary in scale and allegation, they all have a few things in common; they have lacked serious evidence, and they have been almost entirely unsuccessful. The majority of legal proceedings have been rejected or dismissed in courts, blocking the Trump campaign from establishing a serious legal precedent upon their misinformation. Nonetheless, they remain as a potentially dangerous attempt to undermine the democratic process.