Trump’s electoral battle more brazen
President invites Michigan GOP lawmakers to White House in attempt to overturn election results
After failing repeatedly in court to overturn election results, President Donald Trump is taking the extraordinary step of reaching out directly to Republican state legislators as he tries to subvert the Electoral College process, inviting Michigan lawmakers to meet with him at the White House on Friday.
A source with knowledge of the trip said that Trump would meet with Michigan’s Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, and speaker of the House, Lee Chatfield, late Friday afternoon. Both lawmakers are Republicans who have said that whoever has the most votes in Michigan after the results are certified will get the state’s 16 electoral votes.
The White House invitation to Republican lawmakers in a battleground state is the latest — and the most brazen — salvo in a scattershot campaign- after- the-campaign waged by Trump and his allies to cast doubt on President- elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s decisive victory.
It comes as the Trump campaign and its allies have been seeking to overturn the results of the election in multiple states through lawsuits and intrusions into the state vote certification process, often targeting cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta with large
and politically powerful Black populations. Trump himself reached out personally to at least one election official in Wayne County, Michigan, home of Detroit, who tried to decertify the results there.
Some members of Trump’s team have promoted the legally dubious theory that friendly legislatures could under certain scenarios effectively subvert the popular vote and send their own, pro-Trump delegations to the Electoral College.
Shirkey said in an interview earlier this week with Bridge Michigan, a local news outlet, that the Legislature would not move to appoint its own slate of electors, stating, “That’s not going to happen.”
The statewide canvassing board, a bipartisan four-member panel, is responsible for certifying Michigan’s election results by a Monday deadline.
One of the Republican members of the board, Norm Shinkle, said in an inter view on Thursday that he was coming under enormous pressure regarding his vote, which he said was complicated by a late night announcement from the two Republicans on the four-member canvassing board in Wayne County that they wanted to “rescind” their votes to certify the county’s results.
T r ump rea ched out Tuesday night to one of those Republicans, Monica Palmer, to thank her for her support, according to two people briefed on the call. Palmer and the other Republican board member, William Hartmann, had initially refused to certify the election results, before relenting Tuesday night after a public outcry and accusations that they were trying to disenfranchise voters in Detroit, which is more than three- quarters Black. Palmer and Hartmann are white.
The Republicans sought to rescind the certification votes they had cast on Tuesday night through affidavits released late Wednesday night, roughly 24 hours after Trump had spoken with Palmer.
But legally, functionally and practically, they cannot do so.
“There is no legal mechanism for them to rescind their vote,” Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for Michigan’s top election official, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, said on Thursday. “Their job is done and the next step in the process is for the Board of State Canvassers to meet and certify.” That meeting is scheduled for Monday.
At a news conference Thursday, Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and other allies lambasted the media and laid out dubious legal claims and a plan to file more lawsuits. At one point, Giuliani was sweating so profusely that sprayon brown hair color visibly dripped from his temples to his chin.
Many of the allegations of fraud stem from poll watchers who filed affidavits included with lawsuits in battleground states aimed at delaying vote certification. Those affidavits lean into innuendo and unsupported suggestions of fraud.
For example, they refer to suitcases in a polling place, but make no suggestion that ballots were being secretly counted. There are allegations of ballots being duplicated — something routinely done when a ballot is physically damaged. There are claims that partisan poll watchers were too far away to observe well and therefore something fishy was probably going on. But they don’t have proof. Poll watchers have no auditing role in elections; they are volunteer observers.
Giuliani cited a few sworn affidavits that he said showed a vast Democratic conspiracy, but added that he could not reveal much of the evidence. One he cited was from Jessy Jacob, identified as a city employee in Detroit who said she saw other workers coaching voters to cast ballots for Biden and the Democrats.
A judge who refused to block certification of Detroit-area results noted that Jacob’s claims included no “date, location, frequency or names of employees” and that she only came forward after unofficial results indicated Biden had won Michigan.
Trump legal adv iser Jenna Ellis, who joined Giuliani, said more evidence would be forthcoming and that Trump’s allies would have more success in courts going forward. But so far, most of their legal actions have been dismissed.
Chris Krebs, the Trump administration election official fired last week over the comments about the security of 2020, tweeted: “That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest.”