PRESIDENT MAKES  BAZAAR ATTEMPTS TO REVERSE ELECTION RESULTS

 

         …This is how the president is looking to much of the country and the world.

 

The president personally intervened in Michigan.  The results were a state board member’s desire to withdraw her vote to certify

 

The messy efforts to upend the US presidential election has moved from the courtroom to a series of Trump’s ridiculous events in the country’s state capitals.  Bazaar deliberations are now under enormous pressure as President Trump and his allies try to block any formal recognition of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in key battleground states.

In the immediate focus, it is on the four-member Michigan state canvassing board, which is scheduled to meet today on whether to certify Biden’s large win in that state.

On Thursday, one of the two Republicans on the board said that he did expected Biden to win the election.  But he may suggest a delay to allow for an audit of the state’s ballots amid unfounded allegations by the president’s legal team of widespread fraud.  Biden is now leading in Michigan by roughly 150,000 votes.

“I do think with all of the potential problems, if any of them are true, an audit is appropriate,” board member Norman Shinkle said in an interview.

Michigan Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield were invited and did go to the White House to meet with President Trump.

This is just one of the president’s attempts to overturn the state’s election results.

“Right now the idea to check into some of these accusations seem to make sense to me,” Shinkle said. “We have to have people trust our system going forward.”

A partisan deadlock on the board could set off a series of explosive political fights in the state.  These fights would be between Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and GOP lawmakers aligned with Trump.

Last week, the president personally intervened in Michigan, first calling a GOP member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, who subsequently sought to withdraw her vote to certify the result there.  Trump then invited those two top Republican lawmakers to the White House on Friday.

Beyond Michigan, the president and his allies have increased their efforts to derail the vote certification process in the other key states that delivered Biden his victory.  That includes: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia, which are all set to finalize their vote tallies in the coming week.

The looming deadlines are Dec. 8, which is the warning bell for when states are supposed to have resolved disputes over who won.  Then Dec. 14, is for when electors officially cast their electoral votes.

Last Thursday, legal experts said Trump’s pressure campaign was unlikely to actually change the electoral college’s vote.  But, they said, the fact that Trump was trying it, that posed a historic level of danger for American democracy.  This is by raising the prospect that a presidential election could be stolen from the inside.

“We have never had anything comparable in the history of the country to the level of interference with democracy that the Trump people are asking these legislatures to do,” said Paul Smith, vice president for litigation and strategy with the Campaign Legal Center.  “With the political pressure on the legislatures, that really is a scary thing.”

Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich), who represents a district outside of Detroit, said that although Trump’s threats may not have legal standing, they should be taken seriously.

“My personal view of this is, yes, it’s pathetic, yes it’s ridiculous,” Levin said. “However if you look at history, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes are born often when there’s some exit ramp out of democracy. And I’m sure a lot of the people involved at those times said, ‘Oh whatever, obviously they’re so completely breaking the rules that they’ll be stopped.’ But they aren’t.”

He said that a range of Michigan’s top elected officials have been meeting constantly to talk about the issue.  “We are not going to let Donald Trump hijack Michigan’s democratic structures,” he said.

Trump’s effort to pressure GOP officials amounts to a kind of Plan C for his re-election effort.  After losing at the ballot box, Trump and his allies sought to overturn the election results in court, but they lost, and lost repeatedly because they could not supply proof for their allegations of widespread voter fraud.

The current plan is even more difficult, since it involves persuading GOP officials to discard legal votes cast by their own constituents.  Biden won the electoral college with 306 votes — 36 more than the 270 required for victory. So Trump would have to persuade Republicans in at least three out of the six key states to throw out their results.

Bob Bauer, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign, said Thursday that the tactic would fail, calling it “a completely losing hand.”

The strategy is being spearheaded by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, who, at an incendiary news conference in Washington on Thursday, made baseless claims that Biden had orchestrated a national conspiracy to rig the vote.

Behind the scenes, Republicans familiar with the plan said that even Giuliani believes the legal path is arduous, but thinks he might delay the results enough to cast doubt on Biden’s win.  So far, it's not looking good for Giuliani's efforts.

In a new legal filing Thursday in federal court in Pennsylvania, Trump’s lawyers argued that the judge might have the power to decertify electors as late as Dec. 14, the date the electoral college formally votes.  This is an indication of the campaign’s intent to keep up the fight to overturn Biden’s victory.

Trump’s plan appears to be to stir up enough allegations of election fraud that…even if they are baseless…could give Republicans a reason to act.  In Michigan on Thursday, there were signs that GOP officials were not dismissing Trump out of hand.

In explaining why he was leaning toward a delay in certifying the vote, Shinkle in Michigan, cited an already debunked conspiracy theory aired by Trump and one of his lawyers, Sidney Powell, that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of voting machines, deleted thousands of Trump votes. That theory has been rejected by multiple election experts, including Trump’s own chief of election security, whom the president fired this week.

Trump is becoming very upset with the lack of success by Sidney Powell and her legal team.

“If Dominion was fudging votes, that’s a serious problem,” Shinkle said. “If it’s true. I don’t know. I have to be convinced of it. That’s why the audit makes sense.”

Earlier this month, Shinkle’s wife filed an affidavit in a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign alleging widespread irregularities in Detroit’s ballot-counting operation.  But Shinkle said Thursday that he had not read his wife’s affidavit…?  Asked whether Biden was indeed the president-elect, Shinkle said “the odds are probably that he will become president. But I don’t know what’s going to happen in Pennsylvania or Nevada. My job is to try to do the right thing for the vote in Michigan.”

Shinkle said that Trump and his allies had not contacted him, but if they did, “I would say hi. They have a position to advocate.”

The board’s other Republican member, Aaron Van Langevelde, could not be reached for comment Thursday evening.

Chris Thomas, an adviser to the Detroit city clerk who served as Michigan’s elections director from 1981 to 2017, said he could not recall a single instance of the canvassing board requesting an audit before certifying an election.  “It’s not something that has happened,” he said. “They have duties — they don’t have a lot of discretion. The statute tells them what they should do. They certify elections based on certified results that come from the counties.”

If the Board of Canvassers deadlocks on the decision to certify Michigan’s results Monday, Governor Whitmer could seek to replace its members on the spot, or seek a court order requiring the board to certify. Whitmer’s office has not said whether it intends to use those options.

At a news conference Thursday, the governor said she was confident Michigan’s 16 electoral votes would be awarded to Biden with no disruptions. She noted that Biden had won Michigan by a margin 14 times larger than Trump won it by in 2016.

“We will be sending a slate of electors that reflects the will of the people of Michigan at the end of this process,” the governor said. ‘I can’t tell you all the different actions they are contemplating, but I implore people to put country over party and do the will of the people — respect the law, and see through that the will of the people is reflected in our electors and not play games with this fundamental part of our democracy.”

Trump allies have called for the Republican-controlled legislature to try to appoint their own electors. Experts have called such a move legally doubtful, and earlier this week, state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R) dismissed the prospect of a legislative intervention in the race, calling Biden the president-elect and said that a Republican effort to overturn Michigan’s election results was “not going to happen.”

Elsewhere, a senior member of Michigan’s congressional delegation, Rep. Fred Upton (R), said that it was time for Trump to give up these efforts and concede: “No one has seen any real identification of any real fraud,” he told CNN.

Several states appeared to be marching toward certification in the coming days. In Georgia, for example, officials on Thursday finalized the results of a hand count of all 5 million ballots. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who has defended the election as fair and secure, was expected to certify Biden as the winner Friday.

But Trump and his allies were still making last-ditch efforts on several fronts.

In Wisconsin, a recount requested by the Trump campaign of ballots in the state’s two most heavily Democratic counties, Dane, home of Madison, and Milwaukee, began last Friday.

Fortunately, there are dates that will finalize Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the election.  But for me, they can’t come too soon.

Copyright G. Ater 2020