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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump mounts all-out assault on election result in Michigan

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      Donald Trump has mounted an all-out assault on the election result in Michigan, reportedly planning to fly state lawmakers to meet with him in Washington and phoning county officials in an apparent attempt to derail the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s 150,000-vote victory in the state.
      On Tuesday night, Trump placed phone calls to two Republican members of a county-level vote certification board the night before the pair tried to reverse their previous endorsement of a large chunk of the vote in Michigan.
      The news emerged 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 for the meeting has been given, Trump has been pressuring Republican state lawmakers to try to hijack the electoral college by advancing slates of electors that could compete with those selected by the states’ voters.
      There was no indication that Trump’s strategy, which in addition to the consent of legislatures would require a string of highly unlikely court victories and ultimately participation by Democrats in Congress to succeed, had any remote chance of overturning the election.
      But Trump’s full-court press in Michigan has raised concerns about the integrity of the state’s election result, which has an election certification deadline of Tuesday 23 November.
      As members of the Wayne county board of canvassers, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer played a crucial role this week in transforming Michigan’s popular vote into all-important electoral college votes for Biden. Michigan has 16 electoral votes.
      But at a meeting on Tuesday night, Hartmann and Palmer at first refused to certify the vote in Wayne county, which hosts 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 largest margin of any county in Michigan.
      After three hours of discussion among community members attending the meeting virtually, some of whom accused Hartmann and Palmer of carrying out a brazen, racist assault on the right to vote, the pair certified the Wayne county vote. In the past the process has been treated as routine.
      Trump spoke with Palmer on the phone later that night, she told the Detroit Free Press. “He was checking to make sure I was safe,” she said. Palmer said that she and her family had “received multiple threats”.
      The next day both Hartmann and Palmer filed affidavits in court seeking to reverse their certification of the Wayne county result, claiming that they had been promised internally that the vote would be audited, only to discover it would not be.
      The White House did not reply to a request for comment. Neither did Hartmann or Palmer. Trump inaccurately tweeted on Tuesday night that the board had declined to certify the Wayne county vote, indicating that he was following the process closely.
      The Michigan secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said through a spokesperson on Thursday that the certification was final. “There is no legal mechanism for them to rescind their vote,” she said. “Their job is done and the next step in the process is for the board of state canvassers to meet and certify.”
      The vice-chairman of the Wayne county board of canvassers, Democrat Jonathan Kinloch, denied the substance of the affidavits, telling the Washington Post that the Republican pair understood the process and knew what they were certifying.
      Ever since Trump’s election loss two weeks ago, the Trump campaign has been filing lawsuits and applying pressure on Republican officials in multiple states in an effort to overturn the election result or, barring that, to spread the false belief that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Polling indicates that they are succeeding in the latter objective with a majority of Republicans.
      Trump campaign tampering had not caused a serious hitch in the process of vote certification, however, until Tuesday night.
      Biden needs electoral votes to make his win over Trump official, although he defeated Trump in a sufficient number of states that he still would win in the electoral college even if the Trump campaign managed to steal the election in multiple big states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.
      Separately in Michigan on Thursday, the Trump campaign withdrew an election-related lawsuit in federal court, making the false assertion in court documents that the Wayne county vote had not been certified. The Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was leading that case.
      The Trump campaign’s legal strategy came under question in a separate case in Pennsylvania, where on Wednesday the campaign proposed that the campaign itself should conduct a review of mail-in ballots and let the court know what it found. As of this writing the court had not taken up the offer from the campaign, which has failed to advance any of its dozens of lawsuits since election night. More

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      in US Politics

      Republican certifiers in Michigan back down after refusing to approve Biden win

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      Michigan’s largest county has reversed course and unanimously certified its presidential election results after Republicans first blocked the move in a party-line vote that threatened to temporarily stall official approval of Democrat Joe Biden’s win in the state.
      The Wayne county board of canvassers acted after their 2-2 tie was condemned by Democrats, election experts and the meeting’s online spectators as a dangerous attempt to overthrow the will of voters.
      The board met after days of unsuccessful litigation filed by Republican poll challengers and President Donald Trump’s allies. They claimed fraud during absentee ballot counting at a Detroit convention center but two judges found no evidence and refused to stop the canvassing process.
      Biden crushed Trump in Wayne county, a Democratic stronghold, by more than a two-to-one margin and won the state by 146,000 votes, according to unofficial results.
      The canvassers first rejected certification of the Detroit-area vote with a tie. Monica Palmer, a Republican, said poll books in certain Detroit precincts were out of balance. In response, Jonathan Kinloch, a Democrat, said it was “reckless and irresponsible” not to certify the results. “It’s not based upon fraud. It’s absolutely human error,” Kinloch said of any discrepancies. “Votes that are cast are tabulated.”
      The board then listened to spectators criticising Palmer and fellow Republican William Hartmann via Zoom during the meeting’s public comment period.
      The Reverend Wendell Anthony, a well-known pastor and head of the Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), called them a “disgrace”.
      “You have extracted a Black city out of a county and said the only ones that are at fault is the city of Detroit, where 80% of the people who reside here are African Americans. Shame on you!” Anthony said.
      Certification of the election results in each of Michigan’s 83 counties is a step towards statewide certification by the Michigan board of state canvassers.
      “Glad to see common sense prevailed in the end,” said Detroit’s mayor, Mike Duggan. “Thank you to all those citizens who spoke up so passionately. You made the difference!”
      The Michigan Democratic party chair, Lavora Barnes, called the initial 2-2 vote tie “blatant racism”.
      At least six lawsuits have been filed in Michigan, the latest one landing on Sunday in federal court. But there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the US election.
      The issues that Trump’s allies have raised are typical in every election: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots to have been miscast or lost.
      The University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas, who teaches election law, said certifying results was usually a routine task. “We depend on democratic norms, including that the losers graciously accept defeat. That seems to be breaking down.”. More

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      in US Politics

      Michigan and Washington impose new restrictions as US Covid cases pass 11m

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      Michigan and Washington state have joined a growing number of US cities and states in imposing new restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus, amid a nationwide surge which saw the national caseload grow by 1m in less than a week, passing 11m.
      Johns Hopkins University in Maryland reported 133,045 new Covid-19 cases on Sunday, down from a record high of more than 184,000 on Friday but a 13th day over 100,000 in a row.
      The growth in cases is especially concerning ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, when Americans typically gather indoors to celebrate with friends and family.
      “The situation has never been more dire,” said Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. “We are at the precipice and we need to take some action.”
      Whitmer, a Democrat, ordered high schools and colleges to stop in-person classes, closed restaurants to indoor dining and suspended organised sports. Her order also restricted indoor and outdoor residential gatherings, closed some entertainment facilities, and banned gyms from hosting group exercise classes.
      The new restrictions are set to last three weeks, as part of a more surgical approach to dealing with the pandemic than general lockdown orders last spring. Whitmer’s previous stay-at-home orders made her the target of criticism from a Republican-led legislature, rightwing protests and later a kidnapping plot.
      Whitmer’s new, more limited orders drew condemnation from Trump adviser Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist without specific infectious disease credentials. Atlas tweeted that Michigan residents should “rise up” against Whitmer’s orders.
      Fourteen men have been charged in connection with the plot to kidnap Whitmer.
      On Monday, she told reporters Atlas’s comment was “just incredibly reckless considering everything that has happened, everything that is going on. We really all need to be focused on the public health crisis that is ravaging our country and that poses a very real threat to every one of us.”
      Atlas tweeted that he would “NEVER” endorse or incite violence.
      More than 246,000 people have died in the US from Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins, which recorded 616 deaths on Sunday. More Americans have died per capita than in other developed nations, studies have shown, even compared to “high mortality” countries.
      Deaths statistics are predicted to worsen in the next few weeks. Current projections from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show as many as 282,000 deaths from Covid-19 by 5 December.
      Spread of Covid-19 appears to be accelerating. It took 300 days for 11m Americans to test positive, after the first case was found in Washington state on 20 January. But it took just six days to move from 10m to 11m.
      Economists and epidemiologists have broadly maintained the same position throughout the pandemic: that the economy and public health are inextricably linked.
      Whether new surgical-style restrictions will effectively contain the virus remains to be seen. Some prominent experts such as Dr Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s school of public health, said similar restrictions “appear to be working in France”.
      Others are more cautious. Andew Pekosz, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins, told NPR the level of spread is “a very daunting problem to control the numbers of cases that we’re seeing right now with these kinds of minor efforts”.
      US covid graphic
      Michigan’s orders came the same day Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, announced his state would enforce new restrictions on businesses and social gatherings for the next month.
      Starting on Tuesday, gyms and some entertainment centers will be required to close indoor services. Retail stores, including grocery stores, will be ordered to limit indoor capacity and multiple-household, indoor social gatherings will be prohibited unless attendees have quarantined for 14 days or tested negative and quarantined for a week. By Wednesday, restaurants and bars will again be limited to outdoor dining and to-go service.
      Even the previously resistant North Dakota governor, Republican Doug Burgum, ordered a statewide mask mandate and imposed several business restrictions on Friday. The Republican heeded the advice of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to require face coverings. Bars, restaurants and other venues were ordered to reduce capacity.
      North Dakota has nearly the worst per capita spread of Covid-19 in the nation, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
      The US appears to be entering the worst phase of the pandemic in terms of new cases. Texas and California last week each marked more than 1m confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic.

      In Texas, sporting events were canceled and at least one city added mobile morgues in anticipation of Covid deaths overwhelming hospital storage. Meanwhile, in California, the nation’s most populous state and the first to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, officials urged residents to keep holiday gatherings to small, outdoor visits less than two hours long.
      Health experts and officials across the nation are now cautioning people to forego or revise gatherings and holiday travel plans as Thanksgiving and other celebrations approach.
      There are notes of optimism on the horizon – makers of two leading vaccine candidates announced their drugs are far more effective than initially predicted. Wide distribution of a vaccine is months away, and will face complex logistical challenges. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump's longshot election lawsuits: where do things stand?

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      Since election day, Donald Trump and other Republicans have filed a smattering of lawsuits in battleground states that have provided cover for Trump and other Republicans to say that the election still remains unresolved.
      Legal experts have noted these suits are meritless, and even if they were successful, would not be enough to overturn the election results. Indeed, judges in several of these lawsuits have already dismissed them, noting the Trump campaign has failed to offer evidence to substantiate allegations of fraud.
      Here’s where some of the key lawsuits stand:
      Pennsylvania
      One of the main rallying cries for Trump and his supporters has been that they were not allowed to observe vote counting in Philadelphia, the overwhelmingly Democratic city that helped Biden carry Pennsylvania.
      That’s not true. The Trump campaign did secure a court order to allow observers to get closer to the vote counting process, but there’s no evidence observers were excluded and Philadelphia had a 24/7 livestream of its counting. When the campaign went to federal court arguing that its observers didn’t have access to vote counting, a campaign lawyer was forced to admit there was a “non-zero” number of campaign observers watching the vote count.
      Pennsylvania Republicans and the Trump campaign are also still pushing the US supreme court to reject mail-in ballots that were postmarked by election day and arrived at election offices by 6 November. Pennsylvania law requires ballots to arrive by the close of polls on election night, but the Pennsylvania supreme court, where Democrats have a majority, pointed to mail delays and the pandemic to justify the extension. Several other states in the US allow ballots to be counted if they arrive after election day but are postmarked before.
      Republicans have been trying to get these ballots rejected since early September, when the Pennsylvania supreme court extended the receipt deadline by three days. The number of late-arriving ballots is thought to be relatively small, so even if the supreme court were to ultimately reject them, it would not be enough to overturn Biden’s lead of nearly 45,000 votes in the state.
      Trump and Republicans have also pursued a number of cases to try and get courts to reject mail-in ballots where voters made a mistake, but have been unsuccessful in all of their suits. Even if Republicans succeeded, it wouldn’t be enough to overturn the results of the race.
      On Monday evening, the Trump campaign filed another lawsuit in federal court offering a new legal theory – Pennsylvania’s election was illegitimate because it had different processes for voting by mail and voting in person. Many legal experts quickly noted the theory was bogus.
      The suit was “inexcusably late”, said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, who noted the differences between in-person and mail-in voting were known for months.
      “The core theory on which it rests – that there’s some kind of right to have all ballots counted through precisely the same procedures – would effectively invalidate mail-in voting not just in Pennsylvania, but nationwide,” he said. “Yet again, it offers no actual evidence of any impropriety or fraud in how Pennsylvania has counted these ballots. It’s just a transparent effort to throw out legal votes – or, at least, to muddy the waters long enough to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying its slate of electors in time.”
      Arizona
      The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Arizona on Saturday that seemed to be based on a discredited conspiracy theory that voters who used Sharpie pens to fill out their ballots would not have them counted.
      The campaign’s suit didn’t specifically mention Sharpies, but contained allegations from voters who said they noticed ink had bled through their ballots, which could potentially cause their ballots not to count if the ballot scanners believed they had cast a vote for more than one candidate in a contest, something known as an overvote. The suit says that poll workers failed to avail voters of the opportunity to cast a new ballot when scanners notified them of the issue.
      The Trump campaign submitted affidavits from two voters who said they were not notified of the chance to fix their ballots. A poll watcher submitted an affidavit saying he observed around 80 instances in which voters were given vague or confusing information about the possibility their vote could be rejected. He said he observed about 40 instances in which the poll worker had pressed the button to submit the ballot on behalf of the voter. Biden leads Trump in Arizona by more than 17,000 votes. More

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      in Elections

      'It's not over': Trump supporters protest Biden victory in swing states

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      As word came on Saturday that the election had been called for Joe Biden, hundreds of supporters of the defeated president began amassing at Pennsylvania’s state capitol building in Harrisburg to protest.It was a split-screen simulcast of America’s intensified political division, as Donald Trump’s defeat was jubilantly celebrated 130 miles east in Philadelphia, and in cities around the country.And just as Trump has refused to accept the outcome, so too have many of the around 70m people who voted for him, claiming instead that his loss was the result of ballot fraud – a baseless assertion promoted by the White House – and media manipulation. “We need to make sure every legal vote is found and to make sure this election is fair,” the Yorktown state representative Mike Jones told a cheering crowd. “If we allow this country to succumb to socialism, it will not because the left overpowered us, it will be because good men and women did nothing.”Many here repeated a belief that the media and big tech had been against Trump since the start, with Biden as something of a ride-along.“The election has been called by the media. The government has not certified the votes, so anything could still happen,” said Mary Wallace, a Harrisburg resident, adding: “I want nothing more than for Donald Trump to have four more years.”Wallace’s words echoed those of the president on Saturday morning, when he said his opponent “has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.” More

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      in Elections

      US election 2020: Biden sees narrow lead over Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin as results awaited – live updates

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      Key events

      Show

      10.18am EST10:18
      Democrats: ‘Results indicate we are on a clear path to victory this afternoon’

      9.16am EST09:16
      AP running vote tally shows Biden holds a narrow lead in Michigan for first time

      8.08am EST08:08
      Former Trump adviser John Bolton calls president’s election comments ‘a disgrace’

      7.54am EST07:54
      Paths to victory remain for both Biden and Trump – but Biden has more

      Live feed

      Show

      10.18am EST10:18

      Democrats: ‘Results indicate we are on a clear path to victory this afternoon’

      In a live address Joe Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon has said Joe Biden is on course to become the next president of the US. She said:

      We believe we are in a clear path to victory by this afternoon, we expect that the vice president will have leads in states that put him over 270 electoral votes today. The vice president will garner more votes than any presidential candidate in history, and we’re still counting. He has won over 50% of the popular vote. We are on track to win in Michigan by more than Donald Trump did in 2016. To win in Wisconsin by more than Trump did in 2016. To win in Pennsylvania by more than Trump did in 2016. And we flipped one of his states, Arizona.

      10.14am EST10:14

      The Democratic party are about to broadcast what they are calling a ‘Election protection briefing’. Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon and former Counsel to president Barack Obama Bob Bauer will be talking shortly.

      Joe Biden
      (@JoeBiden)
      We won’t rest until everyone’s vote is counted. Tune in as my campaign manager @jomalleydillon and campaign adviser Bob Bauer give an update on where the race stands. https://t.co/Rwz4iR25B3

      November 4, 2020

      10.11am EST10:11

      Here’s the state of play – excuse the pun – in the states that have not yet been declared for one candidate or the other. We are expecting results from at least Wisconsin and Michigan later today. The others may take a little longer. More

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      in Elections

      Voting proceeds smoothly across US despite fears of unrest

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      Across America millions of people went to the polls amid an election campaign fraught with anxiety over the prospect of voter intimidation and the chance of civil unrest after a historically divisive election.But as polls started to close on the east coast of the US, reports from across the country reflected a day of peaceful voting with only sporadic reports of incidents of intimidation or misinformation or technological problems with voting machines.The leader of a group of 42,000 legal volunteers deployed for the election said so far there had not been “major, systemic problems or attempts to obstruct voting”.Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said early voting, voter education efforts and earlier litigation had made for “a relatively smooth election day across the country”.The committee operates the Election Protection hotline, which provides information and assistance to Americans who encounter problems while voting. Clarke said there was an increase in complaints about voter intimidation and electioneering compared to past elections, but those problems were at a smaller, less intense scale than had been expected.“While we have seen these complaints, in many instances they are lone wolfs, individuals, maybe two people, but not large groups that would otherwise have a stark chilling effect on the electorate,” Clarke said. “And I think many voters this season have come out determined.”Clarke cautioned that this could be the “calm before the storm,” and that the committee was bracing for issues over whether absentee ballots were properly handled and counted in the coming days. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump to declare victory before results are in, report says, as final sprint begins

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      President aims to replicate shock election win in 2016Scholars warn of collapse of democracy as election loomsUS politics – live coverageDonald Trump embarked on a blistering final campaign sprint on Sunday, lining up 10 rallies in seven swing states over two days in an effort to defy the polls and replicate his shock election win in 2016. As he did so, it was reported that he is planning to declare victory on Tuesday, before the result is called. Continue reading… More