Trump’s election doubts in works for months
The trouble broke out inside the main counting room in Detroit late on the morning of Nov. 4.
It was the day after Election Day, and until then the process of tabulating votes from the city’s various counting boards had gone smoothly inside the TCF Center, the cavernous convention hall that plays host to the North American International Auto Show.
As batches of ballots came in by van, workers methodically inspected and registered them at 134 separate tables, each monitored by voting rights observers and so- called election challengers from each party.
But the posture of the Republican challengers shifted as the count swung in favor of Joe Biden and word spread that President Donald Trump would sue. One witness, a nonpartisan observer, Julie Moroney, said she heard a Republican organizer say, “Now we’re going to challenge every ballot.”
Republican volunteers suddenly ramped up their objections across the room: accusations that the workers doing the counting were entering obviously incorrect birth years or backdating ballots. In some cases, the volunteers lodged blanket claims of wrongdoing.
“What are you doing?” a worker asked a Republican observer who was challenging ballots before he was able to even begin to inspect them, a Democratic observer, Seth Furlow, recalled. The Republican observer responded, “I was told to challenge every one.”
Furlow vividly recalled his discomfort with a scene in which mostly white Republican challengers were confronting the mostly Black elections workers.
Already, police had escorted a handful of particularly disruptive observers from the room. But tensions increased when election officials noticed that the number of challengers had grown well beyond what each side was permitted and barred entry in a bid to reduce their ranks. Shouts of “stop the count” went up among Republicans.
The fraud that the Republicans claimed to observe was not fraud at all, a Michigan state judge determined on Friday in rejecting a lawsuit filed by allies of Trump. The various instances of supposed malfeasance were in fact well- established procedures for dealing with the peculiarities of data entry, the correction of minor errors and protocols for social distancing — all intended to ensure a careful and accurate vote count.
But in the fact- twisting narrative of Trump, his political allies and his supporters, the Detroit counting center was a crime scene where Democrats stole an election, a miscarriage demanding that outrage be channeled through the courts, presidential Twitter posts and cable news stemwinders.
And that was the plan envisioned by the pro- Trump forces all along.
Like similar episodes in Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the scene in Detroit was the culmination of a years- long strategy by Trump to use the power of the executive branch, an army of lawyers, the echo chamber of conservative news media and the obedience of fellow Republicans to try out his most audacious exercise in bending reality: to turn losing into winning.
Obscured by the postelection noise over the president’s efforts to falsely portray the election system as “rigged” against him has been how much Trump and his allies did ahead of time to promote a baseless conspiracy devised to appeal to his supporters, providing him with the opportunity to make his bid to cling to power in the face of defeat.
The president saw mailin ballots as a political threat that would appeal more to Democrats than to his followers. And so he and his allies sought to block moves to make absentee voting easier and to slow the counting of mail ballots. This allowed Trump to do two things: claim an early victory on election night and paint ballots that were counted later for his opponent as fraudulent.