Trump legal effort hits wall in 2 Pennsylvania cases over technical ballot errors
Two more Pennsylvania legal challenges by President Donald Trump‘s campaign appear to have failed, insuring that more than 2,700 ballots that had been contested over technicalities would, in fact, be counted.
One case, filed in the Philadelphia suburb of Bucks County, sought to toss out 2,177 ballots over missing words on the address line or improperly sealed secrecy envelopes. A similar challenge brought in neighboring Montgomery County was ordered closed by the court.
In dismissing the Bucks County lawsuit, Judge Robert O. Baldi said it would be „an injustice to disenfranchise these voters” based on the technical errors with the ballots. Baldi noted repeatedly that the Trump team „specifically stipulated” that „there exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots.”
MORE: Election 2020: A look at Trump campaign election lawsuits and where they stand
„There is nothing in the record and nothing alleged that would lead to the conclusion that any of the challenged ballots were submitted by someone not qualified or entitled to vote in this election,” Baldi wrote.
The point took on added significance as the Trump legal team, and the president himself, have continued to allege fraud on social media and in press appearances — but not as stridently in court where evidence is required to support the claim.
Eliza Sweren-Becker, counsel for the Democracy Program at the bipartisan Brennan Center for Justice, told ABC News suits like these appear aimed at grabbing attention.
„In large part, this litigation, the other cases that the campaign has filed are really a distraction,” Sweren-Becker said. „It’s important to recognize the frivolous nature of these suits.”
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Some of the reasons the Trump team argued would disqualify ballots involved mail-in ballots from voters who left off part of their address or failed to properly secure the secrecy envelope, among other concerns the judge cited as „minor.”
„The minor irregularity of a lack of a complete handwritten name or address is not necessary to prevent fraud and there would be no other significant interest undermined by allowing these ballots to be counted,” he wrote.
Trump legal effort hits wall in 2 Pennsylvania cases over technical ballot errors originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Threats and Tensions Rise as Trump and Allies Attack Elections Process
President Donald Trump’s false accusations that voter fraud denied him reelection are causing escalating confrontations in swing states across the country, leading to threats of violence against officials in both parties and subverting even the most routine steps in the electoral process.
In Arizona on Wednesday, the Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, issued a statement lamenting the “consistent and systematic undermining of trust” in the elections and called on Republican officials to stop “perpetuating misinformation.” She described threats against her and her family in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in her state.
In Georgia, where Biden holds a narrow lead that is expected to stand through a recount concluding Wednesday night, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has said he, too, received menacing messages. He also said he felt pressured by Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to search for ways to disqualify votes.
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In Pennsylvania, statehouse Republicans on Wednesday advanced a proposal to audit the state’s election results that cited “a litany of inconsistencies” — a move Democrats described as obstructionist and unnecessary given Trump’s failure to present any evidence in court of widespread fraud or other problems. Republicans in Wisconsin filed new lawsuits Wednesday in the state’s two biggest counties, seeking a recount. Biden reclaimed both states after Trump won them in 2016.
Nowhere was the confusion and chaos more evident than in Michigan on Tuesday night, when two Republican members of the canvassing board in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, initially refused to certify election results, pointing to minor recording discrepancies. It was a stunningly partisan move that would have potentially disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters from a predominantly Black city, and after a stream of public backlash, the two board members reversed their votes and agreed to certify.
“You could see the racism in the behavior last night,” Mike Duggan, the Democratic mayor of Detroit, said at a news conference Wednesday, condemning Republican efforts to block the voting results. “American democracy cracked last night, but it didn’t break. But we are seeing a real threat to everything we believe in.”
Late Wednesday, in yet another about-face, the two Republican election board members said they were rescinding their votes to certify the results. In affidavits, they effectively said that they had been bullied into voting for the certification and that they did not believe the Democrats on the board were following through with their promise to ensure an independent audit of the Wayne County results.
Jonathan C. Kinloch, the vice chair and one of the two Democratic members of the Wayne County canvass board, said in an interview that the vote to certify remained binding.
In courtrooms, statehouses and elections board meetings across the country, the president is increasingly seeking to force the voting system to bend to his false vision of the election, while also using the weight of the executive office to deliver his message to lower-level election workers, hoping they buckle.
The effort has been joined by surrogates like Graham, who has used his visibility as a senior U.S. senator to make false claims about vote processing in Nevada; forward disputed accusations about mail ballots in Pennsylvania to the Justice Department; and level unsubstantiated accusations about supposedly fraudulent votes for Biden.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and the former mayor of New York, have made blanket attacks against cities with large Black populations like Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia, painting those places in evidence-free tirades as too corrupt to be trusted to hold honest elections.
The extraordinary assault on the voting system by the president and his allies has taken on added intensity as the deadlines for certifying results in several states approach. Once certified, final tallies will further forestall Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss.
Barring some breakthrough in the president’s legal push, his strategy appears to center on disrupting the process through which states finalize their vote counts and submit their delegate slates to the Electoral College.
Republicans’ attempts to follow his lead in Wayne County failed in the face of Detroit residents who were outraged by what they saw as an open attempt to disenfranchise them. A public comment session with hundreds of voters and civil rights leaders rippled into a three-hour uproar, as they condemned the fact that two white officials were threatening the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of Black voters.
“You look at Black cities and you have extracted a Black city out of the county and said the only one at fault is the city of Detroit, where 80% of the people who reside there are African Americans,” exclaimed the Rev. Wendell Anthony, the president of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP, his face almost touching the computer screen. “Shame on you,” he added. “You are a disgrace.”
“But on Jan. 20, 2021, at 12 noon,” he said, “no matter what you do, the president of the United States will be Joseph Biden and the vice president, for the first time ever, will be a Black woman named Kamala Harris.”
“Do you know how many young Black teenagers voted for the first time this year?” Benita Bradley of Detroit said during the Zoom call Tuesday night. “And you sit here and slap those people in the face. What you are doing to brown and Black people in this community makes you part of the problem, you are the problem. You are the reason why young kids don’t see the promise in voting. But our country will go forward. We will unify.”
The two Democratic members of the Wayne County canvassing board, Jonathan C. Kinloch and Allen Wilson, reacted with similar shock and anger at the initial refusal to certify the votes. After the two Republican members reversed course and voted to certify, the process moves to the Board of State Canvassers, where the results are to be finalized by Nov. 23.
Dana Nessel, the Democratic attorney general of Michigan, said she had kept a wary eye on the Wayne County proceedings, and was particularly worried about any potential litigation stemming from a canvass fight.
“I keep hoping we’ll see a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said. “But it was obvious that these are plans that have been in place for a long time and it’s just a matter of how far the Republicans will take this.”
The announcement late Wednesday about the Republican board members’ attempt to rescind their certification votes arrived in a news release from a public affairs firm based in Leesburg, Virginia, called ProActive Communications, which has done consulting work for Trump’s campaign and whose founder, Mark Serrano, has been a frequent television defender of the president’s. Trump’s 2020 operation paid the firm more than $2 million for its consulting services, according to records kept by the campaign finance website OpenSecrets.
The Wayne County canvassing board&aposs reversal on Tuesday was a distillation of these waning days of the Trump presidency — a clash over an attempt by Trump to present once more an alternative version of reality. With only minor irregularities reported, the two Democratic members were prepared to accept that Michigan had conducted a smooth election and to certify the results despite some minor errors, a routine step in the process. The Republican members, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer, had made clear in the days leading up to the meeting that they were prepared to accept Trump’s assertions that Democrats were stealing his presidency.
Palmer had raised questions on social media about Biden’s lead in the race in the days after the election, searching for discrepancies in online data from the secretary of state’s office. She also queried Republicans who had applied to be poll challengers at the TCF Center in Detroit, where absentee ballots were counted, seeking examples of the party’s monitors being denied access.
Hartmann had filled his Facebook page with false allegations and conspiracy theories that the vote was manipulated against the president. One post included allegations about malfeasance in Detroit that a judge has called “not credible” and another that featured a video promoting a cornucopia of fraud allegations — including against Detroit — that have unraveled in court or been debunked by election officials. Hartmann also promoted a video from the right-wing cable network One America News that Facebook flagged as having “false information” about the coronavirus death rate.
Tuesday’s inflammatory meeting also drew attention to Hartmann’s social media feeds, where old posts showed racist depictions of President Barack Obama, whom Hartmann once referred to as a “Muslim President” (Obama is Christian).
Neither Palmer nor Hartmann responded to requests for comment, but Mike Shirkey, the Republican leader of the state Senate, said in a statement Wednesday that there had been “disturbing reports of individuals who allegedly threatened the children of members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.”
Hobbs, the secretary of state of Arizona, said her experience as a social worker had prepared her for “threats of violence and vitriol” and called them “abhorrent.” She said they would not prevent her from performing her duties. “Our democracy is tested constantly, it continues to prevail, and it will not falter under my watch,” she said.
She called on the president, Congress and elected leaders to cease spreading misinformation that undermines the system.
“It is well past time that they stop,” she said. “Their words and actions have consequences.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
Statewide audit results reaffirm Biden winner in Georgia
The results of Georgia’s first-ever risk-limiting audit, which entailed counties recounting by hand every vote cast in the presidential race, reaffirmed that President-elect Joe Biden is the victor in Georgia, according to the secretary of state.
„The audit confirmed the original result of the election, namely that Joe Biden won the Presidential Contest in the state of Georgia,” the audit report plainly states.
MORE: Refuting falsehoods, Georgia election officials defend integrity of audit, election
It will be the first time since 1992, when then-candidate Bill Clinton’s margin of victory was similarly close, that a Democrat will earn the Peach State’s 16 electoral votes. Edison Research, the company ABC News uses to report votes, projected that Biden would win Georgia on Friday.
„The recount process simply reaffirmed what we already knew: Georgia voters selected Joe Biden to be their next president. We are grateful to the election officials, volunteers and workers for working overtime and under unprecedented circumstances to complete this recount, as the utmost form of public service,” Jaclyn Rothenberg, the Biden campaign’s Georgia communications director, said in a statement.
However, the Trump campaign said that Biden is not the winner, even though the audit report states he is, because Georgia hasn’t certified its election results. The campaign also said Georgia shouldn’t certify them.
„This so-called hand recount went exactly as we expected because Georgia simply recounted all of the illegal ballots that had been included in the total. We continue to demand that Georgia conduct an honest recount, which includes signature matching. We intend to pursue all legal options to ensure that only legal ballots are counted,” Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis said in a statement.
Republican Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, has been under fire from members of his own party, who’ve made unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, since before the full, by-hand recount of the presidential race was announced on Nov. 11. The state was always planning to conduct an audit on one contest following the general election, as is now required by law following the passage of a 2019 election reform bill, but it was up to Raffensperger to choose which race to audit, and he selected the presidential race because of its „national significance.” Since the margin in the contest was so tight, the secretary, in consultation with audit experts assisting with the process, determined that the most efficient and accurate way to do the audit would be to hand count every one of the approximately 5 million votes cast in the race.
According to VotingWorks, the organization that helped implement the audit, it’s the largest hand count of votes in U.S. history.
In the results of the audit, Biden’s lead was 12,284 votes. The statewide variation of the machine-counted results and the hand counted results was 0.1053%. According to the report, prior research indicates that the expected variance between hand and machine counts is between 1% and 1.5%. No county has a variation greater than 0.73% and 103 out of 159 counties had variations less than 0.05%.
„Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Raffensperger said in a statement. „This is a credit to the hard work of our county and local elections officials who moved quickly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time.”
The deadline for Raffensperger to certify the general election results is 5 p.m. Friday, and the secretary’s office has said the announcement of the certification’s completion will likely come in a press release.
Since the margin of victory is still within 0.5% of total votes cast in the contest, the Trump campaign can request a recount. The recount would be conducted using high-capacity scanners and not be done by hand. Under state law, counties bear the costs associated with a recount.
The deadline to request a recount is 5 p.m. Tuesday.
Republicans, including the president, railed against the audit’s process because it did not entail re-verifying the signatures accompanying the approximately 1.3 million returned absentee ballots.
„Thousands of uncounted votes discovered in Georgia counties. When the much more important signature match takes place, the State will flip Republican, and very quickly,” Trump tweeted Thursday.
Looking at signatures again would still not take place as part of a recount. Absent a court order, or the presentation of „credible evidence to pursue on a specific issue,” re-verifying signatures will not take place, according to Gabriel Sterling, the statewide voting system implementation manager in Raffensperger’s office.
During the audit, election officials in four counties discovered uncounted votes that were not included in their originally reported results.
In Fayette, Walton and Douglas counties, election officials learned that memory cards — just one in each county — containing votes were erroneously not uploaded. In Fayette County, 2,755 votes were on the memory card; in Walton County, 284 votes were on the memory card; in Douglas County, 293 votes were on the memory card.
In Floyd County, election officials found a batch of ballots that had never been scanned at all, an error that Gabriel Sterling, the statewide voting system implementation manager, called an „amazing blunder.” Raffensperger called on the county’s chief clerk of elections, Robert Brady, to resign because of the mistake. On Thursday, the Floyd County Board of Election voted to fire Brady.
Sterling said Wednesday that the issue in Floyd was „a lot more dangerous” because unlike the memory card issue, „there wasn’t a reconciliation process that was going to catch” the error in Floyd, so without this audit, there’s a real possibility those votes never would have been found. If the other three counties had conducted their reconciliation process properly, the missing memory card would have been found.
MORE: Trump to meet with GOP state lawmakers in effort to override election loss
He said that reinforcing the reconciliation process to county officials will be a priority looking toward the next election.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Sterling, who has been the public face of the audit representing the secretary’s office, said that he was „prayerful” that when the audit was completed, everyone — regardless of party affiliation — could trust the results.
„Everybody who’s involved in this — even the parties — they need to have faith in the outcome of these elections, whether they win, or whether they lose, because that’s the bedrock of how we have a transfer of power,” he said.
ABC News’ John Verhovek contributed reporting.
Statewide audit results reaffirm Biden winner in Georgia originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Turkey’s behaviour „widening its separation” from EU, Borrell says
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Turkey’s rhetoric on Cyprus is aggravating tensions with the European Union and Ankara must understand that its behaviour is „widening its separation” from the 27-nation bloc, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Thursday.
„We consider the recent actions and statements by Turkey related to Cyprus contrary to the United Nations resolutions and further igniting tensions,” Borrell told a news conference after a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
„We consider that it is important that Turkey understands that its behaviour is widening its separation from the EU … In order to return to a positive agenda, as we wish, will require a fundamental change of attitude on the Turkish side.”
He was referring to comments by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who called for an equal „two-state” solution in Cyprus during a visit earlier this week to the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north of the island.
Erdogan also said Turkey and Northern Cyprus would no longer tolerate what he called „diplomacy games” in an international dispute over rights to offshore resources in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Turkey is an official candidate for EU membership.
Cyprus has been split along ethnic lines since a Turkish invasion in 1974 triggered by a brief Greek-inspired coup. Only Ankara recognises Northern Cyprus as an independent state and it has no diplomatic relations with the government of Cyprus, which is a member of the EU.
Cyprus called Erdogan’s visit „provocative and illegal”.
The EU has threatened to impose sanctions on Turkey over illegal exploration at sea when its leaders meet next month.
„Time is running, and we are approaching a watershed moment in our relationship with Turkey,” Borrell said.
The EU has failed to persuade Ankara to stop exploring in waters disputed by Greece and Cyprus, but it has so far held off imposing sanctions that Athens and Nicosia are seeking.
Germany, which has led diplomatic talks with Ankara, wants to give dialogue a chance because of close EU-Turkey trade ties.
(Reporting by John Chalmers and Robin Emmott, Editing by William Maclean)
EU to impose more Belarus sanctions, including on firms
By Robin Emmott
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union foreign ministers agreed on Thursday to push ahead with a new round of sanctions on Belarus including on Belarusian companies, in response to state repression of pro-democracy protests, the EU’s top diplomat said on Thursday.
The EU has already imposed travel bans and asset freezes on almost 50 Belarusian officials in protest over an Aug. 9 presidential election the West says was rigged and over President Alexander Lukashenko’s violent crackdown on opponents.
The new sanctions are expected to target more senior officials and also entities that finance Lukashenko and his government, Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, told a news conference.
„One day, we will exhaust the number of people that could be sanctioned. And now we have to go to more sensitive issues, which is sanctioning firms, which will affect the developing of the normal economic activity,” Borrell said.
Borrell said it was up to EU governments to propose companies to target and did not give any examples.
The country’s largest telecoms company, state-owned Beltelecom, is accused of cutting off internet and mobile data services to hamper protesters’ ability to coordinate, diplomats and human rights group say.
The EU, the largest donor of financial assistance to Belarus, sanctioned 40 Belarus officials on Oct. 2 and has since expanded the number targeted.
The EU has sought to promote democracy and develop a market economy in Belarus, but, along with the United States, accuses Lukashenko of staying in power by holding fraudulent elections, jailing opponents and muzzling the media.
Opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who fled to Lithuania after the election she says she won, urged EU leaders this week to impose „targeted financial sanctions against people … who are in the pockets of Lukashenko”.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said before the EU meeting that more EU measures, such as sanctions, were necessary because „the Belarusian authorities are obviously not prepared to start a dialogue with the opposition”.
Police in Minsk used tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse tens of thousands of demonstrators last Sunday, on the 14th straight weekend of protests since the disputed election that Lukashenko says he won by a landslide.
Borrell said the EU was reviewing all its financial assistance to Belarus and none of its aid would be channelled through the government of Lukashenko, who Brussels no longer recognises as the legitimate president.
EU governments are looking for ways to increase pressure on the Belarusian leadership, which has the backing of Russia, to end its crackdown and talk with the opposition.
The death last week of a 31-year-old protester, after what demonstrators said was a severe beating by security forces, has further galvanised EU support for the Belarusian opposition.
(Reporting by Robin Emmott, editing by Gareth Jones and Giles Elgood)
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