MICH. LAWMAKERS PLEDGE TO FOLLOW ‘NORMAL PROCESS’; GA. CERTIFIES VOTE
President Donald Trump received twin setbacks in his effort to overturn his defeat on Friday, with Georgia officials certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s slim victory there and Michigan Republicans declaring after a White House meeting that they had learned nothing to warrant reversing the outcome in their state.
“We will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election,” Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield said in a joint statement issued late Friday.
The developments came after a tumultuous Thursday, when the president’s lawyers held a news conference on Capitol Hill and made claims that Biden rigged the election and proclaimed their intent to aggressively challenge the results.
Trump this week made an extraordinarily personal intervention in Michigan, where his lawyers hope to stall the state’s certification of the vote, set to be considered at a meeting Monday, and get the GOP-controlled Legislature to appoint proTrump electors. Trump trails Biden in Michigan by about 156,000 votes.
But even after a personal invitation to the White House by the president, the state’s top two GOP lawmakers notably did not endorse his claims of widespread fraud in the state and instead said they used the meeting to press Trump for more COVID-19 relief funds.
“We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan,” Shirkey and Chatfield said in their joint statement.
“Michigan’s certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and intimidation,” they added. “Allegations of fraudulent behavior should be taken seriously, thoroughly investigated, and if proven, prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And the candidates who win the most votes win elections and Michigan’s electoral votes. These are simple truths that should provide confidence in our elections.”
Meanwhile, in Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger certified Biden’s roughly 12,000-vote win and Gov. Brian Kemp, also a Republican, signed the certification, leaving little chance for delays in the seating of Biden’s electors there. Trump can still request a recount in the state, but Raffensperger — who has resisted pressure from Trump’s allies to support their claims of irregularities in the vote — has said he does not expect it to change the outcome.
“As secretary of state, I believe that the numbers that we have presented today are correct,” he said in a statement Friday. “The numbers ref lect the verdict of the people, not a decision by the secretary of state’s office or of courts or of either campaign.”
Some battles continued on in a handful of other states, but even there, Trump’s hopes to delay or overturn the result appeared diminished on Friday.
In Wisconsin, election officials in Milwaukee and Dane counties on Friday began a recount requested by the president’s campaign. The Trump campaign asked that several categories of ballots, potentially amounting to tens of thousands of votes, be set aside for potential challenge. It was unclear that any large-scale ballot rejection would succeed, however, given that the types of ballots the campaign targeted were treated no differently than elsewhere in the state.
The president, who trails Biden in Wisconsin by about 20,600 votes, could have requested a statewide recount but did so only in the state’s two most Democratic counties.
In Arizona, one pending legal challenge to the election remains, involving complaints from two voters that their votes were not properly counted — but it affects too few ballots to change the outcome.
In Nevada, the statewide results are expected to be certified on Tuesday. The following day, a Carson City judge is set to hear the Trump campaign’s argument that the results should be overturned or annulled as a result of widespread irregularities and fraud. Similar claims have met with defeat in other court proceedings in Nevada.
Pennsylvania counties were given a deadline of Monday to submit their official results to Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, who is expected to move swiftly to certify the presidential race for Biden. But Berks County, which Trump won by eight points, does not intend to certify its results until Wednesday. Stephanie Weaver, a county spokeswoman, said the state was aware of the plan. Boockvar’s office did not respond to requests for comment on how the delay would affect her schedule.
Despite such bumps, Trump detractors expressed confidence Friday that state officials in the states where the president is trying to overturn the results — Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada — would respect the will of the popular vote.
“There’s no question this is cheap theater,” said Jim Blanchard, a former Democratic governor in Michigan, of the meeting between Trump and GOP lawmakers from his home state. “This is going to get played out one way or the other, and we’re going to have the Electoral College selected to vote for Joe Biden. The only question is how many days it will be.”
At the White House, Shirkey, Chatfield and several other state GOP lawmakers met with the president in what White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany described as a routine visit with elected leaders.
McEnany said the meeting would involve no advocacy, and no campaign officials were scheduled to attend — including lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sydney Powell, whose news conference Thursday featured claims of a centralized conspiracy with roots in Venezuela to rig the U.S. presidential election. They alleged voter fraud in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and other cities whose municipal governments are controlled by Democrats and where Biden won by large margins.
The event prompted an avalanche of outcry from Republicans and Democrats alike, who accused the president of using the power of his office to attempt an unprecedented subversion of democracy.
Trump is “famous in many well-documented instances of asking or doing things that are inappropriate in most people’s view,” said former Michigan governor Rick Snyder, a Republican. “I don’t think it would be surprising that he’d do something inappropriate today.”
But, Snyder added, Shirkey and Chatfield are “well-respected lawmakers, and they’re going to follow the law.”
The lawmakers’ White House visit came after Trump personally intervened to try to upend Michigan’s vote certification process. All 83 counties have certified their vote counts, and the state board of canvassing is scheduled to meet Monday to consider certifying the final state tally.
This week, the president called a GOP official who voted to certify the results in Wayne County, home of Detroit. She and her fellow Republican board member subsequently tried to rescind their confirmatory votes, a move the secretary of state’s office said was not permitted.
Trump’s invitation to Shirkey and Chatfield ratcheted up alarm among current and former elected officials in Michigan, who expressed fear that he would pressure them into embracing his claims of massive voter fraud in Detroit and encourage the state canvassing board not to certify the vote.
One of the two Republicans on the state canvassing board, Norman Shinkle, told The Washington Post on Thursday that he was leaning toward seeking a delay and requesting an audit of the vote, citing conspiracy theories touted by Trump and his attorneys about voting machines.
“Right now, the idea to check into some of these accusations seems to make sense to me,” he said.
Trump’s lawyers have said that if the state board deadlocks on certifying the vote, they want the GOP-controlled Legislature to appoint its own slate of electors.
Election law experts have said such a move would be legally dubious, as state law grants no role for the legislature in the certification process.