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Donald Trump has mounted an all-out assault on the election outcome in Michigan, reportedly planning to blow up state lawmakers to meet him in Washington and phone county officials in an apparent attempt to derail the certification of victory from 150,000 votes for Democrat Joe Biden in the state.
Tuesday night, Trump made phone calls to two Republican members of a county-level vote certification board the night before the couple tried to reverse their earlier endorsement of a large chunk of the vote in Michigan.
The news came as Republican lawmakers in Michigan prepared to fly to Washington on Friday to meet with Trump at his request, the Washington Post first. reported.
While no explanation has been given for the meeting, Trump has been pressuring Republican state lawmakers to try to hijack the electoral college by advancing lists of voters that could compete with those selected by state voters.
There was no indication that Trump’s strategy, which in addition to the consent of the legislatures would require a series of highly improbable court victories and ultimately the participation of Democrats in Congress to succeed, had any remote chance of overriding the ones. elections.
But the press across Trump’s Michigan court has raised concerns about the integrity of the state’s election result, which is set for the election certification deadline on Tuesday, November 23.
As members of the Wayne County canvassing board, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer played a crucial role this week in transforming Michigan’s popular vote into important electoral college votes for Biden. Michigan has 16 electoral votes.
But in a meeting Tuesday night, Hartmann and Palmer initially refused to certify the vote in Wayne County, which is home to the city of Detroit and where more than 80% of the vote is African-American, citing minor irregularities. Biden won the county by more than 330,000 votes, his highest margin of any county in Michigan.
After three hours of discussion among community members who virtually attended the meeting, some of whom accused Hartmann and Palmer of carrying out a blatant racist attack on the right to vote, the couple certified the vote of the county of Wayne. In the past, the process has been treated as routine.
Trump spoke to Palmer by phone later that night, he told the Detroit Free Press. “I was checking that he was safe,” he said. Palmer said she and her family had “received multiple threats.”
The next day, Hartmann and Palmer filed affidavits in court to reverse their certification of the Wayne County result, claiming they had been promised internally that the ballot would be audited, only to find that it would not.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Neither Hartmann nor Palmer. Trump incorrectly tweeted Tuesday night that the board had refused to certify the Wayne County vote, indicating it was closely following the process.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said through a spokesperson Thursday that the certification was final. “There is no legal mechanism for them to rescind their vote,” he said. “Your job is done and the next step in the process is for the state canvassing board to meet and certify.”
Wayne County canvassing board vice chairman Jonathan Kinloch, a Democrat, denied the content of the affidavits, telling the Washington Post that the Republican couple understood the process and knew what they were certifying.
Since Trump’s electoral defeat two weeks ago, the Trump campaign has filed lawsuits and lobbied Republican officials in various states in an effort to overturn the election result or, barring that, to spread the false belief that the Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Polls indicate that they are achieving the latter goal with a majority of Republicans.
However, tampering with the Trump campaign had not caused a serious problem in the vote certification process as of Tuesday night.
Biden needs electoral votes to make his victory over Trump official, although he defeated Trump in a sufficient number of states that he would still win in the electoral college even if the Trump campaign managed to steal the election in multiple large states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. .
Separately in Michigan on Thursday, the Trump campaign dropped an election-related lawsuit in federal court, making the false claim in court documents that Wayne County’s vote had not been certified. Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was leading that case.
The Trump campaign’s legal strategy was challenged in a separate case in Pennsylvania, where on Wednesday the campaign proposed that the campaign itself must conduct a review of mailed ballots and report what it found to the court. As of this writing, the court had not accepted the campaign offer, which has failed to advance any of its dozens of demands since election night.
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