Republicans face choice on whether to enable Trump in election claims,
For the next three weeks, the integrity of American democracy is in the hands of people like Norman D. Shinkle, a proud Michigander who has, until recently, served in relative obscurity on the state board that certifies vote results.
But now Shinkle faces a choice born from the national election turmoil created by President Donald Trump, his preferred candidate, for whom he sang the national anthem at a campaign rally in Lansing, Michigan, last month.
Shinkle’s duty, as one of two Republicans on the four-member board, is to validate the will of Michigan voters and certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory before the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14. Yet Shinkle is weighing whether to block certification at a board meeting scheduled for Monday, because of minor glitches that Trump and his allies have baselessly cast as evidence of widespread, election-invalidating fraud.
He said he had received hundreds of phone calls, emails and text messages from people for or against certifying. “You can’t make up your mind before you get all the facts,” he said.
That Shinkle is equivocating over a once-routine step in the process — despite all 83 state counties submitting certified results and Biden leading by 154,000 votes — shows the damage inflicted by Trump on the American voting process and the faith that people in both parties have historically shared in the outcome of elections.
But this is also a moment of truth for the Republican Party: The country is on a knife’s edge, with GOP officials from state capitols to Congress choosing between the will of voters and the will of one man.
At this point, the president’s impact is not so much about overturning the election — both parties agree he has no real chance of doing that — but infusing the democratic process with so much mistrust and confusion that it ceases to function as it should.
Under an unending barrage of fraud charges, voters might begin to question the legitimacy of elected officials from the rival party as a matter of course. And the GOP risks being seen as standing for disenfranchisement and the undemocratic position that a high level of voting is somehow detrimental.
“What Trump is doing is creating a road map to destabilization and chaos in future years,” said Trevor Potter, a Republican who served as chair of the Federal Election Commission in the 1990s. “What he’s saying, explicitly, is if a party doesn’t like the election result they have the right to change it by gaming the system.”
Trump’s gambit, never realistic to begin with, appears to be growing more futile by the day: Georgia became the first contested state Friday to certify its vote for Biden, and the president continues to draw losing rulings from judges who bluntly note his failure to present any evidence of significant fraud or irregularities. On Saturday a federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed a lawsuit by the Trump campaign seeking to invalidate ballots, ending Trump’s last major effort to delay certification of the state’s results. The judge excoriated the campaign’s legal team for seeking the disenfranchisement of 7 million voters based on evidence-free “speculative accusations.”
Some fellow Republicans have started breaking with him, including Sen. Mitt Romney, a Trump critic, who said the president was seeking to “subvert the will of the people,” and Sen. Marco Rubio, who has acknowledged Biden is the president-elect.
On Friday, Republican lawmakers in Michigan also made clear, after meeting with Trump at the White House, they would allow the normal certification process to play out without interfering, a potentially important signal ahead of the certification decision by the state elections board Monday.
But Saturday, the national and Michigan state party chairs issued a statement calling on the canvassing board to delay certification beyond its Monday deadline, to conduct an audit.
If Shinkle and his fellow Republican on the state board, Aaron Van Langevelde, were to oppose certifying the results, the board would deadlock.
Democrats and election lawyers say the courts would almost certainly force the board to complete the certification process, well in time for the Electoral College deadline next month. And Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could replace the board members if they defy a court order. But they also agree a deadlocked vote would give Trump a new opportunity to cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the election system and Biden’s win, while also prolonging his own legally dubious and failing attempt to convince Republicans who control the Statehouse to send pro-Trump delegates to the Electoral College.
Biden’s advisers say they are confident he will be awarded Michigan’s 16 Electoral College votes. But they acknowledge that the resulting national spectacle of court fights and new charges of fraud could prove “very harmful to the democratic process,” as Biden’s senior adviser, Bob Bauer, put it Friday.