O VOO DO CORVO

 

TRANSITION 2020

Trump nearing last stand as efforts to challenge election slip

 

Michigan's state elections board is meeting Monday about certifying its results, with Trump and Republicans pressuring for a delay.

 

By KYLE CHENEY and ZACH MONTELLARO

11/23/2020 12:15 PM EST

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/23/trump-election-michigan-results-439691

 

President Donald Trump’s push to subvert the 2020 election results may be hours away from collapse, as election officials push toward certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s wins in key states.

 

In Michigan, the state Board of Canvassers is meeting in Lansing Monday afternoon, with certification of election results showing Biden beating Trump by more than 155,000 votes on the agenda. It’s typically a routine exercise for the four-member, bipartisan board, but the board’s two Republicans have come under rising pressure from Trump and his allies to reject certification and seek a delay in order to investigate “irregularities” in Detroit’s vote counting — allegations that are not supported by any evidence of wrongdoing.

 

One of the board’s two members, Norm Shinkle, has indicated in recent interviews that he’s inclined to vote against certification and instead seek a delay. That would leave the deciding vote to Aaron Van Langevelde, a lawyer for the state legislature’s House GOP caucus. Notably, Michigan’s top state legislative leaders indicated — after an Oval Office meeting with Trump — that they don’t see any evidence that would result in reversing Biden’s win in the state.

 

Van Langevelde did not respond to requests for comment.

 

If either Shinkle or Van Langevelde vote to certify the election — despite personal appeals for delay from the Trump campaign and top national GOP officials, including Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel — it could be the fatal blow to Trump’s legally dubious efforts to block Biden from from attaining the 270 electoral votes he needs to win. The president’s court cases and the political pressure he’s putting on fellow Republicans to fight the election results are falling flat.

 

In addition to the brushback from the Michigan GOP lawmakers, Trump’s efforts to challenge the vote count or delay certification have so far fallen short in other states Biden carried, including Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia.

 

Trump’s bid to persuade a federal judge to toss millions of votes for Biden in Pennsylvania met with a sharply worded rejection on Saturday. And a small but growing number of House and Senate Republicans in Washington say it’s time for Trump to accept defeat and help smooth the transition to a Biden administration.

 

“A pressure campaign on state legislators to influence the electoral outcome is not only unprecedented but inconsistent with our democratic process,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in a Sunday statement. “It is time to begin the full and formal transition process.”

 

In Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, has also downplayed the likelihood that the state board wouldn’t certify the results.

 

"The voters of Michigan have spoken, they’ve made a choice,” she said in an interview on MSNBC on Sunday. “There’s no legal or factual basis to question that choice. And there are several protocols in place to protect that choice through the certification that we have every reason to expect will happen [on Monday].”

 

The drama in Michigan comes a week after two Republican members of a local canvassing board — in Detroit’s Wayne County — briefly held up certification there, citing mismatches between the tabulated total and the various precincts’ poll books. Minor miscalculations are relatively routine, and officials indicated they only affected a tiny fraction of votes, not remotely close to the margin Trump would need to reverse Biden’s large lead in the state.

 

The two Wayne County Republicans ultimately relented, however, sending the decision to the state board.

 

Republican officials in other states have cast aside Trump’s calls to otherwise delay the inevitable. The most notable example is Georgia, which certified its election results on Friday despite an intense public campaign targeting GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as well as the Republican governor, Brian Kemp., The president and his allies — including both of Georgia’s Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue — attacked Raffensperger by alleging widespread impropriety in the election without actually providing any evidence of it.

 

Kemp, another steadfast ally of the president, certified Georgia’s Electoral College electors for Biden on Friday as well, casting his decision as one he was legally obligated to do that would open up a path for a recount for the president’s team.

 

Monday is also the deadline for counties to certify their results in Pennsylvania, after which final state certification rests with Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, an appointee of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.

 

Trump’s lawsuit in the state, which was ripped apart by a federal judge, sought to block certification. The campaign is currently trying to appeal to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

 

Allies of the president — including GOP Rep. Mike Kelly and Sean Parnell, a congressional candidate who lost to Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb — are also trying to block certification in Pennsylvania state court. Their longshot case argues that the state’s mail voting law, which was passed by a Republican-controlled legislature and was used for elections before November, was unconstitutional.

 

And in Arizona, another state that Biden narrowly flipped, the Republican-controlled county board of supervisors in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county that was critical to Biden’s victory, voted unanimously on Friday to certify its results.

 

“No matter how you voted, this election was administered with integrity, transparency, and most importantly in accordance with Arizona state laws," Republican chairman Clint Hickman said, rejecting claims of fraud leveled in the state by the president and his team.

 

Just one county in Arizona has not yet certified its results: Mohave County, which stretches along the state’s Northwest border and heavily backed the president. Its deadline to certify is by the end of Monday, with the statewide canvass planned for Nov. 30.

 

Trump’s national effort to upend the election has been beset by internal strife and dissension. On Sunday, Trump’s campaign removed conservative lawyer Sidney Powell from its team. Powell had begun to train attacks on Republican officials in Georgia for certifying Biden’s victory there, and she had also concocted a conspiracy theory alleging massive fraud by an electronic voting machine company — contending that Trump actually won the election “in a landslide,” a claim that the national Republican Party amplified.

 

Powell contended that both Trump and Rep. Doug Collins, her preferred candidate in Georgia’s Senate special election, had been cheated. Powell’s allegations that Georgia Republicans conspired against Collins in his race against Loeffler, the appointed incumbent, rankled other Trump allies who are desperate to defend two Senate races in the state on the ballot in a Jan. 5 runoff.