Rather than finding fraud, trump's many lawsuits have shown how well the
voting system works and how few mistakes and how little fraud there is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-election-legal-challenges/2020/11/14/904fbd04-25e2-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html
[I snipped the beginning, thinking only a little was left. I was
wrong. ]
The mismatch between Trump’s rhetoric about voter fraud — and his
ability to prove it — was particularly stark in Georgia.
There, Trump’s campaign said this week that it had found the clearest
possible evidence of fraud: A dead man had voted.
“Someone used the identity of James Blalock of Covington, Georgia to
cast a ballot in last week’s election, even though Blalock died in
2006,” the campaign posted on its website, along with a screenshot of
Blalock’s obituary. It added: “These victims of voter fraud deserve
justice.”
Trump’s campaign had one thing right. James Blalock is dead.
But he wasn’t the one who voted.
“I knew it wasn’t fraud,” said Mrs. James Blalock, a 96-year-old widow,
in an interview with Atlanta’s WXIA-TV on Friday.
Mrs. Blalock, whose first name is Agnes, had chosen to be listed on the
voter rolls under her husband’s name — which is now an uncommon practice
but is legal. She told WXIA she’d voted for Biden: “I guess I voted
against the other one, really.”
Philip A. Johnson, chairman of the board of elections in Newton County,
Ga., confirmed that account and called the allegations of Trump’s
campaign “shameful.”
“I’ve been practicing law 46 years, and I believe that when you aim
accusations or allegations, you should always have your facts straight,”
Johnson said. He is a former Democratic Party official, but his
appointed position is officially nonpartisan. “It just bothers me that
they weren’t.”
WXIA said it had found at least one other instance where one of Trump’s
“dead” voters was alive. There are a few remaining cases — including at
least two in Nevada — where authorities are investigating whether
someone did use a dead person’s name to vote. But they say these were
isolated cases and didn’t amount to any kind of coordinated fraud.
The accusation about Mrs. Blalock wasn’t Trump’s only misfire in
Georgia. In another case, Trump’s campaign had filed a lawsuit saying
that 53 late-arriving ballots in Savannah’s Chatham County may have been
backdated to appear valid.
But, when they called their witnesses, the witnesses admitted they
didn’t know that for sure. The local board of elections testified that
the ballots arrived on time.
Judge James Bass dismissed the case in eight words: “I’m denying the
request and dismissing the petition,” he said from the bench.
In Nevada, Trump allies promised they had found problems on a huge
scale. In news conferences, they said thousands of people — some having
departed this life, others simply having departed Nevada — might have
voted illegally.
They said there were reports of a van decked out in Biden/Harris logos,
and carrying boxes of ballots that people were opening, filling out and
sealing in envelopes
“Nevada is turning out to be a cesspool of Fake Votes,” Trump tweeted
this week, promising that new revelations, once released, would be
“absolutely shocking!”
But many of the “out of state” voters turned out to be military
personnel, who are allowed to continue voting while outside Nevada.
[And others were college students going to school out of state, also
legally voting]
And the lawsuit filed in federal court offered no evidence of widespread
fraud. Instead of thousands of illegal votes, Republicans presented
evidence about . . . one.
In the lawsuit, a woman said a thief had filled out and returned her
mail ballot. When she showed up to vote in person, the woman said, she
wasn’t allowed.
County officials denied that. They said they had actually offered the
woman a chance to vote in person, if she would sign an affidavit saying
the mail-in ballot had been stolen. She had refused.
The Trump allies said this incident was still proof of a flawed system,
because the woman could not vote in the normal way.
“I’m still having a hard time understanding your argument,” Judge Andrew
Gordon said.
He blocked Republicans’ request for emergency changes in local voting
procedures — but said they could return if they found more compelling
evidence.
As of Friday, they had not.
Biden was winning the state by 34,000 votes. Trump’s litigation had not
changed that total — even by one.
In Arizona, the Trump camp’s allegations of misconduct — and hope for an
election miracle — centered at first on a conspiracy theory about
Sharpie pens.
The president’s allies alleged that when voters in Maricopa County used
Sharpies to bubble in Arizona ballots, the voting machines could not
properly read them.
“AZ update: apparently the use of sharpie pens in gop precincts is
causing ballots to be invalidated,” Trump ally Matt Schlapp, the head of
the American Conservative Union, tweeted Nov. 4. “Could be huge numbers
of mostly Trump supporters. More to come.”
AD
Trump’s son Eric retweeted that, adding three siren emoji. Neither man
explained how or why the Sharpie problem would have disproportionately
affected Trump’s supporters.
Voters backed by a conservative legal advocacy group filed suit,
claiming that Sharpies had been “bleeding through” ballots and causing
problems with their processing.
Then the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and the
Arizona GOP stepped in with another argument. The suit said that
machines had repeatedly detected “overvotes” — where people appear to
have chosen multiple candidates in the same race — and that poll workers
had pushed or encouraged voters to push a green button casting their
ballot anyway.
No vote is counted in an overvoted race.
The lawsuit said that invalidated overvotes would “prove determinative”
in Trump’s bid for reelection and sought to block certification of
Arizona’s results until the ballots could be reviewed by hand.
But there was a problem. In all of Maricopa County, the total number of
overvotes for president was 190. Biden is winning Arizona by about
10,000 votes.
“We’re not alleging that anyone was stealing the election,” said the
Trump campaign’s lawyer, Kory Langhofer, in a court hearing Thursday.
Langhofer added 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.”
State and county election officials have said there is no truth to the
rumors that ballots filled out with a Sharpie cause problems for the
voting machines. “We looked into that. We were able to determine that
did not affect anyone’s vote,” said Arizona Attorney General Mark
Brnovich (R).
On Friday, Langhofer officially gave up on claims that the Sharpie
allegation could flip the result of the presidential election in
Arizona, saying the point was moot because so few votes were affected.
“We continue to explore President Trump’s options in Arizona,” said
Murtaugh, the Trump campaign spokesman.
As his legal hopes faded, the president on Thursday endorsed a new,
baseless, conspiracy theory: that a company called Dominion Voting
Systems had given thousands of his votes to Biden. Dominion Voting
Systems operates in Arizona and other key states.
Later that day, Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security released a
statement rebutting his claim, though without naming Trump or Dominion
directly. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American
history,” said the statement from the federal Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency and its state and local partners. “There
is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed
votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Brnovich, the Arizona attorney general, said the best piece of evidence
that Maricopa County had run a fair election was the fact that the
official who actually oversaw the voting — county recorder Adrian Fontes
(D) — had lost his own race.
“If indeed there was some great conspiracy, it apparently didn’t work,”
Brnovich said.
In Michigan, Trump and Republican groups have filed five different
lawsuits, all based on similar allegations: that officials in Detroit
had miscounted ballots in a way that helped Biden. In one case, they
didn’t even get the filing right — lawyers somehow aimed at the Western
District of Michigan but instead filed the case in an obscure federal
court in Washington. Trump’s team blamed a computer glitch.
The Michigan lawsuits relied on testimony from people inside the city’s
ballot-counting room — poll watchers, an IT contractor, and an election
worker. The most voluminous of the lawsuits, filed in federal court,
include more than 230 pages of sworn statements.
[This might be what giuliani was rferring to at the 4 Seasons garden
club.]
“Shocking allegations of voter irregularities revealed in 234 pages of
signed and sworn affidavits,” the Trump campaign wrote on Twitter.
But a closer look at the affidavits showed that many did not allege any
wrongdoing with ballots. Instead, they showed poll challengers
complaining about other things: a loud public-address system, mean looks
from poll workers, and a Democratic poll watcher who said “Go back to
the suburbs, Karen.”
[LOL. You all know about Karen, right?]
Some poll observers had become suspicious simply after seeing many
ballots cast for Democrats — in Detroit, a heavily Democratic city where
Biden won 94 percent of the vote. “I specifically noticed that every
ballot I observed was cast for Joe Biden,” one observer wrote. The Trump
campaign filed that as evidence in court.
In other cases, poll challengers raised issues with procedures that
election workers say were normal. Some, for instance, noted that workers
input voters’ birth dates as January 1, 1900. Election officials say
that was a quirk of the computer system: It required workers to enter a
voter’s birth date at a step when they did not have access to that
information, so they were told to enter a placeholder.
So far, Trump and his allies have faced a judge three times in Michigan.
All three times, it went poorly.
In one case, the plaintiffs relied on testimony from a poll worker, who
was relaying what she’d been told by an unidentified election worker.
Judge Cynthia Stephens said that was hearsay. Inadmissible. The lawyer
tried to argue.
“ ‘I heard somebody else say something,’ ” Stephens said. “Tell me why
that’s not hearsay. Come on, now.”
Stephens ruled against the plaintiffs.
A few days later, Judge Timothy M. Kenny heard a similar argument from
another group of Republican plaintiffs. He asked how well the Republican
poll-watchers understood the procedures they were watching.
The city had conducted a “walk-through” for Republican poll-challengers
in late October, long before the counting began, to show how the
absentee ballot counting procedure worked.
Had the plaintiff’s poll watchers been there, to learn about the process
they were now objecting to?
No, the plaintiff’s lawyer said. They had not known about it.
“Plaintiff’s affiants did not have a full understanding of the
[convention center] absentee ballot counting process,” Kenny wrote in an
opinion. “However, sinister, fraudulent motives were ascribed to the
process and the City of Detroit. Plaintiff’s interpretation of events is
incorrect and not credible.”
David Kallman, an attorney for the Republican poll-challengers, said
afterward that he would appeal Kenny’s decision to a higher court. He
said there was still time to get a favorable ruling before Michigan is
supposed to certify its statewide election results on Nov. 23.
“We’ve still got some time built in there,” Kallman said. “Not a lot of
time.”
Pennsylvania was the state that put Biden over the top, and it has been
the center of Trump’s legal battles since Election Day. Trump has said
on Twitter that Pennsylvania’s fraud was so big that — if it were
corrected — “based on our great Constitution, we win the State of
Pennsylvania!”
In Pennsylvania’s courts, however, Trump’s legal team has produced no
signs of fraud on that scale.
In fact, as his lawyers have bounced from loss to loss, they have often
struggled to explain the logic of their own arguments.
In that Philadelphia case — where Trump’s lawyer attempted to dodge a
question by saying there was a “nonzero number” of GOP observers in a
room — Judge Paul Diamond responded with another question.
“I’m asking you as a member of the bar of this court,” Diamond said,
invoking attorney’s responsibility to be honest. “Are people
representing the plaintiffs in the room?”
“Yes,” the lawyer said.
“I’m sorry, then what’s your problem?” Diamond asked. Trump’s lawyers
also wanted closer access for their observers in the room.
In another case, in state court, Trump’s attorneys asked a judge to
throw out 592 ballots because voters had made minor mistakes, such as
failing to write their address on the outer envelope. In most cases, the
address was already printed on a mailing label attached to the envelope.
What the judge wanted to know was: Why? Why was the Trump campaign
focused on these ballots? What was the reason for throwing out people’s
votes, for a minor error?
“I am asking you a specific question, and I am looking for a specific
answer,” said Judge Richard P. Haaz. “Are you claiming that there is any
fraud in connection with these 592 disputed ballots?”
“To my knowledge at present, no,” Trump campaign attorney Jonathan
Goldstein replied.
The Trump campaign has some broad, long-shot lawsuits still pending in
Pennsylvania.
One seeks to have more than 680,000 votes in Democratic-leaning
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh thrown out, on the basis that the campaign’s
observers were not allowed close enough to the counting process. That
could swing the state’s election, but it appears very unlikely to
succeed.
Another seeks to throw out 10,000 ballots that arrived after Election
Day, saying that an extension granted by the state was improper. That
one may actually succeed, but it’s unlikely to swing the election —
Biden’s lead is much bigger than 10,000, even if all those votes were
his.
On Friday alone, Trump’s campaign suffered six different defeats in
state courts, as judges rejected their attempts to invalidate about
9,000 ballots for minor errors.
The Trump campaign has notched only minor successes in Pennsylvania
courts.
On Thursday, a state court agreed with Trump’s request to bar a small
number of ballots where voters were late to provide missing proof of
identification. Those ballots have not been counted yet.
That was a victory. But it only underscored the vast mismatch between
Trump’s actual legal strategy and the history-changing one he had
promised.
Before that court’s decision, Trump was losing Pennsylvania by 65,000
votes. Afterward, he was still losing Pennsylvania by 65,000 votes.
Kayla Ruble, Tom Hamburger, Jon Swaine, Aaron Blake and Rosalind S.
Helderman contributed to this report.