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Election 2020 live updates: Biden projected to win Georgia, Trump projected to win North Carolina
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President-elect Joe Biden is projected to win Georgia, and President Trump is projected to win North Carolina in the final calls of the presidential race.
Edison Research projects that Biden will capture Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, flipping a state Republicans have won in presidential elections since 1996. Georgia is now conducting a statewide hand recount of presidential votes, but Biden’s current lead of 14,152 votes in Georgia is expected to withstand any recount changes.
Trump is projected to add N.C.’s 15 electoral votes to his total. Overall, Biden is projected to win 306 electoral votes, Trump is projected to win 232.
Trump will deliver an update on the effort to develop and distribute a coronavirus vaccine at 4 p.m., his first public remarks in more than a week. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris continued to meet with transition advisers to plan their administration even as Trump challenges the vote count in several states and refuses to concede.
A Michigan judge has rejected a GOP demand to delay certification of the vote count in Detroit. This is the latest in a string of defeats for President Trump and his allies, who have sought to un-do – or at least delay – Biden’s electoral victory with long-shot lawsuits claiming election irregularities.
Here’s what to know:
Election officials in Georgia have begun a recount to manually verify all of the nearly 5 million ballots cast in the presidential race in the state, where Biden narrowly leads.
Trump is mostly ignoring public presidential duties as he focuses on baseless claims that voter fraud cost him reelection.
Far-right protesters who back Trump’s refusal to concede plan to gather Saturday in D.C.; anti-fascist and anti-racist counterdemonstrators are expected as well.
November 13, 2020 at 3:12 PM EST
Georgia, last state to be called, goes to Biden
By Colby Itkowitz and Scott Clement
Georgia, the last state to be called in the 2020 presidential election, has been won by Biden, giving the president-elect another 16 electoral votes to expand his lead over Trump.
Trump’s apparent early lead in the state on election night eroded as mail-in ballots from more Democratic areas were counted. Georgia, which voted for Trump by five percentage points in 2016, was a major pickup for Democrats, who have hoped to one day flip the state.
Biden visited the state for the first time in the campaign a week before the election, seeing possibility there but never counting on it to deliver him the presidency.
Like other Sun Belt states, Georgia’s population has grown younger and more diverse, cutting into the long-held Republican advantage there. Much credit has gone to Democrat Stacey Abrams, who, after losing a race for governor in 2018, made it her mission to fight voter suppression and register new voters.
Although the race has been called for Biden, the political drama in the state is far from over. The narrow margin of victory triggered a hand recount of nearly 5 million ballots, which began Friday, but Biden’s current lead of 14,152 votes in Georgia is expected to withstand any recount changes.
A 2020 Fairvote study of 31 recounts across various states found on average recounts shifted the vote margin by 430 votes. The largest shift in the percentage-point margin was in Vermont’s 2006 auditor’s race, in which the recount shifted the vote margin 0.107 percentage points, a 239-vote swing. Biden’s current percentage-point advantage is more than twice that level, standing at 0.28 percentage points.
In the meanwhile, Georgia will become the center of the political universe, with both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats up for grabs in dual runoff elections on Jan. 5. The winners of those races will determine the balance of power in the Senate.
November 13, 2020 at 2:33 PM EST
Arizona GOP lawsuit criticized by office of state’s Republican attorney general
By Hannah Knowles
A new election lawsuit filed Thursday by the Arizona GOP is being criticized by the office of the state’s Republican attorney general as having no legal footing.
The suit takes issue with the hand-count auditing process for ballots in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, but seemed confused about how it worked. The suit said the audit in Maricopa was expected to start “any day now,” when in fact the county had already finished, with reported 100 percent accuracy.
Arizona’s hand-count audits check that machines worked correctly by examining ballots from two polling places or 2 percent of them, whichever is greater. They also look at either 1 percent of all early ballots cast or 5,000 early ballots, whichever is less. The hand counting is done by a bipartisan group appointed by county political parties.
The Arizona GOP wants the court to order Maricopa to sample “precincts,” the word used in state law. But Maricopa uses a “vote center” system, in which voters can choose whatever polling place they find most convenient, rather than their designated precinct. So it sampled vote centers for its audit, as the state’s election manual advises.
In a letter to Republican state legislative leaders, the chief deputy and chief of staff for Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) wrote that there is no legal basis to insist on “precinct” auditing. “In those counties that use voting centers, the practical effect of a hand count audit based only on precincts could result in no ballots being counted because no ballots would have been cast using tabulating machines at precincts,” the letter states. “We do not believe the Legislature intended this result.”
Earlier this week in an interview with Fox Business, Brnovich rejected the idea of any scheme to steal the election and said there was no evidence “that would lead anyone to believe that the election results will change.”
The Arizona Republican Party did not respond to questions Friday about its lawsuit.
November 13, 2020 at 2:25 PM EST
Trump adds 15 electoral college votes to his total with projected North Carolina win
By Paulina Firozi and David Weigel
President Trump is projected to win North Carolina, adding 15 electoral college votes to his total, according to Edison Research.
The state was one of the final battlegrounds to report final results, taking a relatively long time to tabulate votes in part because it allowed ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be received through Nov. 12.
North Carolina was a reach state for Democrats. They didn’t need it to win the presidency, but believed there was an opportunity to wrest it away from Trump, who won the state in 2016 by 3.7 points. Barack Obama won the state in 2008, the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so in 32 years, but it’s otherwise leaned Republican.
Trump bested Biden in the state by just under 2 points.
November 13, 2020 at 1:51 PM EST
Trump to speak at 4 p.m., his first public remarks since last Thursday
By Colby Itkowitz
President Trump arrives in the White House briefing room Nov. 5. (Evan Vucci/AP)
The White House announced that Trump will deliver remarks at 4 p.m. regarding the development of a coronavirus vaccine, marking only his second time speaking publicly since the Nov. 3 election.
The president, who for four years was heard from almost daily, went dark after a news conference Nov. 5, the Thursday after the election, in which he decried the election results and baselessly claimed that they were corrupted.
Since then, he has been heard from only through tweets and through surrogates arguing that he was the rightful winner of the election.
It is unclear whether the president will take questions from the media after his remarks, as he typically has done after delivering coronavirus updates.
November 13, 2020 at 1:45 PM EST
Michigan judge rejects GOP demand to delay certification of vote count in Detroit
By David Fahrenthold
A Michigan judge on Friday rejected Republicans’ requests to delay the certification of election results in Detroit, saying he saw no convincing evidence of election fraud at a center for counting absentee ballots.
Wayne County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy M. Kenny said that the allegations of misconduct, made by GOP poll watchers and one Detroit election official, were “not credible.” Kenny said that the plaintiffs’ demand for an outside audit of the election in Michigan could delay the process so long that Michigan’s electors might not be selected in time to vote in the electoral college.
To grant the plaintiffs’ request, Kenny said, “would undermine faith in the Electoral System.”
Biden now leads in Michigan by about 148,000 votes.
Kenny’s ruling is the latest in defeats for Trump and his allies, who have sought to undo — or at least delay — President-elect Biden’s electoral victory with long-shot lawsuits claiming election fraud. In Michigan alone, this is the third time that a judge has rejected GOP demands to delay certification of the state’s result — or even to rerun the entire election.
The Michigan lawsuit at issue Friday was brought by two Republican poll watchers. It echoed the allegations made in other Michigan lawsuits: that workers counting absentee ballots in Detroit had broken rules to help Biden.
The plaintiffs submitted affidavits from witnesses — and one election worker — alleging that late-arriving ballots had been backdated to appear valid, and that some voters had a birth date in 1900.
Lawyers for the defense said these witnesses, armed with little knowledge of the vote-counting process, had been alarmed by normal procedures they did not understand. In his ruling, Kenny agreed, saying he’d been convinced by defense witnesses who were experts in administering elections.
November 13, 2020 at 1:29 PM EST
Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene complains about having to wear a mask in Congress
By Colby Itkowitz
Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), right, on Friday during an orientation for newly elected lawmakers on Capitol Hill. (Pool photo by Astrid Riecken/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene took to Twitter during her freshman orientation to Congress to lament Capitol Hill’s policy that everyone wear a mask.
“Our first session of New Member Orientation covered COVID in Congress. Masks, masks, masks… I proudly told my freshman class that masks are oppressive,” the representative-elect tweeted. “In GA, we work out, shop, go to restaurants, go to work, and school without masks. My body, my choice. #FreeYourFace.”
Greene, a far-right, Trump allegiant who has espoused baseless QAnon theories and promoted bigoted rhetoric, won her seat to Congress after beating the establishment GOP candidate in the primary. In her deep-red district, it was all but assured she would then win the general election.
Greene’s comments come as coronavirus cases are spiking in the United States. Many Trump campaign aides and Secret Service agents have been infected, as has the longest-serving House member, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), age 87.
Several Democrats pounced on Greene’s tweet as an example of the extremist beliefs within the Republican Party.
“The top House Republican said yesterday House Republicans would welcome their new QAnon Caucus into the fold, and sure enough, crazy attacks on science followed,” tweeted Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) “Masks save lives. They protect the people around us. Refusing to wear masks is selfish and endangers others.”
Greene was seen around the Capitol wearing an American-flag mask but was also photographed without it.
November 13, 2020 at 1:24 PM EST
Trump campaign acknowledges its Arizona lawsuit will not make a difference in presidential race
By Hannah Knowles
The Trump campaign acknowledged Friday that its lawsuit in Arizona would not make a difference in the presidential race.
The suit had alleged “up to thousands” of allegedly mishandled ballots in Maricopa County would “prove determinative” in the presidential election. But its claims and goals were steadily watered down this week in court as county officials said fewer than 200 votes for president were at stake. Biden leads by close to 11,000 votes in Arizona.
The campaign maintained in a Friday filing that two down-ballot races “remain at issue”: a Board of Supervisors seat and a state Senate seat. But attorneys for the Arizona secretary of state, a defendant in the case, said that all claims were almost certainly moot, pending 3 p.m. local time Friday, when Maricopa County expects to finish counting all its ballots.
The suit also does not allege the fraud Trump and his allies have warned about throughout the country — something an attorney for the president’s campaign, Kory Langhofer, emphasized repeatedly at a hearing Thursday. His arguments cut a sharp contrast with the “Stop the steal” push that has rallied Trump supporters in Arizona.
“We’re not alleging that anyone was stealing the election,” Langhofer told the court Thursday, adding later, “The allegation here is that, in what appears to be a limited number of cases, there were good-faith errors in operating machines that should result in further review of certain ballots.”
The Trump campaign’s lawsuit alleges that poll workers pressed or told voters to press a button on a tabulating machine to cast their ballots even after those tabulators flagged an apparent “overvote,” in which the machine believed a voter marked two candidates in the same race. If the machine reads two votes in the same race, it will not count a vote for any candidate in that contest.
Maricopa County says it has identified about 950 total ballots with overvotes, roughly 190 of them with an overvote for the office of president.
The lawsuit originally sought to halt certification of election results until all affected ballots could be reviewed by hand. But on Thursday, plaintiffs said they wanted a review only if the final vote tallies showed it could make a difference.
The Trump campaign encountered skepticism and setbacks right off the bat Thursday, when Judge Daniel Kiley refused to admit some of its evidence, saying it was not trustworthy.
November 13, 2020 at 12:33 PM EST
Pelosi defiant about Democrats’ mandate as her majority dwindles
By Colby Itkowitz
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continued to defend her caucus’s loss of seats, blaming it on Trump at the top of ticket making it harder for Democrats to win in red districts.
“We had a very deep victory two years ago,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) said during a news conference Friday. “I don’t think that people quite understand, of the 40 seats that we won, 31 were in Trump districts. He wasn’t on the ballot. And right away we said: ‘He’s going to be on the ballot. That’s a steeper climb in these districts.’”
“We saved most of those seats,” she said. “So we’re very proud of that.”
Pelosi gave Trump credit for turning out voters in those districts and said she is already looking ahead to the midterms, when some of those ousted Democrats might run again.
“The fact is that President Trump, to his credit, turned out a big vote,” she said, “and in some of these districts, which people wondered how we won them before, they were so Trumpian.”
“A number of candidates have already said they’re going to run again. I’m not going to make any announcements for anybody, but a number of them have told me that they’re ready,” she said. “They loved being in Congress.”
Pelosi rejected the idea that her smaller majority undercuts her ability to get things done, pointing out that she soon will have an ally in the White House, giving her more power, not less.
She also remarked on Republicans adding more women to their ranks, saying she was excited to have more women in Congress and hoped they would find common ground on shared interests such as domestic-violence issues.
“So let’s say let’s be optimistic and let us see. But I congratulate and welcome each and every one of them,” Pelosi said, adding that the Democrats will have 90 women in their caucus next year compared with the Republicans’ record 35 women.
November 13, 2020 at 12:21 PM EST
Georgia begins its laborious hand recount
By Reis Thebault
MARIETTA, Ga. — Georgia on Friday morning began the laborious process of recounting by hand every one of the nearly 5 million ballots cast in the state’s presidential election.
It’s a monumental undertaking.
The state’s 159 counties are manually re-tallying the votes and auditing the results for any irregularities, though there is no evidence of widespread problems.
Trump and his allies have peddled unsubstantiated claims of fraud in Georgia and elsewhere, but Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has held firm that the election was fair and transparent. He said he expects the recount to confirm the state’s results, which have Biden ahead by more than 14,000 votes.
In Cobb County, a suburban enclave north of Atlanta, the audit began at 9 a.m. Friday in a sprawling park and event center. The process started with more than 50 election workers — a number that was expected to swell as the count wears on — at rows of tables in teams of two.
The pairs verify each ballot and determine who received the vote, while observers from both parties stroll through the aisles and watch. Each party is allowed the same number of official observers, but they must preregister with the county. Members of the public and media may also attend but are not permitted inside the cordoned-off recount area without county credentials.
In Cobb County on Friday morning, official, preregistered Democratic observers outnumbered Republicans. Kim Blackadar, a resident who voted for Trump and attended the audit, lamented that her party had thus far not sent as many official observers. “More eyeballs need to be present,” she said.
Janine Eveler, head of the county’s elections office, said the entire election there has been smooth. “We haven’t seen any anomalies in Cobb County,” Eveler said.
November 13, 2020 at 10:28 AM EST
Russia keeps mum on Biden victory, but says Moscow can work with ‘any president’
By Robyn Dixon
MOSCOW — Russia stuck to its increasingly awkward diplomatic stance Friday of failing to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden — deepening its outlier status after China sent a well-wishing message to Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris.
Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Putin would send a congratulatory telegram to “the person named the president-elect” when the official results are announced.
“If we understand correctly, the president-elect has not been named yet,” Peskov told reporters. He said Russia had not reached out to Biden in any way and declined to clarify whether Moscow planned to wait out every possible Republican court action.
He repeated Russian denials of interference in the 2016 or any other election, but added that Russia was willing to work with any American president.
“We will work with any president whom the Americans themselves will choose,” he said. “And, of course, a president who will want to, at least somehow, revive our bilateral relations would appeal to us more.”
The holding pattern on congratulating Biden underscored the Kremlin’s apparent concern that Biden will take a tougher line on Russia than Trump. It also contrasts sharply with the delight among Russian officials, including Peskov, after Trump’s election in 2016.
Peskov also had a dig at American democracy, echoing a line from Russian officials since Trump baselessly claimed giant fraud in the election.
He said there had been constant U.S. criticism in the past of Russia’s human rights record and elections.
“It is now even somewhat awkward to say,” Peskov said. “It seems that the Americans can hardly criticize anyone for that now.”
November 13, 2020 at 9:30 AM EST
Trump in interview with Washington Examiner says, ‘Never bet against me’
Trump, in an interview with the Washington Examiner published Friday, laid out a fanciful vision for how he believes he can still win the election through a series of recounts and court challenges even though there is no evidence to suggest that’s possible.
Trump has kept a low profile this week and hasn’t really been heard from other than tweeting — a stark contrast to his typical daily appearances in front of the camera through news conferences, speeches and rallies.
In the interview conducted on Thursday, Trump told the Examiner’s Byron York that he would still win Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia, the latter two through hand counts. It is improbable that a hand count would yield the thousands of votes Trump would need to overcome Biden’s leads in those states.
Trump also claimed erroneously that he would win back Michigan and Pennsylvania through challenging ballots through lawsuits. Biden has sizable leads over Trump in those states that would require courts to throw out close to 150,000 votes in Michigan and nearly 55,000 in Pennsylvania for Trump to win them.
He told York that he believed he would turn the election in his favor in two or three weeks. “Never bet against me,” he said.
November 13, 2020 at 8:59 AM EST
Law firm representing Trump campaign in Pennsylvania pulls out of case
By
A law firm representing Trump in his attempt to challenge the election count in Pennsylvania has withdrawn from the case.
Porter Wright Morris & Arthur said in a court motion filed late Thursday that attorneys Ronald L. Hicks Jr. and Carolyn B. McGee would no longer be representing Trump’s campaign in the case.
“Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that Plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws,” the attorneys said in their motion.
The firm said Trump’s campaign was “in the process of retaining” other attorneys to represent it. Linda A. Kerns, a Philadelphia attorney who is representing Trump in a flurry of lawsuits in the state’s courts, will remain on the case.
Several law firms representing Trump in his efforts to undermine the result in battleground states have come under pressure to drop the president as a client.
Trump’s federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania seeks an emergency injunction preventing state authorities from certifying the state’s election results. It alleges that hundreds of thousands of votes cast in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are invalid because Trump’s campaign was unable to observe them being counted, which election officials deny.
Commonwealth Secretary Kathy Boockvar on Thursday asked the court to dismiss what she called Trump’s “desperate and unfounded attempt to interfere” with the election process.
“The voters of Pennsylvania have spoken,” attorneys for Boockvar said in a court filing.
November 13, 2020 at 7:55 AM EST
China congratulates Biden, Harris on victory
Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2013. (Pool/Reuters)
SEOUL — China finally congratulated President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris on Friday for their U.S. election win, ending whispers over Beijing’s reticence.
Beijing’s salutations came just over 24 hours after Biden’s team said he had held phone calls with the leaders of Australia, Japan and South Korea — U.S. allies that have watched with varying degrees of concern as Beijing has expanded its regional influence. Biden was projected as the winner of the presidential election on Nov. 7.
The early overtures to China’s neighbors reflected Biden’s campaign promise of staying tough on China but seeking a united front instead of the Trump administration’s more unilateral approach. China’s government has been cautiously optimistic about calmer relations with Washington under a Biden administration, although officials have no illusions of a major thaw.
November 13, 2020 at 7:52 AM EST
Two senior Homeland Security officials forced out as White House firings widen
By Nick Miroff and Ellen Nakashima
The White House has forced out two top Department of Homeland Security officials as part of a widening purge of anyone suspected of lacking complete loyalty to President Trump, three people familiar with the removals said Thursday.
Valerie Boyd, the top official for international affairs at DHS, was asked for her resignation, as was Bryan Ware, a senior policy aide at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The requests came from the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office, whose 30-year-old director, John McEntee, has recently intensified efforts to purge appointees who have failed to demonstrate sufficient fealty to the president.
Boyd, in a resignation letter obtained by The Washington Post, wrote to DHS acting secretary Chad Wolf that she hopes government officials will “act with honor” during the transition to a new presidency.
November 13, 2020 at 7:45 AM EST
Biden finds support among some Republican lawmaker
President-elect Joe Biden began seeing more support, if indirectly, from Republicans on Thursday as senior GOP lawmakers calle
d for him to receive classified briefings even as the Trump administration continued to bar a formal transition.
Trump officials prolonged that blockade even though in private top campaign aides were candidly telling President Trump that his prospects of winning reelection were an uphill battle, according to people close to the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. His campaign, meanwhile, was scrambling to form a coherent legal strategy.
The acknowledgments from Republicans came as Biden and his team continued to map out his transition, despite the lack of official certification from the General Services Administration that would unlock the resources and access to the federal government that Biden and his team will need to fully prepare for taking office on Jan. 20.
Updated November 12, 2020
Election 2020: Biden defeats Trump
Live updates: The latest developments.
Biden beats Trump: His victory is a repudiation of Trump, powered by legions of women and minority voters.
Kamala Harris makes history as first woman of color elected vice president.
Biden’s agenda: He plans immediate flurry of executive orders to reverse Trump policies.
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Legal stuff Legal stuff. Legal stuff
POLITICO
2020 ELECTIONS
‘Purely outlandish stuff’: Trump’s legal machine grinds to a halt
So many lawsuits have been filed in so many state and federal courts that no one has an exact number. The campaign has lost nearly all of the cases that have been decided so far.
Trump supporters protesting the election results gather at the State Capitol in Lansing, Mich.
Trump supporters protesting the election results gather at the State Capitol in Lansing, Mich. | AP Photo/David Goldman
11/13/2020 07:03 PM EST
A Michigan lawyer for Donald Trump’s campaign filed a case in the wrong court. Lawsuits in Arizona and Nevada were dropped. A Georgia challenge was quickly rejected for lack of evidence. His Pennsylvania legal team just threw in the towel.
The president’s legal machine — the one papering swing states with lawsuits and affidavits in support of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud — is slowly grinding to a halt after suffering a slew of legal defeats and setbacks.
In the effort to stop Joe Biden’s victory from being certified, so many lawsuits have been filed in so many state and federal courts that no one has an exact number. But one thing is certain: the Trump campaign has an almost perfect record, having won only one case and lost at least a dozen.
Along the way, Trump lawyers have abruptly dropped core claims, been admonished in court for lack of candor and even been forced to admit they had no evidence of fraud, while their client inaccurately rails to the contrary on Twitter.
The sole Trump campaign victory came Thursday night: a Pennsylvania ruling that the secretary of state overstepped her authority by giving citizens extra days to fix signature mismatches on their mail in ballots. The ruling concerns a relatively small number of voters that are not even included in the election results for the state, where Biden leads by 62,000 votes with more than 98 percent of estimated votes reported.
On Friday, in another Pennsylvania case, the Trump cause was torpedoed yet again: an appeals court upheld the state’s method of handling post-Election Day absentee ballots, which could add more votes to Biden’s total.
“They’re throwing the kitchen sink against the wall to see what sticks — a mixed metaphor that’s deserving of this legal strategy. And ‘legal strategy’ should be in quotes,” said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election law attorney who headed the famed Florida recount team that ultimately led to George W. Bush becoming president.
Members of the Allegheny County Return Board process the remaining absentee and mail-in Allegheny County ballots on the North Side in Pittsburgh. | Steve Mellon/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP
Ginsberg chuckled at one hapless Michigan lawyer who filed an election challenge Thursday evening in a federal claims court in Washington, D.C., the wrong venue, and bizarrely titled it, “Donald Trump v. USA,” as if the president was suing the nation.
“Why would anyone ever use that title?” Ginsberg wondered, speculating that Trump’s lawyers are trying to “appease their client” by filing the suits that have little prayer of succeeding because, “they don’t have instances of fraud or irregularities that are relevant.”
Another lawsuit in Michigan, filed by the conservative Great Lakes Justice Center on behalf of two Republican poll watchers, was rejected Friday by a state judge who found that the plaintiffs’ allegations of fraud were really an exercise in speculation fueled by unfamiliarity with the vote-counting process.
“Sinister, fraudulent motives were ascribed to the process and to the City of Detroit. Plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible,” wrote Chief Judge Timothy Kenny. “It would be an unprecedented exercise of judicial activism for this Court to stop the certification process of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.”
Hours before, another Trump attorney dropped his star-crossed case in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where the campaign was pushing the so-called SharpieGate conspiracy theory, a bogus claim that ballots were spoiled because voters used a marker to bubble in their choice of candidates. During the hearing, Trump’s team abandoned mentioning the issue after elections officials made the case that it was an invalid argument.
Trump’s lawyer, Kory Langhofer, also admitted in court that some of the questionable affidavits in support of the suit were collected as part of an online evidence-gathering process that invited “spam.” He also used his business partner as a witness, called other witnesses who were unable to say they were disenfranchised and undercut Trump’s public messaging about fraud.
“This is not a fraud case,” Langhofer said in court. “It is not a stealing-the-election case.”
Similarly, in a Pennsylvania case, another Trump lawyer, Bob Goldstein, made it clear he was also not bringing a fraud claim because “accusing people of fraud is a pretty big step” that he wasn’t prepared to take.
Then, just before midnight Friday, Goldstein’s firm of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur dropped Trump’s campaign as a client, a rare move that underscores how fraught the quixotic case was for the firm’s reputation.
Barry Richard, a veteran election law attorney who also handled George W. Bush’s recount case in 2000, said the Trump campaign’s legal strategy looks amateurish and disjointed.
“This is just purely outlandish stuff,” Richard said. “But we have an outlandish president. So I guess this makes sense.”
He said Trump’s campaign faces a huge challenge. To succeed, he said, the president would have to show that fraud or irregularities not only existed, but in such a large amount that the election needed to be invalidated in the select state.
In an earlier Pennsylvania case where Trump’s team tried to stop ballot-counting, the president’s lawyers were forced to admit that a “nonzero number of” Republican observers were allowed to witness ballot counting, contrary to false claims made outside the courtroom that no Republican observers were present. The judge reminded Trump’s lawyers they have a “duty of candor” in court.
Another recently filed Pennsylvania case argues that it will provide data-based “analytical evidence of illegal voting” at a future date. A newly filed Wisconsin case references “fraud” 31 times, but only to point out fraud in other places and races and provides no evidence of it happening in the state for this election.
In Montana, federal Judge Dana Christensen had harsher words for yet another team of Trump lawyers who were trying to stop mail-in voting in October when he called the claims widespread voter fraud “fiction.” And two days after the election in Michigan, federal Judge Cynthia Stephens rejected yet another lawsuit.
“Come on, now!” she admonished the lawyers at one point during a hearing. In her opinion, she referred to the campaign’s argument as “inadmissible hearsay within hearsay.”
The courts have been unsympathetic to the conspiracy theories and lack of evidence presented in Nevada, where judges all the way to the state supreme court have swiftly rejected Trump campaign arguments. A GOP-produced list of allegedly illegal voters in the state turned out to be legal voters who were soldiers, sailors and their spouses stationed elsewhere. A Nevada woman’s claim of voter fraud also proved so meritless that a federal judge rejected another Trump lawsuit.
On Friday, the Trump campaign dropped its ballot-counting lawsuit in Nevada.
In Georgia’s Chatham County, a lack of documentation of wrongdoing led a state court judge to say last week there was “no evidence” to support a Trump lawsuit challenging the counting and handling of mail-in ballots.
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Yet for all of this, Trump’s campaign and his supporters are continuing to push on with more lawsuits, leading veteran election law lawyers like Kenneth Gross to speculate that he’s using the lawsuits to raise money or process the grief of his loss.
“There are all these stages of grief — anger, denial, bargaining etc. — and it seems to me he’s experiencing all of them simultaneously instead of linearly, except for acceptance,” Gross said. “Keeping multiple balls in the air that we know are not going to land in a good place could be partially to assuage his psychological issues of getting over the loss of this and giving his fans some thin reed of hope. But they’re being misled.”
LEGAL
Another law firm bails out on Trump campaign
BY JOSH GERSTEIN
Gross said the lawsuits are so groundless that the lawyers are more likely to be sanctioned for pursuing them than to succeed in court.
J.C. Planas, a former Republican lawyer and lawmaker from Florida who used to represent GOP candidates in election-law cases, said he can only speculate that Trump is holding out hope that he can pressure Republican legislators in other states to appoint their own electors and ignore the will of voters.
“The strategy is to pull a Jedi mind trick on legislators in these states to appoint their own pro-Trump electors,” Planas said. “In one respect, he’s succeeded because something like 70 percent of Trumpers say the election wasn’t fair.”
Outside the court, where the rules of evidence don’t apply and there is no threat of judicial sanction, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani last week alleged wrongdoing and fraud and promised multiple lawsuits. Biden’s chief legal counsel, Bob Bauer, ribbed the Trump legal team for their spurious claims and even for Giuliani’s widely mocked press conference at a landscaping company in an industrial park on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
“It’s one thing for Rudy Giuliani to go out into the parking lot, sandwiched between a sex shop and a crematorium, and make the claims he made,” Bauer said. “It’s another thing to be a lawyer in a courtroom and have your claims tested.”
Despite the numerous setbacks in battleground states, Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh insisted the campaign had a “methodical” approach that will result in victory.
“Over 72 million people now have voted for President Trump and those Americans deserve to know that this election was free, fair, safe and secure, and they deserve to know that every legal vote is counted and that every illegal vote is not counted,” Murtaugh said in a conference call about the lawsuits Thursday night. “You simply cannot ignore the very real evidence of irregularities.”
Trump has slowly reemerged in the press after days of public silence.
Law firms representing the president in his fight to challenge the election results have come under fire in recent days
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