Trump targets vote certification in latest attempt to block Biden

Getting nowhere in court, the scattered effort by US President Donald Trump to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is shifting toward shadowy electoral boards that certify the vote as Trump and his allies seek to reverse. the electoral process, sow chaos and perpetuate unfounded doubts about counting.

The battle centers on the states of the battlefield that sealed Biden’s victory.

In Michigan, two Republican election officials in the state’s largest county initially refused to certify the results even though there was no evidence of fraud. In Arizona, officials are reluctant to approve vote counts in a rural county.

The moves do not reflect a coordinated effort in the battlefield states that broke with Biden, local election officials said.

Instead, they appear to be inspired by Trump’s incendiary rhetoric on baseless fraud and motivated by Republican acquiescence to the broadside against the nation’s electoral system as state and federal courts sidestep the legal challenges presented by Trump and his colleagues. allies.

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Still, what happened in Wayne County, Michigan on Tuesday (local time) was a jarring reminder of the disruptions that can still be caused as the nation works through the process of affirming the outcome of the November 3 election. .

There is no precedent for the Trump team’s widespread effort to delay or undermine certification, according to University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas.

“It would be the end of democracy as we know it,” said Douglas. “This is just not something that can happen.”

Certifying results is a routine but important step after local election officials have counted the votes, reviewed procedures, verified to ensure votes have been counted correctly, and investigated discrepancies. Typically this certification is done by a local board of elections, and then later the results are certified at the state level.

But as Trump has refused to give in to Biden and continues to spread false claims of victory, this mundane process is taking on new meaning.

Among the key battlefield states, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin counties have passed the initial step of certification of results. With the exception of Wayne County, this process has been largely straightforward. Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia have yet to complete their local certifications.

Then all eyes are on state certification.

In Wayne County, the two Republican pollsters initially refused to certify the vote, winning praise from Trump, and then reversed course after widespread condemnation.

A person familiar with the matter said Trump reached out to pollsters, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, Tuesday night after the revised vote to express gratitude for their support.

Time is running out for Trump. Across the country, recounts and court challenges must be concluded and election results must be certified by December 8. That’s the constitutional deadline before the Electoral College meeting the following week.

Matt Morgan, Trump’s campaign general counsel, said last week that the campaign was trying to stop certification in battle states until it could better handle vote counts and whether it would be entitled to automatic recounts.

Right now, Trump is requesting a recount in Wisconsin in two counties, and Georgia is doing a manual audit after Biden led by a small 0.3 percentage point margin, but there is no mandatory recount law in the state. The law provides that option to a candidate who falls behind if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points.

Some in the president’s orbit have held out hope that by delaying certification, state legislatures controlled by the Republican Party will have the opportunity to select different constituencies, either overturning Biden’s victory or sending it to the House, where Trump almost certainly would win.

But most of the president’s advisers consider it a fever dream. Trump’s team has not been able to organize even basic legal activities since the election, much less the large-scale political and legal apparatus necessary to persuade state legislators to try to undermine the will of their state’s voters.

Trump’s allies in Michigan and Nevada have filed lawsuits seeking to stop certification. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, argued Tuesday to stop the certification of the vote in Pennsylvania, the first time he was in a courtroom in decades. And on the same day, the Arizona Republican Party asked a judge to bar Maricopa County, the most populous in the state, from certifying until the court issues a decision on the party’s lawsuit seeking a new manual recount of a sample. of ballots.

The party is also pressuring county officials across the state to delay certification, although there has been no evidence of legitimate questions about the vote count to show that Biden won Arizona.

“The party is pushing for not only county supervisors but all those responsible for certifying and probing the elections to ensure that all questions are answered so that voters have confidence in the election results,” said Zach Henry, Arizona Republican Party spokesperson.

While most Arizona counties are moving forward with certification, Mohave County officials decided to delay until November 23, citing what they said was uncertainty about the fate of electoral challenges across the country.

“There are lawsuits all over the place on everything, and that’s part of the reason I’m not in a rush to poll the election,” Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould said Monday.

Officials in Georgia’s 159 counties were supposed to have certified their results last Friday. But some have yet to be certified, as the state works by manually counting about 5 million votes.

“They are overwhelmed and they are trying to get to everything,” said Gabriel Sterling, a senior official in the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. “Some of these are smaller counties with fewer resources, and there are a limited number of people who can do so many things.”

Additionally, some counties must recertify their results after previously uncounted votes were discovered during the audit.

Once the counties have been certified, the focus is on the state-level officials who are in charge of passing elections. This varies by state. For example, a bipartisan panel in Michigan certifies elections, but in Georgia it is the responsibility of the elected secretary of state, who has already faced calls from fellow Republicans to resign.

In Nevada, Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske’s role in certification is largely ministerial, but she still received a series of emails urging her not to certify “potentially fraudulent election results,” a spokeswoman said Wednesday. The Justice Department had been investigating a possible case of fraud in the state over voter lists, but an AP analysis found that the case does not appear to have much water.

In Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, a Republican board member, Joyce Dombroski-Gebhardt, said she will not certify the county election without an audit of at least 10 percent of the vote to ensure that some voters do not vote twice. .

Trump won the county, where the board of elections is made up of three Democrats and two Republicans. A Democrat on the board, Peter Oullette, said he had no doubt that the rest of the board will sign the certification on Monday.

Philadelphia also had plans to certify the results on Monday.

And there could still be some delays given the overwhelming workload election officials faced this year during the pandemic, according to Suzanne Almeida of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a good government group that helps with voter education and monitors election work in the state.

“A delay in certification doesn’t necessarily mean there are mischief; sometimes it just takes more time to go through all the mechanics to get certified, ”Almeida said.