Pence declared at an open press conference that the Trump-Pence campaign would “keep on fighting to make sure that every legal vote is counted.” Pence made the assurance even though the campaign’s legal team had yet to bring forth any substantial evidence of voter fraud or ballot-counting irregularities in the three battleground states where they had filed suits: Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
The scatter-shot litigation served primarily to show that Trump’s legal team was in total disarray and had found no legal basis for contesting Biden’s victory. Frustrated by the results, Trump himself turned to a political strategy that amounted to an attempted anti-democratic coup instead of pursuing all legal options available under state election laws.
Trump summoned Michigan legislators to the White House for what his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, disingenuously described as a “routine meeting.” Trump used the meeting to try to persuade the lawmakers to take the extraordinary step of awarding him the state’s sixteen electoral votes despite Biden’s 150,000-plus popular vote margin.
Encouragingly, the four Michigan lawmakers who attended the meeting, including the leaders of the GOP majorities in the state’s two legislative chambers, all spurned Trump’s pleas to nullify the will of the state’s voters. In a joint statement, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield said they had seen no evidence to refute Biden’s victory in their state. “We will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors,” the two leaders said, “just as we have said throughout this election.”
The Trump lawyers had already struck out in Michigan a week earlier [Nov. 13] when a state court judge, Timothy Kenny, rejected a request by two Republican poll watchers to delay the certification of the vote in Detroit because of claimed interference with their monitoring of the vote tabulations. Kenny rejected the poll watchers’ allegations of misconduct as “not credible.”
A state court judge in Pennsylvania had similarly rejected five Trump challenges to counting about 9,000 mail ballots cast in Philadelphia and adjoining Montgomery County aimed at preventing Biden from claiming the state’s 20 electoral votes. The lawsuits cited voters’ failures to supply all the information requested for the ballots. In rejecting the challenges, Judge James C. Crumlish III emphasized that the Trump campaign “was not contending that there has been fraud or that there is evidence of fraud.”
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s Democratic
secretary of state Kathy Boockvar rejected any suggestion of a recount in the
Keystone State on the ground that Biden’s 59,500-vote margin exceeds the
threshold set in state law to require a recount. A federal court judge dealt
Trump another setback on Friday [Nov. 20] by rejecting the campaign's suit to block
certification of the state’s results on the ground that counties were using
different procedures for vote-counting. In a strongly worded 37-page opinion, Judge Matthew Brann said the campaign was effectively trying to disenfranchise all of the state's 7 million voters and to impose an impossible requirement on all counties to use identical procedures in tabulating votes.
In Arizona, the Trump campaign says it is continuing to explore options to try to delay or prevent the certification of Biden’s victory in the Grand Canyon state after a state court judge had rejected a suit seeking to block certification of the vote in populous Maricopa County. The judge found that the alleged irregularities would not affect Biden’s 11,000-vote margin in the overall state popular vote.
The Trump campaign needed to prevail in all three states – with a total of 47 electoral votes – to reduce what appears to be Biden’s 306 electoral votes below the magic number (270) needed to claim the presidency.
Trump’s pull-out-all-the-stops strategy attracted free-lance assistance from an unlikely source over the past week: specifically, South Carolina’s re-elected Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Graham acknowledged having called officials in three battleground states – Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona – for information on ballot-certification procedures in the three states.
One veteran political observer, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, said he could recall no previous instance of a U.S. senator’s intervening in election results in another state. The watchdog ethics group, Citizens for Re and and Ethics in Washington (CREW), went so far as to suggest that Graham’s calls amounted to illegal interference with the elections and to call on him to step down from his Judiciary Committee post.
Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, claimed in his account of the phone conversation with Graham that the senator had urged him to discard all absentee ballots from counties with high rates of disqualified ballots. In a Senate corridor interview with CNN’s Manu Raju, Graham disputed Raffensperger’s account as “ridiculous” and batted away any concern about an investigation of his calls.
Biden carried the Peach State by more than 14,000 votes. Raffensperger pronounced the election to have been fair and transparent and shut the door on any Trump challenges by formally certifying the results last week [Nov. 20]. Biden’s upset victory to gain Georgia’s 16 electoral votes a week after the Nov. 3 election provided a cushion after major networks had called the election for Biden on Saturday, Nov. 7, with 279 electoral votes in all to 214 for Trump.
All told, Trump’s “all-out assault on the election” adds up to much ado about nothing, but just enough to give the Republican head of the General Services Administration (GSA), Emily Murphy, grounds for delaying the ministerial step needed to ascertain Biden’s apparent election to allow the formal transition process to begin.
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