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      This election showed that Republicans' racist 'Southern Strategy' is falling apart | Rev William Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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      Since Kamala Harris and Joe Biden gave their victory speeches in Wilmington, Delaware, Donald Trump has largely disappeared from public view, dispatching lawyers to file frivolous suits that will not impact the outcome of the election as he fumes about “massive fraud” and tweets without irony about an election that ended almost two weeks ago: “WE WILL WIN!”Like parents of a child who has suffered a sudden and unexpected loss, Senate Republicans have suggested they are willing to give the president time to come to terms with reality, asserting with straight faces that he is “within his rights” to challenge election results that disappoint him. All the while, these same senators have been asking Democratic colleagues to convey their congratulations to the president-elect, their former colleague, who they assume will understand the awkward position they find themselves in.But Trump is not a child, and we cannot pretend that he is the only one who is not willing to move on. Make America Great Again was always a thinly veiled promise that white supremacy could mount a resistance to movements that challenge systemic racism with the prospect of a genuine, multi-ethnic democracy. Trump’s refusal to accept the election results is not simply about his own psychological needs. It is a performance in keeping with the Southern Strategy that has animated the Republican party for half a century.During Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, a manuscript of Kevin Phillips’ book The Emerging Republican Majority offered a playbook for how white voters could form a winning national coalition in the post-civil rights era. Phillips called America “the melting pot that never melted” and explained that “all you’ve got to do with American politics is work out who hates whom and you’ve got it.” Phillips advised Nixon that the Republican party could win without African American votes by painting the Democrats as the “black party”. Phillips predicted “a new American revolution coming out of the south and west” because of fears and objections raised by the civil rights movement’s victories. Nixon intended for this “Southern Strategy” to establish a new sun belt power base for the Republican party in the south and west.Indeed, the Southern Strategy made the Republican party a political home for tens of millions of white people who could not move on after the civil rights movement. Strom Thurmond, who had run as a Dixiecrat candidate for president and championed “massive resistance” to the Brown v Board of Ed decision, led the march of southern Democrats into a Republican party that was ready to use “positive polarization” to pit their base against a fusion coalition of Black, white and brown voters whom Republicans demonized as “socialists”, “coastal elites” and “godless progressives”. Though Republicans knew their base was reactionary white conservatives, they did not make explicit appeals to white supremacy. Instead, they insisted that their values were the true American values. Casting themselves as the champions of everyday Americans in the Heartland, they paved the way for Trump’s faux populism.But the most explicit repudiation of an incumbent president since FDR’s victory in 1932 makes clear that the fusion coalition the Southern Strategy was designed to crush has, nevertheless, grown in strength. Despite his promise to champion American workers as a political outsider, Trump lost to Clinton among poor and low-income Americans in 2016 by eight points. Four years later, he lost to Biden among the same demographic by 11.5 points – a 40% gain, representing millions of people who have seen through the lie of the Southern Strategy. When you consider that Trump improved over 2016 among Americans who make more than $100,000 a year, it’s clear that this crack in Trump’s imagined “populist” base was the real key to Biden’s victory. Trump lost because his explicit appeals to fear and division increased turnout among poor Black and brown people and their white allies.This is the real reason Trump and his enablers cannot accept the results of the 2020 election: to do so would reveal that the Southern Strategy has run its course. By investing in division, Republicans have clung to power for half a century, betting on having the larger half if they could split the nation in two. But increased turnout, especially among Black, brown, Native and low-income Americans of every race, not only flipped the rust belt but also broke through the sun belt in Arizona and Georgia. Despite the obstacles of a public health crisis and intentional voter suppression, a new majority engaged the democratic process in 2020 and rejected the Southern Strategy. Republicans are standing by a delusional president because they cannot yet imagine a future apart from the imagined past they promised to white America.But on the ground, in rural communities from Appalachia to Alabama’s Black Belt, we have seen new fusion coalitions of Black, white and brown voters come together to refuse the politics of division and embrace a moral vision of shared government that works for everyone. We know that the basic need for living wages, healthcare, just immigration policies and a livable planet are not right or left issues, but moral issues that can unite people of different backgrounds and ideologies. As we watch Republicans deny reality, we remember the observation of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa: a dying mule always kicks the hardest. While we acknowledge its danger, we can’t let its braying overwhelm the united voice of a historic coalition that has stood together in this election for a new day.The Rev Dr William Barber II is president of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. His latest book is We Are Called to be a Movement
      Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove directs the School for Conversion in Durham, NC, and is the author of Revolution Of Values More

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      'We knocked on 80,000 doors': how progressive Nithya Raman won Los Angeles

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      [embedded content]
      A Los Angeles urban planner who made homelessness and housing the central issues of her campaign and condemned the Los Angeles police department for “responding to protests against police brutality with more police brutality”, won a crucial local race this November.
      Nithya Raman, 39, joins the list of Bernie Sanders-endorsed progressives who have beaten Democratic party incumbents in closely watched races. Her opponent, David Ryu, had been endorsed by Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
      Raman’s Los Angeles city council victory won’t change the balance of power among Democrats in Washington. But her win does show the impact progressives can have by organizing at the local level, and the intensity of enthusiasm she prompted among Angelenos has earned her comparisons to the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
      Raman’s campaign was powered by local advocacy groups, including the Sunrise Movement and Democratic Socialists of America, and she has endorsed a swath of bold progressive policies, from backing a Green New Deal, to arguing that some of the Los Angeles police department’s budget should be diverted to pay for unarmed community crisis specialists and outreach workers. She is pushing for a rent forgiveness program in response to the coronavirus crisis, and opposes all policies that criminalize people who are unhoused.
      Raman spoke to the Guardian the week after her victory. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
      How significant were the George Floyd protests to the progressive victories in LA this year, including voters choosing a new, more progressive local prosecutor and supporting a measure to devote more taxpayer dollars to community prevention services, rather than incarceration?
      After the protests began happening, people began making connections between what they were protesting in the streets and the decisions made by our county supervisors, our city council. They were finding out the name of their city council person. They were learning about what we spend on sheriffs and policing. Many groups in Los Angeles, like Black Lives Matter LA and the Youth Justice Coalition, had been doing the work around these issues for a long time. This election in Los Angeles was a result of that existing work on the ground, plus this widespread engagement. More

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      'Pathetic' Trump denounced over Krebs firing as campaign presses for recounts

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      Donald Trump was condemned by opponents on Wednesday for firing the senior official who disputed his baseless claims of election fraud, as the president pressed on with his increasingly desperate battle to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.The president’s election campaign team continued to press for recounts and investigations in battleground states where Biden has already been declared the winner, including a new request in Wisconsin for a partial recount.And there was uproar over his decision late on Tuesday, announced by tweet, to fire a federal official in charge of election security who dismissed his claims of widespread voter fraud.The firing of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) director, Christopher Krebs, was “pathetic and predictable from a president who views truth as his enemy”, senior House Democrat Adam Schiff said.Officials have declared 3 November’s contest between Trump and Biden the most secure US election ever.On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania supreme court dealt a blow to Trump’s efforts in a state Biden won by nearly 73,000 votes, saying officials did not improperly block the Trump campaign from observing the counting of mail-in ballots, as the president has claimed.In another lawsuit, led in federal court in the state by the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has not argued a case in federal court since the early 1990s when he was a prosecutor, the campaign accused Democrats of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election. No such evidence has emerged in the two weeks since the polls closed.Lawyers for the Democratic Pennsylvania secretary of state, the city of Philadelphia and several counties said the Trump campaign’s arguments lacked any constitutional basis or were rendered irrelevant by the state supreme court decision.They asked US district judge Matthew Brann to throw out the case, calling the allegations “at best, garden-variety irregularities” that would not warrant invalidating Pennsylvania results.The next day, the Trump campaign requested a partial recount in Wisconsin, which Biden won by around 20,000 votes, while in Georgia, which the Democrat won by around 15,000, a hand recount continued towards a midnight deadline.CNN, for one, has declared Biden the winner in Georgia.Neither state was thought likely to flip – and even if they did, their 26 electoral votes combined would not be enough to keep Trump in the White House, requiring a further reverse in Pennsylvania, a big prize with 20 votes, and equally unlikely to be achieved.Biden won the electoral college by 306-232, the same margin by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a victory he insisted on calling a landslide. Candidates require 270 electoral college votes to win. Trump is also fighting on in Nevada.By continuing to refuse to concede, Trump is holding up transition processes including funding for Biden to build his administration, even as the US flounders amid a coronavirus surge.In a statement announcing the request for recounts in Wisconsin, Trump campaign counsel Jim Troupis said: “The people of Wisconsin deserve to know whether their election processes worked in a legal and transparent way. Regrettably, the integrity of the election results cannot be trusted without a recount in these two counties and uniform enforcement of Wisconsin absentee ballot requirements.”The Wisconsin elections commission confirmed it had received $3m from the Trump campaign for the partial recount.A full recount would reportedly have cost nearly $8m. Trump continues to seek donations for recount efforts, though it has been widely reported that much such money is being used to pay off campaign debt and to stoke a political action committee formed to tighten Trump’s grip on the Republican party after he is obliged to leave the White House in January.Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud have been rubbished by officials from both parties and mainstream observers, as all moves to stall Biden’s march to victory have failed.In Michigan, Republican officials backed down amid cries of outrageous racism after threatening to block certification of results in Wayne county, the large, majority African American county that incorporates Detroit. Trump praised their blocking attempt on Twitter.After an election race is called for a projected winner in a state, such as by the Associated Press, results still have to be officially certified by state officials.Biden won Michigan by around 346,000 votes.Dave Wasserman, US House editor of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, said: “It’s time to start calling baseless conspiracies what they are: libellous attacks on the 500,000-plus heroic poll workers and election administrators in every corner of the US who pulled off a successful election amid record-shattering turnout and a global pandemic.”Reverberations also continued from the president’s decision to fire Krebs, one of his own federal appointees.In a statement last week, Cisa, Krebs’s agency, said: “The 3 November election was the most secure in American history. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”In his tweet firing Krebs, Trump claimed the statement was “highly inaccurate”.Schiff, the Democratic House intelligence committee chair, called the firing “pathetic and predictable from a president who views truth as his enemy”.Angus King, an independent Maine senator, said: “By firing [Krebs] for doing his job, President Trump is harming all Americans.”Krebs said: “Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow. #Protect2020” More

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      The dead voter conspiracy theory peddled by Trump voters, debunked

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      Late last week, Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier declared on social media that he had unearthed definitive proof of widespread voter fraud in Detroit. He pointed to an absentee ballot cast by “118-year-old William Bradley”, a man who had supposedly died in 1984.
      “They’re trying to steal the election,” Fournier warned in a since-deleted Facebook post, though the election had already been called for Joe Biden by every major news network days before.
      But the deceased Bradley hadn’t voted. Within days, Bradley’s son, also named William Bradley, but with a different middle name, told PolitiFact that he had cast the ballot. That was confirmed by Michigan election officials, who said a clerk had entered the wrong Bradley as having voted. Though the living Bradley had also received an absentee ballot for his father, he said he threw it away, “because I didn’t want to get it confused with mine”.
      The false claim that the deceased Bradley had voted in the 3 November election is one of a barrage of voter fraud conspiracy theories fired off by Trump supporters across the country during recent weeks, and all have been debunked while failing to prove that widespread irregularities exist.
      Instead, the theories often reveal Trump supporters’ fundamental misunderstandings of the election system while creating a game of conspiracy theory whack-a-mole for election officials.
      “We are confident Michigan’s election was fair, secure and transparent, and the results are an accurate reflection of the will of the people,” secretary of state spokesperson Tracy Wimmer told the Guardian.
      Bradley was only one of dozens of allegedly dead Michigan voters who were found to be alive. Trump supporters pointed to Napoleon Township’s Jane Aiken, who they claimed was born in 1900, and cited an obituary as evidence that she was deceased. But the township’s deputy police chief investigated and found the obituary to be for a different Jane Aiken.
      Police told Bridge Magazine that the Aiken who cast the ballot is “94 years old, alive and well. Quite well, actually.”
      Meanwhile, CNN examined records for 50 Michiganders who Trump supporters claim are dead voters. They found 37 were dead and had not voted. Five are alive and had voted, and the remaining eight are also alive but didn’t vote.
      The Michigan secretary of state cited several reasons for confusion. Though election officials across the country purge dead people from voter rolls annually, some are missed and remain as registered voters. Occasionally a worker will accidentally enter a vote by a living person as being cast by a dead person with a similar name.
      The voting software in Michigan also requires a birthday for each voter. If a clerk doesn’t have it, then 1/1/1901 is used as a placeholder until the clerk can find the accurate birthday. Rightwing conspiracy theorists pointed to multiple examples of residents with that birthday voting.
      Among them was Donna Brydges, a 75-year-old Hamlin Township resident. In a phone call with the Associated Press this week, she confirmed she’s alive and passed the phone to her husband so he could do the same. He added: “She’s actually beat me in a game of cribbage.”
      Michigan election officials, “are not aware of a single confirmed case showing that a ballot was actually cast on behalf of a deceased individual,” the secretary of state wrote on its website.
      Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Trump supporters like Representative Matt Gaetz claimed 21,000 dead people in the state “overwhelmingly swung for Biden”.
      In reality, the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation had filed an 15 October federal lawsuit claiming 21,000 dead people were on the rolls, and asked a judge to order them to be removed before the election. A judge found that more than half of the voters had already been removed, questioned PILF’s intentions and methodology, and didn’t require the state to take action.
      The dead voter theory is only one one of the several conspiracies Trump supporters have used to cast doubt on election results.
      In Pennsylvania, a postal worker who claimed to have heard a supervisor directing staff to backdate late-arriving ballots recanted his allegation once he was visited by postal service investigators. In Arizona and Michigan, Trump supporters filed a lawsuit claiming that votes were tossed out because they had used Sharpie markers to fill out their ballot, but quickly dropped it.
      Several viral videos also purported to reveal suspicious activity. In Detroit, Trump supporters claimed a video showed someone bringing late-arriving mail in ballots into a vote-counting center. In reality, it was a WXYZ Detroit cameraman wheeling his equipment in a wagon. Meanwhile, a video that Eric Trump claimed showed 80 Trump ballots being set on fire was proven to be false – the ballots were sample ballots.
      The Trump campaign also claimed that recent federal lawsuits would prove widespread voter fraud with hundreds of pages of testimony from poll watchers and ballot challengers in Michigan. Almost all of them have failed in court so far.
      Though Trump and his supporters have claimed thousands of dead people voted in Michigan, only one allegation was included in the lawsuits. Warren, Michigan resident Anita Chase wrote in an affidavit that her deceased son, Mark D Chase, who had died in July 2016, was marked in the secretary of state’s online voter tool as having voted in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
      But the secretary of state said Anita Chase had identified one of two other Mark D Chases registered to vote in Michigan – a ballot had not been cast in her son’s name. In their response to the affidavits, Detroit election officials lambasted the Trump campaign over such errors: “Most of the objections raised in the submitted affidavits are grounded in an extraordinary failure to understand how elections function.” More

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      Think Joe Biden's victory marks the end of rightwing populism? Think again | Benjamin Moffitt

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      It is tempting to conclude that Donald Trump’s defeat – which he still hasn’t accepted – is a sign that the “populist wave” that saw many rightwing populists triumph across the 2010s is finally receding. With the populist commander-in-chief losing office, rightwing populists around the world must surely be feeling nervous, wondering if it is all over, and whether they might be next.
      We’ve heard this one before. In 2017, when Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen in France and Mark Rutte defeated Geert Wilders in the Netherlands within the space of a few months, many a thinkpiece was written asking: are populism’s days numbered? I think we all know the answer to that, as do the likes of Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
      Make no mistake: Joe Biden’s win over Trump is a monumental and important victory, not only for the Democrats in the US, but for small-d democrats worldwide. There was a collective sigh of relief in liberal democracies across the globe when the news came through that the most prominent and famous case of rightwing populism would soon be packing his bags. But to assume that Biden’s win sounds the death knell for populism, or that it provides a clear model for defeating populism that should be imitated in other countries, would be a mistake.
      There are three key problems here. The first is assuming that a single election in a single country acts as a bellwether for global trends – even if it is the most powerful and wealthy country in the world. While political scientists often speak about a process of “diffusion” in which political events in one country influence those in others, this is by no means a linear process. While parties and movements across the globe that are opposed to rightwing populism and nativism will undoubtedly take heart from Biden’s victory and study what worked, there is no indication nor guarantee that the dominoes will fall for populists in other countries, many of whose success is far more entrenched and longstanding than Trump’s. Beyond this, while Trump may (eventually) be gone, that does not mean populism is: populist-right leaders and parties tend to have long institutional legacies, and we can expect the GOP to grapple with its post-Trump future – and the question of whether it wants to continue down the populist path he has set them on – for months and years to come.
      The second problem is, strangely enough, overlooking what a singularly and uniquely bizarre, venal and odious character Trump is, even compared with the rogues’ gallery that make up the global populist right. While populism is a political style that revolves around the appeal to “the people” versus “the elite”, the invocation of crisis, and the use of “bad manners” to demonstrate your closeness to the “real people”, Trump took this to an extreme.
      His was a populism on steroids. I have spent my professional life studying populism across the globe, so should be inured to these kinds of things, but constantly found myself shaking my head in disbelief at the depths Trump was willing to plumb. Only Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines or perhaps Bolsonaro come close in terms of their ability to court outrage and offend: most rightwing populists at least know when to tone it down and when to play it up, a balance that Trump seemed unwilling or perhaps even unable to achieve.
      In this regard, it is probably the case that this election should not be read as a vote for Biden, but as a strong vote against Trump. This is what political scientists refer to as “negative partisanship” – the idea that you vote against candidates and parties, not for them. Trump is such a detestable figure that many people probably held their noses and voted for Biden as there was no other realistic choice if they wanted to save the republic. Now that Biden will take office, those people will probably stop holding their noses.
      This relates to the third, perhaps deepest problem: the kind of “anti-populism” put forward by Biden does not represent a lasting response to rightwing populism. By anti-populism, I refer not to a clear ideological disposition or mode of governance, but rather the phenomenon by which opponents of populism are drawn together in a temporary alliance to “defeat” populism. Such anti-populism usually has a centrist and moderate flavour, offering a return to “normal”, a privileging of “rationality”, and the offer of the grownups being in charge once again: precisely what Biden was offering in comparison with the utter chaos of the Trump administration.
      Let us be clear: anti-populism worked here. Biden was able to pull together a loose coalition of disparate groups in the name of defeating Trump – leftists, centrist Democrats, the so-called moderate Republicans of the “Never Trumpers” and Lincoln Project strand. But what now? With Trump (nearly) out of the way, what on earth do these groups have to agree on? “Decency”? “Normalcy”? These are not the basis for a sustainable ideological project or the makings of newly forged political identity. They have served their purpose as part of an electoral strategy, but there is little long-term to grasp on to here, and serious political imagination and courage is needed to forge a way out of this.
      As such, while the embrace of centrism may be enticing at present as Biden calls for unity, compromise and consensus, it is important to keep in mind that such a form of politics often ends up eventually feeding into the desire for populism. Indeed, political theorists such as Chantal Mouffe have explicitly blamed such “third wayism”, which seeks to steer “not right, nor left”, for the rise of right populism in Europe. The American people have every right to demand not “normal”, but serious systemic change in a fractured and deeply unequal nation. It is not difficult to imagine how a failure to meet these challenges could create the conditions in which enough of the populace is discontented and alienated from political, economic and social life that they are willing to roll the dice on a right-populist once again.
      So, let the anti-populists enjoy a much-deserved electoral victory. The Trump era is over, and, in the end, Biden was the person to deliver them from the misery that Trump had lorded over for the past four years. But let’s not be naive: you don’t defeat populism in the long run simply by being anti-populist. The longer struggle of what a Biden presidency will mean now begins.
      • Benjamin Moffitt is a senior lecturer in politics at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. His latest book is Populism More

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      Trump fires director of US cybersecurity agency that refuted voter fraud claims

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      Donald Trump has fired the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election and pushed back on the president’s baseless claims of voter fraud.
      Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.
      The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of the president-elect, Joe Biden, and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Mark Esper, the defense secretary, on 9 November part of a broader shake-up that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.
      Krebs had indicated he expected to be fired. Last week, his agency released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the statement read. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
      Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, ran the agency, known as Cisa, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as Cisa coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.
      Trump mentioned the Cisa statement in his tweet firing Krebs. The president’s tweets also repeated many of the baseless election fraud claims he has made in recent weeks.
      Several top Democrats were swift to condemn the president’s decision to fire Krebs.
      On CNN, senator Chris Coons of Delaware said, “Chris Krebs’ federal service is just the latest casualty in President Trump’s four-year-long war on the truth.”
      Angus King, the Maine senator who is among the candidates who may be appointed Director of National Intelligence in the upcoming Biden administration, called Krebs “a dedicated public servant who has helped build up new cyber capabilities in the face of swiftly-evolving dangers.
      “By firing him for doing his job, President Trump is harming all Americans.”
      Adam Schiff, the Democratic California congressman who chairs the House intelligence committee, said that Trump’s move is “ pathetic and predictable from a president who views truth as his enemy”.
      And Mark Warner, a Democratic senator of Virginia and co-chair of the Senate cybersecurity caucus, said Krebs “is an extraordinary public servant and exactly the person Americans want protecting the security of our elections”.
      “It speaks volumes that the president chose to fire him simply for telling the truth,” he said, echoing many of his Democratic colleagues.
      Ben Sasse, a Republican senator of Nebraska also chimed in. “Chris Krebs did a really good job,” he said. “He obviously should not be fired.”
      Two other DHS officials – Bryan Ware, Cisa’s assistant director of international affairs, and Valerie Boyd, DHS assistant secretary of international affairs – were also reportedly forced out last week.
      Krebs tweeted from his personal account that he was “honored to serve”.
      Twitter quickly flagged the tweets in which the president announced Krebs’ firing for containing “disputed” claims about the election.
      Unwilling to accept reality and concede the election, Trump has doubled down on conspiracy theories about election fraud. His administration has blocked the Biden transition team from receiving briefings, but now that Krebs is no longer working in an official capacity, the incoming administration may be able to glean non-classified briefings from the former cybersecurity official. More

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      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