Throughout the month of November 2020, the presidential election took place. The two main competitors seen in this year’s election was Donald Trump, our 45th U.S. president, and his rival, Joe Biden, who represented the US Democratic party.

With a whopping 58 electoral votes and 3.7% lead in the popular vote, Joe Biden swept the 2020 election and will be inaugurated as president in January 2021. However, President Trump and his many Republican supporters are claiming election fraud, even going as far as to say that people rigged the votes.

It is clear through his denial in-person as well as his many tweets on social media platform Twitter, Donald Trump claims that we should believe that this election was “rigged and corrupt.”

However, there are many sources that assert otherwise. Ironically enough, one of these sources include President Trump himself. In a tweet he made before the election was called by the Associated Press, he boasted about how he was able to make this election “the most secure election ever,” only to suddenly switch sides as his popularity began to decline.

Trump has consistently been refusing to accept his loss in the 2020 presidential election as well as acknowledge President-Elect Joe Biden as the winner.

One of my fellow sophomore peers from Troy High School, Daniel Lee, says: “Honestly, we never know what could have happened in the actual election results. Voter preference obviously went to Biden, and each of the states clearly had its slight majorities. However, I personally do not think the election was rigged or taken hostage in any way.”

I agree with Daniel and I believe that Trump just cannot accept the fact that he lost to Biden. He is in denial of the facts and resorts to convincing himself that this election was fraudulent to save his ego.

In any election, it would be a surprise if there was no voter fraud. There will always be exceptions when dealing with an extremely large pool of voters, such as the voting American public. However, the couple votes that might have slipped through will not change the election result as a whole, and Trump is blinding himself with his own self-confidence.

One of my other student peers, Mo Zhou, had taken a more neutral stance in saying that “Due to COVID, instances of voter fraud are now significantly easier to achieve. Personally I do not have any thoughts regarding the vote frauds, as this may be the sad reality or just another time of Trump laughing the whole nation up just like the past 4 years of his presidency.”

Although I do take a different stance than what Mo believes, he makes a good argument in the sense that since voting is not in person, President Trump’s claim that this election was a fraud is much more believable. However, as I stated before, even with the couple of fraudulent votes that may have gone through, it would not have affected the outcome of the election.

<Connor Kim / Troy High School 10th Grade>