He’s had little success so far, and deadlines are looming.
President Donald Trump is still pressing onward with his effort to try to overturn the election results in states Joe Biden clearly won — but he’s had little success so far, deadlines are looming, and patience among some Republicans is wearing thin. The most significant deadline Monday is that the Michigan Board of State Canvassers will meet this afternoon. By state law, that board is tasked with certifying the election results by November 23 — which means certifying Biden’s win, which was by more than 150,000 votes — but it’s unclear whether they will do so, because Trump is making an unprecedented effort to interfere with the mechanics of electoral democracy. The board has two Republican members and two Democratic members. One of the Republican members has said he wants to delay certification, because he’s given credence to baseless, conspiratorial claims about vote machine rigging pushed by lawyer Sidney Powell. It is unclear what the other GOP member will do. (Meanwhile, after Powell made yet another set of baseless and conspiratorial claims this weekend, Trump’s legal team distanced themselves from her in a statement.) Pennsylvania also has a Monday deadline for counties to certify their vote results — after which the Democratic secretary of the commonwealth, Kathy Boockvar, can certify the state’s overall results. So Republicans have made a flurry of long-shot legal filings, trying to get some judge, any judge, to declare that Pennsylvania can’t certify its results just yet. And over the weekend, a few more Republican US senators got fed up with Trump’s post-election behavior — Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) joined a handful of their GOP colleagues in condemning Trump’s effort to get state legislatures to overturn the will of their voters, which could be significant in the unlikely event that disputes over this election make it to Congress in January. So overall it looks quite likely that Biden will indeed take office as scheduled on January 20, but Trump’s effort to obstruct this is very real, he has convinced many of his supporters that the election was fraudulently stolen from him, and it’s far from clear how this would have played out in a truly close race. Michigan’s certification deadline is Monday Though Michigan was the least close of the swing states Biden won — he leads by more than 150,000 votes, a 2.8 percentage point margin — Trump and his allies have stoked a great deal of post-election mischief there because of the way the state certifies its votes. In Michigan, the job of certifying the results is given to a four-member bipartisan board of canvassers. Each county has its own four-person board, and there’s a statewide board as well. Last week, there were partisan shenanigans at the county level, as the two Republican canvassers in Wayne County (Michigan’s largest county, containing Detroit) initially refused to certify the vote totals. Their stated reason for doing so was that too many precincts were “out of balance” (there were more votes cast than voters’ names confirmed as participating). But the size of these discrepancies was quite small (generally only a few votes in each precinct), suggesting clerical error rather than a massive conspiracy to rig the state for Biden. Plus, similar discrepancies were present in past elections, like this year’s primary. So after a few hours of intense backlash, the Wayne County Republican canvassers backed down and certified the vote — though after President Trump reached out to them, they later claimed they were pressured into certifying. Now this will potentially happen all over again, at the state level, which meets this afternoon. One Republican on the state board, Norm Shinkle, has stated openly in interviews that he doesn’t think the results should be certified, echoing the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of large-scale fraud. (His wife was a witness in one of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits alleging improper election practices in Detroit.) The other, Aaron Van Langevelde, is a lawyer for Michigan state House Republicans. He has not commented on the process. If the state board declines to certify, a legal challenge is certain. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and Attorney General Dana Nessel are all Democrats and would not idly stand by while Republicans try to steal Michigan’s electoral votes from Joe Biden.
