President Donald Trump’s risky gamble to reverse the election focuses on invalidating ballots cast in Philadelphia, Detroit and other heavily Democratic cities, an effort that would disproportionately disproportionate black voters if successful.
While the Trump campaign says it is simply targeting places where fraud is most likely to have occurred, the racial tone of the president’s attempt to hang on to power has drawn criticism from Democrats. The president’s attorneys have presented no evidence of widespread court fraud and so far he has had little success with his legal challenges.
“The aim of the African-American community is not subtle,” Bob Bauer, campaign legal adviser for President-elect Joe Biden, said Friday. “I think it’s quite remarkable how cheeky he is. It’s very, very disturbing. “
A senior Trump campaign adviser, Katrina Pierson, said her goal is to protect the vote of all legal voters, including black voters, by upholding the integrity of the election. Most of the irregularities occur in the most populous and Democratic-majority areas, he said.
“Democrats have used and abused the black vote for their own political gain for decades, and their behavior in this cycle proves that nothing has changed,” Pierson said. He added that Trump received more support in total votes from the black community than any candidate in the modern history of the Republican Party.
Trump’s focus on cities with large black populations contradicts the fact that his re-election was largely lost in locations outside the urban centers of battle states. In suburban Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin counties, Biden improved his margin of victory by nearly 6 percentage points, compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016, or 361,000 votes combined.
In urban counties with more than 1 million residents, Biden’s margin increased just 1.6 points, or 193,000 votes, relative to Clinton.
In Pennsylvania, the most contested state, just those suburban voters were enough to change the state to Biden. Urban voters alone weren’t.
Detroit fight
But Trump and his allies do not question the outcome of the elections in the suburbs. The racial tone of their fight has been most evident in Detroit, a city that is 79% black.
On Tuesday, two Republican members of the Wayne County Canvassing Board initially refused to certify the results of the Nov. 3 election because the vote in Detroit was suspicious. The Republican chairwoman of the board, Monica Palmer, said during the debate that she would be open to certifying the vote in “communities other than Detroit,” according to the Detroit Free Press.
Lonnie Scott, executive director of the liberal advocacy group Progress Michigan, noted that it would include areas with discrepancies like Livonia, where the population is predominantly white.
“He has pulled a black city out of a county and said that the only ones at fault or in dispute is the city of Detroit, where 80% of the people who reside there are African-American,” said Reverend Wendell Anthony, who is the head of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, he told the board after he stalled on certification. “You should be ashamed of. You should be ashamed.”
The two Republicans changed their position after criticism and agreed to certify the election, then tried to rescind their votes after the president called Palmer.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in an interview on MSNBC that the first board vote was an attempt to disenfranchise black voters based on “clerical errors only,” not widespread evidence of fraud.
“We are still in full swing with the certification of the votes in Michigan,” Benson said. “We certainly are not going to let any blatant partisan attempt to disenfranchise African American voters get in the way.”
Voted voters
After losing or withdrawing a series of lawsuits challenging his defeat in various states, Trump appears to be making a legally dubious and unlikely attempt to persuade Republican-led state legislatures to override voters and grant him enough votes in the electoral college to ensure reelection.
He met with Republican leaders from the Michigan state legislature at the White House on Friday. But after the meeting, Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield said they had yet to see any reason to alter the outcome of the election.
“We have not yet learned of any information that changes the outcome of the elections in Michigan,” they said in a joint statement. “We will follow the law and follow normal process with respect to Michigan voters.”
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who took over the legal effort to challenge the election results, has repeatedly described Philadelphia, Detroit and other cities where the campaign attempts to invalidate votes as being run by corrupt political machines with a track record. of electoral fraud. He has said without proof that there was a national conspiracy to rig the elections, with Democrats choosing 10 cities where they “can control” workers and law enforcement.
“They did it in places where they could get away with it,” Giuliani said during a 90-minute press conference Thursday in Washington with other Trump attorneys involved in the effort to overturn the election.
“They didn’t do it in Republican places,” he said. “They did not carry it out where the law is respected.”
Kristen Clarke, president and CEO of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under the Act, called the allegations an insult to blacks living in cities.
“They are not only targeting black voters, but they are also targeting black election officials and black poll workers and suggesting that they lack the ability to conduct elections as any other community has,” he said.
Trump trails Biden by about 156,000 votes in Michigan and by about 81,000 votes in Pennsylvania, requiring him to invalidate many thousands of ballots to change either state.
Many of the lawsuits that seek to invalidate the votes were not brought by the Trump campaign but by supporters, and those that have not been rejected or withdrawn have little chance of success, said Myrna Pérez, director of the Elections and Voting Rights Program at the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan law and policy institute.
“These cases don’t have completely outlandish evidence and legal theories, and I think the only conclusion that can be drawn is that they were trying to target areas with sizable minority populations,” Pérez said.
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