Ex-Sen. Danforth says Trump ‘causing incalculable damage’ with attacks on vote counting
President Donald Trump is doing severe damage to American democracy with his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, former Sen. John Danforth said, in one of strongest statements from a Missouri Republican on the matter.
Danforth’s comments come as former Vice President Joe Biden is on the verge of winning the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency. A handful of states continue to count an unprecedented volume of mail ballots.
Trump, who repeatedly attacked mail voting in the lead-up to the election, made the extraordinary demand Wednesday for states to stop counting ballots and alleged massive fraud without any evidence.
“By alleging widespread fraud, President Trump’s purpose is to undermine Americans’ belief in the legitimacy of the election and therefore in the foundation of our democracy. He is causing incalculable damage to our country,” said Danforth in a statement.
Trump made baseless claims that voter fraud cost him the popular vote in the 2016 election. He formed a presidential commission to investigate, but it disbanded without finding any evidence.
Danforth, who represented Missouri in the U.S. Senate from 1976 to 1995 and served as President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump.
In 2017, he called on Republicans in the state to cut ties with the president. Few in the region followed his advice, including then-Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, who Danforth helped recruit to run for U.S. Senate in 2018.
Hawley has emerged as a close ally of Trump and this week promised to introduce election integrity legislation in response to the Trump campaign’s concerns about the counting process.
He also has attacked Twitter and Facebook for attaching warning labels to the president’s posts for spreading misinformation about the election.
“What a surprise. The #BigTech crackdown continues,” Hawley said in a tweet on Thursday.
Other Kansas and Missouri senators have been cautious in their comments about the protracted and contentious counting process.
“We must make certain every vote is counted correctly, and I’m confident the principles outlined in our Constitution will guide us through this moment,” Sen. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, posted to Twitter Friday.
Former Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer, who Trump tapped earlier this year to lead a rural health care advisory panel, said both Trump and Biden should have the opportunity to make their cases in the courts of law and public opinion.
“I think in the end with public scrutiny on this, if there are problems they’ll get rooted out,” Colyer said.
Two years ago, Colyer made the difficult choice to concede the GOP gubernatorial primary to Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach in a race decided by a little more than 300 votes.
He was within margin to request a recount, but ultimately decided to concede as provisional ballots were still being counted in some counties.
“When I made my decision I was at the point where we would have to go through all sorts of legal battles, which we thought we could win but they would take a lot of time… I didn’t want Kansas’ reputation to be that we couldn’t run an election. We could’ve burnt everything down,” Colyer said Friday.
“It was a very hard decision. It was, how’s my state going to be better? And do I put us through this sort of thing? To me, it was frankly just a public policy choice. And I don’t regret it at all.”
This story was originally published November 6, 2020 at 4:32 PM.
