From the AP:
On Nov. 6, more than two dozen CEOs of major U.S. corporations took part in a video conference to discuss what to do if Trump refuses to leave office or takes other steps to stay in power beyond the scheduled Jan. 20 inauguration of former Vice President Joe Biden. On Saturday Biden was declared the election winner by The Associated Press and other news organizations. …
On Saturday, the day after the video meeting, the Business Roundtable, a group that represents the most powerful companies in America, including Walmart, Apple, Starbucks and General Electric, put out a statement congratulating Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris. It largely reflected the conversation from Friday’s video meeting, saying the group respects Trump’s right to seek recounts and call for investigations where evidence exists….
The executives who participated in the video conference are from Fortune 500 finance, retail, media and manufacturing companies, Sonnenfeld said. But he wouldn’t identify them because they attended the meeting with the condition that their names be kept confidential. Sonnenfeld frequently speaks with CEOs and sets up meetings for them to discuss pressing issues.
Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University who spoke at the video meeting, confirmed Sonnenfeld’s account, as did an executive who attended but didn’t want to be identified because he didn’t want to violate the meeting’s ground rules.
“They’re trying to be moral and effective leaders,” Glover said. “It’s a calculation of whether saying anything now can be an effective tool to making a situation better.”
The time may come for CEOs to speak out, but most are assuming that Trump’s legal challenges and threats are just theater and the change in power will take place uneventfully, Glover said.
Still, several CEOs have urged Trump to acknowledge that he’s lost, concede to Biden and end any political uncertainty.
“The votes have been counted, and the president needs to honor the result,” said Ryan Gellert, CEO of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, which has been outspoken on behalf of progressive causes such as protecting the environment.
President Trump has claimed widespread fraud was at play in the presidential election. Several of his lawyers have told judges in courtrooms across the country that they don’t believe that to be true.
The Trump campaign or Republican allies have brought lawsuits in several battleground states contesting election results that favored President-elect Joe Biden, seeking to stop the certification of results or have ballots thrown out. Under questioning from judges handling the cases, at least two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers have backed away from suggestions that the election was stolen or fraudulent.
In other instances, attorneys representing Mr. Trump or other Republicans have said under oath they have no evidence of fraud. Lawyers also have struggled to get what they say is evidence of fraud admitted into lawsuits, with judges dismissing it as inadmissible or unreliable. A coalition of organizations representing secretaries of state, federal agencies and other top election officials said Thursday there wasn’t evidence that voting systems were compromised during the election.
Election-law experts say many of Mr. Trump’s legal claims amount to citations of common irregularities or unintentional errors by voters or administrators rather than election fraud, or intentional efforts to subvert the election. They say that fraudulent acts do occasionally happen, but they typically affect relatively few ballots.
Disputes over procedures or errors are usually resolved by invalidating disputed ballots—typically a limited number that doesn’t alter the result—or modifying counting procedures. Courts only very occasionally have taken extraordinary steps such as ordering a new election….
Mr. Goldstein at first declined to answer, saying “everybody is coming to this with good faith.”
Judge Richard Haaz pressed: “I understand. I am asking you a specific question, and I am looking for a specific answer. Are you claiming that there is any fraud in connection with these 592 disputed ballots?”
“To my knowledge at present, no,” Mr. Goldstein said.
The exchange illustrated the difference between Mr. Trump’s public-relations strategy around the election and what can be raised in court, where strict rules govern what attorneys can say within the bounds of their professional responsibilities and what evidence is deemed admissible.
“I think that there’s a huge difference between the kind of cheap talk that the president can engage in on Twitter and the way that lawyers need to present evidence in court,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor and election-law specialist at the University of California, Irvine.
“Not only are lawyers subject to sanctions if they file frivolous lawsuits or provide false information to the court, but claims are also subject to the rules of evidence,” Mr. Hasen added.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on this racially discriminatory loser of a lawsuit:
The suit seeks to exclude all the presidential vote totals from the two most populous and heavily Democratic counties in the state when certifying the state’s results. Those two counties delivered 577,408 votes for Biden and 213,133 for Trump, a gap of 364,264 votes, according to unofficial results. Other counties also had high levels of absentee voting but were not targeted in the lawsuit.
“Certifying Presidential Electors without excluding certain counties would violate voters’ fundamental right to vote by vote-dilution disenfranchisement,” the suit alleges, citing protections provided by the First and 14th amendments.
NYT on the state of play.
Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, the law firm leading the Trump campaign’s efforts to cast doubt on the presidential election results in Pennsylvania, abruptly withdrew from a federal lawsuit that it filed days earlier on behalf of President Trump.
“Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws,” the law firm said in a federal court filing.
The firm’s withdrawal followed an article in The New York Times on Monday described internal tensions at the firm about its work for Mr. Trump’s campaign in Pennsylvania. Some employees said they were concerned that the firm was being used to undercut the integrity of the electoral process. One Porter Wright lawyer resigned in protest over the summer.
Porter Wright, based in Columbus, Ohio, has received at least $727,000 in fees from the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, according to federal election disclosures.
The law firm on Monday filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania on behalf of the Trump campaign. The suit, which is pending, alleged that there were “irregularities” in the presidential vote across the state, which President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by more than 50,000 votes.
The Democratic National Committee has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
Previously, Porter Wright had filed a number of other actions in Pennsylvania courts challenging aspects of the state’s voting process. It isn’t clear if the firm will continue to represent Mr. Trump’s campaign on those cases. A Porter Wright representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
“Why do people think I have to concede? I WILL NOT CONCEDE,” wrote Manga Anantatmula, the Virginia Republican who lost to Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D) last weekby 43 points and nearly 170,000 votes.
“Please donate what you can to help me in my battle against potential fraud!” wrote Leon Benjamin, who lost to Rep. A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) by more than 22 points and 89,000 votes, according to unofficial returns
“We must defeat those who will lie, cheat, and steal to win an election at any cost,” wrote Rep.-elect Bob Good — who won his own race in central Virginia but is supporting President Trump’s effort to challenge the national results.
Their claims are part of a cacophony of doubt that Republicans have sown in the election since Trump lost to President-elect Joe Biden. Across the region, some losingcandidates have yelled “stop the steal” with pro-Trump protesters. Some, like Benjamin, are raising money for their own “legal defense” (though Benjamin said in a statement he will return the donations if it turns out he has no actionable case).
Top U.S. cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, who worked on protecting the election from hackers but drew the ire of the Trump White House over efforts to debunk disinformation, has told associates he expects to be fired, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Krebs, who heads the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), did not return messages seeking comment. CISA and the White House declined comment.
Separately, Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, confirmed to Reuters that he had handed in his resignation on Thursday. Ware did not provide details, but a U.S. official familiar with his matter said the White House asked for Ware’s resignation earlier this week.
The departure is part of the churn in the administration since Republican President Donald Trump was defeated by Democrat Joe Biden in last week’s election, raising concerns about the transition to the president-elect who would take office on Jan. 20. Trump, who has yet to concede and has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud, fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper and has installed loyalists in top positions at the Pentagon.
At his campaign headquarters, many staffers were expected to be laid off in the coming days, two officials said, with some aides being notified on Thursday. Officials were also supposed to brief surrogates on legal strategy Thursday afternoon but postponed the call twice, a person familiar with the planning said.
Later, in a 12-minute call, campaign officials said they believed Trump could still win the race. Tim Murtaugh, the campaign spokesman, asked donors and surrogates “for patience” and said it would take some time.
“There is not going to be a silver bullet,” he said. Murtaugh spent much of his time criticizing the news media, according to an audio recording of the call.
“The campaign continues to firmly believe that this election is not over,” Murtaugh said.
Justin Clark, the deputy campaign manager overseeing the legal efforts, told listeners that “you’re going to see a lot of things happen,” without offering much in the way of specifics. Clark asked for people to send to the campaign for investigation things they see on Twitter or on other websites.
Privately, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, continued to tell allies that Trump is “realistic” about his chances but wants to continue the fight, a person who has spoken to him said. Campaign manager Bill Stepien and other top campaign aides has also briefed Trump on his chances, casting them as uphill and telling Trump it is unlikely he will win.
But Trump does not want to pull out of the fight until the votes are certified in key states, which won’t be until late November or early December. His campaign filed five new lawsuits in Pennsylvania in an attempt to block 8,349 ballots in Philadelphia from being counted — complaints that centered on mail-in ballots that city officials decided to accept despite administrative errors made by voters.
Biden has been declared the winner of Pennsylvania by multiple media outlets, and he leads Trump in the state by more than 53,000 votes. Kevin Feeley, a spokesman for the Philadelphia city commissioners, said on Thursday that the disputed ballots had not yet been added to the public vote totals.
The Trump campaign ran into resistance elsewhere in the courts in Pennsylvania, as three former Republican members of Congress and several veterans of GOP administrations joined the opposition to an effort by Trump to use the federal courts to block certification of the state’s election results.
Kevin Johnson for The Fulcrum.
This week, as President Donald Trump persisted in claiming election fraud in the absence of hard evidence, Politico Magazine asked a dozen experts in election law whether they saw reason to doubt that Joe Biden would be duly inaugurated in January. Could the election results be illegitimate? If not, is there a chance Trump would find a way to game the system anyway? And what’s the biggest weak spot in the process from here on?
Normally when we survey experts, we’ll get a range of answers—a breadth that reflects their backgrounds and particular corners of expertise. Not this time. In what might offer some reassurance to the members of both parties who are ready to accept the state results and move on, they all resoundingly said they’re confident Biden will be sworn in come January, and that the legal challenges Trump and his supporters are currently mounting are meritless.
“There is simply no evidence of fraud. Nor is there any other realistic basis for altering the apparent outcome,” wrote Steven F. Huefner, a law professor at the Ohio State University. That assessment was backed up by Lawrence Douglas, a law professor at Amherst College who has for more than a year been studying what could go wrong with this election. He saw “no reason whatsoever to question the legitimacy of the process or the trustworthiness of the results.”
As for other gamesmanship from Trump’s camp: “I have tried to imagine how he could even possibly accomplish” stopping Biden’s inauguration, wrote Lisa Manheim, author of The Limits of Presidential Power: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law. “And I just can’t figure it out.”…
New York University constitutional law professor Richard Pildes similarly sees this as the real Trump strategy, unlikely as it is to bear fruit: “The Trump campaign can’t have any hope of overturning in the courts the popular vote in three states, based on what it has filed so far. These suits have a different audience and a different aim: to shape a ‘lost cause’ narrative and to set Republican legislatures up to defy the popular vote in their states and claim the authority to appoint electors themselves. No state legislature has ever done that since the law governing the Electoral College process was passed in 1887, and even if one or more did that this year, there are further steps in the process that would block those actions from having any effect on the outcome.”
Florida State University law professor Michael Morley pointed to weaknesses in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which guides how Congress counts electoral votes and determines the winner. “The ECA is written in archaic language, is ambiguous in several crucial respects and leaves some key issues unresolved,” he wrote. One issue, for example, is that “it is unclear whether Congress may, or even must, reject votes cast by so-called ‘faithless electors’” who vote against their own state’s presidential choice. Nevertheless, Morley is confident that “based on the current Electoral College projections and the vote tallies within the swing states, it appears extremely unlikely that the ECA’s deficiencies will impact the results of this election. It remains a serious problem, however—one that Congress should seek to address well in advance of future presidential elections.”…
According to Hasen, who wrote Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy: “Trump cannot litigate his way to victory; the only path would be a brute force political one that would disregard the rule of law. Any strategy based upon trying to get Republican state legislators to try to stop the certification of the vote and appoint their own slate of electors would be a legally unsupported naked power play. State legislatures would only have the power at this point to appoint 2020 electors if voters failed to make a choice on Election Day. But voters did make a choice, and it would be a violation of the rule of law and democratic norms to try to get state legislatures to overturn the will of the people.”
Ted Olson, who successfully argued for then-candidate George W. Bush in the 2000 U.S. Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore, said Thursday he believes the 2020 election is over and Joe Biden is the president-elect.
Olson, a partner with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who went on to serve as solicitor general in the Bush administration, made the remarks during a panel on the powers of the presidency hosted by the Federalist Society, as he discussed checks against the president.
“The Framers, they separated the powers because they knew that individuals would be flawed. They put in lots of checks, and we just experienced one, the election,” Olson said. “To the extent that the citizens of this country did not like the manner in which President Trump spoke, or the manner in which he threatened people or the manner in which he executed the laws, they exercised their franchise. And we have—I do believe the election is over—we do have a new president.”
“And we do because a large number of people expressed disapproval, whether one agrees with that or not, of the manner, style and techniques of this particular president,” Olson continued. “So we do have a Constitution that works pretty well. At the end of the day, we are going to have flawed individuals holding that office, and the people ultimately have the responsibility and opportunity to make a change when they feel it’s appropriate.”
Maggie Haberman for the NYT:
At a meeting on Wednesday at the White House, President Trump had something he wanted to discuss with his advisers, many of whom have told him his chances of succeeding at changing the results of the 2020 election are thin as a reed.
He then proceeded to press them on whether Republican legislatures could pick pro-Trump electors in a handful of key states and deliver him the electoral votes he needs to change the math and give him a second term, according to people briefed on the discussion.
It was not a detailed conversation, or really a serious one, the people briefed on it said. Nor was it reflective of any obsessive desire of Mr. Trump’s to remain in the White House.
“He knows it’s over,” one adviser said. But instead of conceding, they said, he is floating one improbable scenario after another for staying in office while he contemplates his uncertain post-presidency future.
There is no grand strategy at play, according to interviews with a half-dozen advisers and people close to the president. Mr. Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base….
As a next step, Mr. Trump is talking seriously about announcing that he is planning to run again in 2024, aware that whether he actually does it or not, it will freeze an already-crowded field of possible Republican candidates. And, Republicans say, it will keep the wide support he showed even in defeat and could guarantee a lucrative book deal or speaking fees….
Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, has been a source of enormous frustration for Trump advisers. Advisers have tried to tell Mr. Trump that the fraud Mr. Giuliani is offering hope of proving simply does not exist.
Mr. Trump is getting suggestions from an array of other lawyers, as well. They include Sidney Powell, the lawyer for his former national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who was at the Trump campaign headquarters over the weekend.
Advisers have nudged the president to stop talking about “fraud” because that has legal implications that his team has not been able to back up. So Mr. Trump has taken to pronouncing the election “rigged,” one of his favorite words but one with dangerous implications in terms of how his own supporters view the election’s ultimate outcome.
The members of Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee – Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Assistant Director Bob Kolasky, U.S. Election Assistance Commission Chair Benjamin Hovland, National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) President Maggie Toulouse Oliver, National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) President Lori Augino, and Escambia County (Florida) Supervisor of Elections David Stafford – and the members of the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council (SCC) – Chair Brian Hancock (Unisyn Voting Solutions), Vice Chair Sam Derheimer (Hart InterCivic), Chris Wlaschin (Election Systems & Software), Ericka Haas (Electronic Registration Information Center), and Maria Bianchi (Democracy Works) – released the following statement:
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.
“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
“Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.
“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”
Cracks are growing in the GOP defense of President Donald Trump’s long-shot effort to overturn the 2020 election outcome, with many top Republicans contending that Joe Biden should immediately get national security briefings, some calling for the official transition process to begin and others are acknowledging that Trump stands little chance at reversing results clearly showing he lost.
Republicans say they are willing to give Trump a chance to make his case in court. But they fully recognize that Trump is losing by margins in key battleground states that make his chances of success in his legal cases extremely grim at best. Many have grown unnerved at his purge of top national security officials. And others are making clear that Trump should concede the race once it’s evident that he’s lost his court challenges.Some are even willing to now consider Biden “president-elect,” a title few Republicans have been willing to say publicly as Trump baselessly claims the election has been rigged.
“Sure,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, said when asked if she considers Biden “president-elect.”
While Capito says there’s a “process” for legal challenges, she added that she hoped the process would resolve itself quickly — “inside a week or so.”
“It looks like a difficult mountain for the President,” she said of his legal case.
Capito is not alone. Many Republicans privately recognize that Biden will soon be President, and they are hoping that Trump will concede the race once it’s clear his legal challenges are collapsing — and once key states have certified the results.
A top Republican source, who has been in touch with Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, said Republicans are eying the certification dates of Arizona on November 30 and Georgia on November 20 — two states with Republican governors where Biden is now leading in the vote tallies — as key moments. If the states certify the results as Biden victories, then Trump will have little recourse but to concede, they believe, though no one knows what the President will do for sure.
“I think it’s a very narrow road,” Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, a member of the Senate GOP leadership, said when asked about Trump’s chances at reversing the election’s outcome.
Indeed, with Trump losing by tens of thousands of votes in key states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada — and nearly 150,000 votes in Michigan — even Trump’s staunchest supporters believe that the President should concede the race if he can’t prove widespread voter fraud in court. What’s less clear is what would happen if Trump refuses to step aside if courts reject his claim.
“My guess is it’s a heavy lift, but I don’t know,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican and top Trump defender, when asked about the President’s efforts to overturn the results by alleging mass voter fraud and impropriety at the polls.
Asked if Trump should concede if he loses in court, Johnson said: “Yeah. The court should have the final say in these things.”
A Pennsylvania appellate court handed President Donald Trump’s campaign a minor victory Thursday, barring counties from including in their final vote tallies a small pool of mail ballots from people who had failed to provide required ID by a Monday deadline.
In a two-page order, a Commonwealth Court judge struck down a decision by the Wolf administration to give voters more time, post-election, to fulfill the ID requirement.
Though state law only requires first-time voters to show ID at the polls, all voters who applied to vote by mail had to be validated their identification against state records by Nov. 9.
Two days before the election, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar pushed that date back by three days, citing a court decision earlier this year that allowed late-arriving mail ballots to be counted as long as they had been mailed by Nov. 3 and received within three days of that.
In her order Thursday, Commonwealth Court President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt ruled that Boockvar had no authority to do that.
State officials did not immediately return requests for comment on whether they intended to appeal.
None of the votes affected by the ruling had yet been included in the state’s official tally — which as of Thursday had Joe Biden at a 54,000-vote advantage over Trump.
I expected it would be weak based on the 105-page complaint, but this motion is even weaker than I thought. The primary complaint is one about which the campaign might not even have standing—a claim that the ordinary rules that election officials applied in running the election somehow usurped the power of the state legislature to set the rules for elections. That’s something for the legislature to complain about, and something that the campaign could have complained about well before the election. The same goes for its equal protection argument.
They cite no authority for asking a federal court for delay in state certification, and no good explanation as to why a delay would help to further the state’s case.
There are many other problems here, and I hope to have time later to go through this more.
But I’m co-Reporter on the ALI Torts:Remedies project, which is meeting all day Friday, so I’ll mostly be out of pocket through tomorrow.
New draft by David Cottrell, Felix E. Herron, Michael C. Herron, and Daniel A. Smith:
The 2020 General Election took place against the backdrop of a pandemic and numerous claims about incipient voter fraud and election malfeasance. No state’s presidential race was closer than Georgia’s, where a hand recount of the presidential contest is planned. As an initial post-election audit of the 2020 election in Georgia, we analyze residual vote rates in statewide races. A race’s residual vote rate combines the rates at which ballots contain undervotes (abstentions) and overvotes (which occur when voters cast more than the allowed number of votes in a race). Anomalously high residual vote rates can be indicative of underlying election administration problems, like ballot design flaws. Our analysis of residual vote rates in Georgia uncovers nothing anomalous in the presidential race, a notable result given this race’s closeness. We do, however, find an unusually high overvote rate in Georgia’s special election for a seat in the United States Senate. This high overvote rate is concentrated in Gwinnett County and appears to reflect the county’s two-column ballot design that led roughly 4,000 voters to select more than one candidate for senate in the special election, in the process rendering invalid their votes in this contest.
Following last week’s elections, Democrats will retain control the House of Representatives. At the same time, their margin will be considerably smaller than it was in the preceding Congress. Republicans will likely hold between 208 and 212 House seats, placing them within shouting distance of the majority in the next election.
This is first in a two-part examination of the relationship between redistricting/reapportionment and the Congress that will take office in January 2023. It concludes that without any extreme gerrymandering, reapportionment and redistricting alone will likely cost Democrats their majority, even before taking into account the national mood or the general tendency toward midterm losses for the party holding the presidency. Of course, litigation may change the calculus, but absent court losses in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia and Florida, Republicans would likely control the House in the 118th Congress elected in 2022. For our purposes here, however, we will assume that there will be no sea changes in voting laws.
I talked to KJZZ.
News organizations have called the 2020 presidential election for Democrat Joe Biden, but that hasn’t stopped President Trump’s surrogates from sharing misleading, fake and debunked videos that cast doubt on the election results.Follow the latest on Election 2020
Election officials have swatted away Trump campaign claims of voter fraud, and no evidence presented by the president’s team — or anyone else — has supported these allegations.
Still, nearly a week later, several of these videos — including this manipulated clip of President-elect Biden and claims about votes cast in Sharpie — are still circulating on social media in an effort to seed doubts about the outcome of the 2020 election. Here is a tour of four big offenders.
NYT ran this the other day, and worth linking now in light of the President raising these debunked claims on twitter.
David Graham for the Atlantic.
Why would candidates for Florida Senate seats do no campaigning, no fundraising, have no issue platforms, nor make any effort to get votes?
Local 10 News has found evidence to suggest three such candidates in three Florida Senate district races, two of them in Miami Dade County, were shill candidates whose presence in the races were meant to syphon votes from Democratic candidates.
Comparisons of the no-party candidates’ public campaign records show similarities and connections that suggest they are all linked by funding from the same dark money donors, and part of an elaborate scheme to upset voting patterns.
In one of those races, District 37, a recount is underway because the spread between the Democratic and Republican candidates is only 31 votes. The third party candidate received more than 6300 votes.
That third party candidate is Alexis Rodriguez, who has the same last name as the Democratic incumbent senator Jose Javier Rodriguez. The Republican challenger is Ileana Garcia.
Alexis Rodriguez falsified his address on his campaign filing form last June. The couple who now live at the Palmetto Bay address say they have been repeatedly harassed since then by people looking for Rodriguez, who hadn’t lived there in five years.
Local 10 visited Rodriguez’s place of business Tuesday, where Rodriguez lied about his identity. Pretending to be a business partner, Rodriguez shed little light on his sudden candidacy in the District 37 race and lack of fundraising or campaigning.
Local 10 began investigating Rodriguez’s candidacy because of a hunch by Executive Producer Natalie Morera de Varona last month. She was collecting candidates’ headshots for election broadcast graphics and was curious why a candidate was nowhere to be found, not returning phone calls.
A search of campaign documents filed by Rodriguez led to a money trail and campaign finance connections with other no-party third candidates in Florida Senate District 9 in Central Florida, and District 39 in Miami-Dade.
The District 39 candidate is 81-year-old Celso Alfonso, a retiree who named the woman he calls his wife as campaign treasurer. She owns a day spa, and the home where we found Alfonso Tuesday afternoon.
He, too, lied about his identity at first, and finally admitted to being the candidate.
Alfonso claimed he had a lifelong dream to be in public service. He said he filed on his own, that no one assisted him.
A comparison of candidates Alfonso and Rodriguez show unusual similarities.
AP:
Trump has promised to contest President-elect Joe Biden’s win in court. But the fine print indicates much of the money donated to support that effort since Election Day has instead paid down campaign debt, replenished the Republican National Committee and, more recently, helped get Save America, a new political action committee Trump founded, off the ground.
“This is a slush fund. That’s the bottom line,” said Paul S. Ryan, a longtime campaign finance attorney with the good government group Common Cause. “Trump may just continue to string out this meritless litigation in order to fleece his own supporters of their money and use it in the coming years to pad his own lifestyle while teasing a 2024 candidacy.”
The Democratic National Committee and Biden’s campaign are also raising money for a legal fight over the outcome of the election. Most of the money is for the DNC’s legal account, though some of it will be routed to the party’s general fund, which doesn’t face the same spending restrictions. It could then be used to pay for ads, for example, if Republicans try to get ballots tossed out with minor — and correctible — errors, according to a DNC official.
Trump’s approach is far different.
The first few days after the election, money that was purportedly for the legal fight primarily went to Trump’s campaign for debt payment, as well as the RNC, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. But on Monday, Trump launched Save America, his new PAC, which is now poised to get the largest share in many cases.
Save America is a type of campaign committee that is often referred to as a “leadership PAC,” which has higher contribution limits — $5,000 per year — and faces fewer restrictions on how the money is spent. Unlike candidate campaign accounts, leadership PACs can also be tapped to pay for personal expenses.
The Trump campaign is moving from state to state to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s win, in a series of increasingly wild legal maneuvers without credible claims that face astronomical odds and carry little precedent.
Lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona now are attempting to advance a smattering of accusations and legal theories, some based upon vague and unsupported allegations of fraud or complaints of minor ballot processing access, as a way to prevent state officials from certifying the popular vote results, which currently all favor Biden.
“As the Trump campaign has come forward with its legal arguments, they haven’t really produced any facts or legal theory that’s stronger than when they started,” election lawyer and CNN analyst Rick Hasen said.
President Donald Trump’s campaign strategy increasingly appears to be to cast enough doubt over vote counts so it can find judges to block states from certifying the choice its voters made, according to elections experts, including longtime Republican lawyer-turned-CNN analyst Ben Ginsberg.
The Electoral College doesn’t formally select the president until December 14, with a key deadline December 8.
If that worked, in theory, it could then open the path for state legislatures — especially the Republicans in power in Michigan and Pennsylvania — to argue they should make their own choice for their Electoral College slate, handing Trump a victory that goes against Biden’s win in more than one state. But it couldn’t come close to giving Trump the electoral win without lots of help.”
I suspect the Trump campaign’s pipe dream is to force all these issues that have never before been litigated to the Supreme Court,” Ginsberg said.
Both liberal and conservative legal experts say the theoretical approach Trump appears to be trying is extremely unlikely. Even longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove wrote in The Wall Street Journal Wednesday night that Biden’s win wouldn’t be overturned.
‘“To win, Mr. Trump must prove systemic fraud, with illegal votes in the tens of thousands. There is no evidence of that so far. Unless some emerges quickly, the president’s chances in court will decline precipitously when states start certifying results,” wrote Rove, who is long considered a mastermind of political maneuvering during the presidency of George W. Bush.
Lawyers for the Biden campaign have called the Trump campaign lawsuits theater, and nothing more.
As chairman of Michigan’s 8th Congressional District Republican Committee, Norm Shinkle actively worked to re-elect President Donald Trump.
Now, he’s poised to play a key role in deciding whether to certify Michigan election results that Trump is publicly disputing and fighting in court.
Shinkle is a member of the Board of State Canvassers, a constitutionally created body that is intentionally partisan. The panel, appointed by the governor, is composed of two Democrats and two Republicans who cannot certify election results without bipartisan consensus in the form of at least a 3-1 majority vote.
In the case of a 2-2 tie, legal experts say state courts would likely order the board to certify the Michigan election. In the unlikely event that doesn’t happen, Democrats fear the Republican-led Legislature could be put in position to decide how the state awards its 16 presidential electors.
As they prepare for what they expect to be a certification vote this month, canvassers told Bridge they are tracking the legal drama unfolding in Michigan, where Trump has claimed victory despite unofficial results that show he lost to Democrat Joe Biden by nearly 150,000 votes.
“I make no predictions on this,” said Shinkle, a former state senator who lives in Ingham County.
“If you just go ahead and certify everything that comes in front of you, what prevents people from cheating? There’s got to be a penalty if there is cheating going on.”
His wife, Mary Shinkle, is a witness in Trump’s federal lawsuit as one of more than 100 GOP poll challengers who filed affidavits about their experience at the TCF Center in Detroit, where absentee votes were counted.
“She saw a lot of strange things going on,” Shinkle told Bridge, pledging to keep an open mind about the statewide election overseen by local officials in 1,600 jurisdictions.
WaPo:
President Trump declared Wednesday on Twitter, “WE WILL WIN!”
But, in fact, the president has no clear endgame to actually win the election — and, in an indication he may be starting to come to terms with his loss, he is talking privately about running again in 2024.
Trump aides, advisers and allies said there is no grand strategy to reverse the election results, which show President-elect Joe Biden with a majority of electoral college votes, as well as a 5 million-vote lead in the national popular vote.
Asked about Trump’s ultimate plan, one senior administration official chuckled and said, “You’re giving everybody way too much credit right now.”
Republican officials have scrambled nationwide to produce evidence of widespread voter fraud that could bolster the Trump campaign’s legal challenges, but no such evidence has surfaced. And Biden’s lead in several states targeted by the Trump campaign has expanded as late-counted votes are reported. In all-important Pennsylvania, the Democrat now leads by more than 50,000 votes.ADADVERTISING
Still, the absence of evidence and of a comprehensive and realistic plan to overcome Trump’s significant deficit and secure him a second term have not stopped some of the leading figures in the administration and the Republican Party from amplifying the president’s misinformation about the election outcome.
Shortly before the major news networks called the election for Joe Biden on Saturday, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien dialed into a private call for top donors and allies to insist his candidate could still win the race — and ask them one more time to chip in.
The margins are close, Stepien said, and the campaign is still fighting. And while he recognized the call was meant as a briefing on the recount fights and not a fundraiser, Stepien made an ask anyway: He urged the donors to go to the campaign website and give to Trump’s legal defense fund.
Much of the money raised by Stepien and the Trump campaign won’t go towards challenging election results, however, but to help set the stage for the president’s next act. The Trump campaign has a recount fund, but the money won’t go to it unless someone gives more than $8,333. Rather, 60 percent of a donation up to that amount for Trump’s “Official Election Defense Fund” is routed to a new PAC started this week by the president that can pay for a wide range of activities — but is likely legally barred from spending on recounts, lawyers say. The remaining 40 percent goes to the Republican National Committee, which is allowed — but not required to — spend on the recount. Prior to Tuesday, the majority of a donation went to helping Trump’s campaign cover its debt.
Faced with this prospect, some allies of the president are advocating, or beginning to whisper about, Republican state legislatures taking matters into their own hands and sending slates of Trump electors to Congress regardless of the vote count.
This is a poisonous idea that stands out as radical and destructive, even in a year when we’ve been debating court-packing and defunding the police. The best that can be said for it is that it is almost certainly a nonstarter, which doesn’t mean that it won’t get more oxygen.
Donald Trump Jr. has pushed this option and Sen. Lindsey Graham, now bonded to Trump more firmly and completely than he was to the late Sen. John McCain, says “everything should be on the table.” A conservative in the Pennsylvania House, Daryl Metcalfe, has declared, “Our Legislature must be prepared to use all constitutional authority to right the wrong.”
We may be one presidential tweet away from this gambit becoming orthodoxy for much of the Republican Party….
State legislatures acting in the current context would be an extraordinary imposition. This scenario presumably involves the courts, first, rejecting Trump’s legal challenges because they lack the requisite evidence. So the vote counts in the key states would stay the same and there wouldn’t be compelling evidence of massive fraud, and yet the legislatures would act anyway.
The Republicans control the legislatures in all the key states, and they are subject to pressure from Trump and his supporters, but this would be asking them to defy the will of the people as expressed in a vote that would, by this time, have been litigated and perhaps recounted and audited.
One can only guess that the political reaction against this in the states in question would be thermonuclear. This must be one reason why the Republican leader of the state Senate in Pennsylvania, Jake Corman, has so far been steadfast in saying the Legislature is not going down this route.
Any such move would also be subject to litigation likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court. Even if the power of the legislatures is vast, there will be a dispute over whether they can ignore the results of elections that, prior to an unwelcome outcome, were supposed to determine the state’s electors.
On top of this, the legislatures appointing electors would trigger a historic donnybrook in Congress, which considers objections to electoral ballots under the Electoral Count Act of 1887. If Republicans aren’t united—and certainly a handful of senators, maybe more, would refuse sign up for this gambit—the party wouldn’t be able fend off objections to legislature-appointed Trump electors.
A more sensible path is to give the Trump team the time and space to pursue recounts and litigation. Then, if these efforts don’t produce reversals of vote counts or clear evidence of widespread fraud affecting tens of thousands of votes, to urge the president to fold his tent.
Both Facebook and Twitter went into Election Day under enormous pressure from both parties, but in the end it was Trump and other Republicans whose posts were labeled most often for containing misleading or false information about the vote count and the integrity of the election.
Disinformation experts are skeptical that Twitter and Facebook’s labeling did much to quell the spread of Trump’s claims and conspiracy theories that spread using hashtags like #SharpieGate and #StopTheSteal throughout the week.
“We don’t really know what the impacts of the labels are,” Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington who studies the flow of information online, told reporters last week during a briefing organized by the Election Integrity Partnership.
“At this point, no matter how fast they take action and no matter what labels they put on those messages, they’re getting out and they’re landing in a soft audience that is going to soak it up because it’s telling them what they want to hear,” Starbird added.
For Trump supporters intent on finding it, proof of the president’s claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” is everywhere.
For some, it’s in the videos: the one in which a Colorado man claiming to be a poll worker, dressed in a yellow vest, rips up Trump ballots (it was a TikTok prank) or the trash bag of torn ballots found by a wedding party in an Oklahoma church (they were actually “spoiled ballots“) or the testimony from a Pennsylvania postal worker who claimed he was ordered to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day (he has since recanted and also denied recanting).
For others, the evidence of a so-called Democratic plot could be found in the numbers.
“Is it me, or do people not understand statistics?” asked one of the 1.3 million members in Nationwide Recount 2020, a private Facebook group, presenting an impassioned, if confusing, case for why mail-in ballots in swing states were favoring Biden.
“Benford’s Law,” a supporter commented, linking to an anonymous Twitter account that claimed in a series of tweets that a mathematical observation that the first digits of numbers are likely to be smaller somehow suggested widespread fraud by the Democrats.
Posts like these, discussing a dizzying array of false claims and conspiracy theories, have dominated social and ultraconservative media since the early morning after Election Day, when President Donald Trump prematurely and incorrectly declared himself the winner. As the votes continue to be counted and Joe Biden’s lead has increased (Biden was up by more than 5 million votes Wednesday), so has Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him.
And while no evidence of significant, widespread or even small-time voter fraud has been found, the years of groundwork laid by Trump and his supporters have blossomed into a flood of misleading — and importantly, fractured — claims of a rigged election.
An analysis of post-election conversations in social media, broadcast, traditional and online media by the intelligence platform Zignal Labs reported more than 4.6 million mentions of voter fraud in the week after Election Day.
The conversation centers on more than 20 distinct narratives making up an election fraud disinformation campaign, according to an analysis provided to NBC News by the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of researchers studying misinformation and the vote.
“Instead of evidence, we’re assaulted with a plethora of claims seeking to undermine faith in the election, ranging from confusing to clearly fabricated,” said Joe Bak-Coleman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington who is tracking post-election disinformation as part of the Election Integrity Partnership. “Individually, none of these claims could stand up to a moment’s scrutiny, but collectively they’re deafening, urging the average citizen to give up and accept the ambiguity.”
Pressure mounted on state and local officials in battleground states to accept claims of ballot-counting irregularities and voter fraud in the election despite a lack of evidence, as Republicans sought new ways to block certification of Joe Biden’s clear victory in the presidential race.
In Michigan, Republican lawyers lobbied the Wayne County canvassing board to consider evidence of alleged improprieties before certifying the vote. In Pennsylvania, GOP lawmakers were the target of social media campaigns demanding the appointment of electors who favor President Trump. And in Georgia, the Republican secretary of state defended the election and announced a hand audit of the results, despite calls by the state’s Republican senators for him to resign over alleged problems.ADhttps://0eb14ecbad31f2416426b5ebf649f8c5.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
The efforts in these states — where Biden has won or is leading in the count — come as the Trump campaign struggles to amass genuine evidence of fraud that will pass muster in court. Republican lawsuits seeking to challenge the Nov. 3 election results so far have foundered, and affidavits cited as proof of election fraud in cities such as Detroit have failed to substantiate serious claims that votes were counted illegally.
While the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have so far been “summarily dismissed,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) said Wednesday that she is concerned the GOP may try to use baseless claims about irregularities or vote tampering to disrupt the certification of Biden’s win, depriving him of the state’s 16 electoral votes.
“It appears as though that is the strategy they are pursuing,” Nessel said on a call with reporters held by the nonpartisan Voter Protection Project. “We will do everything we can possibly do in the state of Michigan to ensure that that does not occur and that the slate of electors accurately reflects whoever received the most votes.”…
The state’s 83 county canvassing boards are required to complete their certification by Nov. 17. If a county cannot agree to certify results, it is required to send data to the state canvassing board, which meets Nov. 23 to consider certification.
If that board reaches an impasse, state law directs the legislature to act. While that is a long-shot possibility that has never happened, Democrats are now beginning to express worry about it.
The Senate majority leader and the speaker of the state House, both Republicans, declined requests for comment Wednesday. However, the speaker, Lee Chatfield, tweeted recently that “whoever gets the most votes will win Michigan! Period. End of story. Then we move on.”
A person familiar with the speaker’s thinking said that he and other Republicans do not want the legislature to decide the vote in Michigan.
Even as President Donald Trump’s campaign is waging a well-publicized legal war on the broad rules governing the presidential election in Pennsylvania, its lawyers are engaging in lower-profile but no less important, county-by-county trench battles to disqualify individual votes in Philadelphia and its suburbs over technicalities.
Meanwhile, they are pursuing record numbers of challenges to “provisional” ballots, in some cases for grounds as small as the name of the county being misspelled.
Instead, their filings ask courts and county boards to disenfranchise potentially thousands of legitimate voters in Philadelphia and its suburbs over procedural errors made when filing their ballots.
There is no indication that the votes in question were specifically cast for Joe Biden — in fact, some voters contacted by The Inquirer said they voted for Trump. In the unlikely event that Republicans were to prevail in every ballot appeal they’ve brought before regional courts, the votes in question would still amount to only a fraction of Biden’s roughly 50,000-vote lead in the state as of Wednesday night.
And so far, these smaller-scale challenges have not been met warmly in court.
WaPo:
In an interview this week with federal agents, a Pennsylvania postal worker walked back his allegation that a supervisor had tampered with mailed ballots, saying he had made “assumptions” based on overheard snippets of conversation, according to an audio recording of the interview posted online Wednesday by activists who have championed his cause.
The two-hour recording shows that Richard Hopkins recanted claims he had made in a sworn affidavit that top Republicans cited over the weekend as potential evidence of widespread election irregularities and fraud.
Hopkins told federal investigators on Monday his allegations were based on fragments of conversation among co-workers in a noisy mail facility in Erie, Pa., according to the recording.
When an agent from the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General asked Hopkins if he stood by his sworn statement that a supervisor “was backdating ballots” mailed after Election Day, Hopkins answered: “At this point? No.”
He also agreed to sign a revised statement that undercut his earlier affidavit.
Those previous allegations had prompted Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) to call for the Justice Department to investigate. The Trump campaign also cited them in a lawsuit seeking to delay the certification of election results in Pennsylvania, part of a broad effort to challenge the presidential election results.
Hopkins did not respond to messages seeking comment on Wednesday.
Hopkins surreptitiously recorded the interview on Monday, then revealed to the agents that he had done so at the end of the session, according to the recording. Project Veritas, an organization that initially aired Hopkins’s claims last week, released the recording on Wednesday, claiming that it showed he was coerced and pressured into signing a “watered down statement drafted by them using their words.”
The attorney who brought a lawsuit against Wayne County and Detroit election officials this week claimed at a hearing Wednesday that local election officials had failed to refute claims of election fraud leveled against them and stated his right to ask the court to intervene to block certification of the election results.
The lawsuit, filed by attorney David Kallman, also asks the court to void the Nov. 3 election and order a new one.
Lawyers representing local election officials denied the claims of fraud and argued that the case, if allowed to proceed, would disenfranchise voters, give credence to election conspiracies and potentially prevent Michigan from being able to appoint electors in time to cast the state’s Electoral College votes.
Wayne County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy M. Kenny promised to issue his ruling Friday.
WSJ:
President Trump’s campaign is pursuing a patchwork of legal attacks in key states that have been called for President-elect Joe Biden to mount a long-shot effort to try to prevent officials from certifying the results, advisers and lawyers involved said.
Trump advisers have grown more vocal in conversations with Mr. Trump in recent days that they don’t see a path to victory, even if his legal efforts meet some success, a White House official said, though some advisers have continued to tell the president he still has a shot. An official said Mr. Trump understands that the fight isn’t winnable but characterized his feelings as: “Let me have the fight.”
One potential strategy discussed by Mr. Trump’s legal team would be attempting to get court orders to delay vote certification in critical states, potentially positioning Republican-controlled state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors who would swing the Electoral College in his favor, according to people familiar with the discussions.
It isn’t known how seriously the campaign has considered this idea, one of the people said.
Many of the advisers and lawyers said they doubt the effort would succeed and say it is aimed largely at appeasing Mr. Trump, who believes the election was stolen from him and expects his legal team to keep fighting.
Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers and lawyers said there isn’t an overarching legal theory or coordination behind the campaign’s efforts. The legal battle likely will conclude with Mr. Trump claiming the election was rigged against him and that he fought the outcome, the White House official said.
“I don’t think there’s really a coherent strategy,” said one Republican official.
The Trump campaign hasn’t presented evidence of widespread fraud in any of its legal claims.
Aside from the fact that trying to get state legislatures to submit alternative slates of electors is extremely likely to fail, I’d add that trying to get states to choose electors for Trump and overturn the will of the voters is not just “a long shot:” it is profoundly anti democratic and would trigger national protests and unrest.
Reporters reporting on this story should not normalize something that would mark the end of American democracy.
AJC:
By ordering a statewide hand recount of every ballot in the presidential race, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger combined different parts of recount and audit procedures.
His decision will result in a time-consuming, labor-intensive process that’s never been attempted before. Raffensperger said it will be worthwhile if it builds confidence in the election, where Joe Biden was leading Donald Trump by over 14,000 votes.
The count will be conducted under Georgia’s rules for election audits, but not as envisioned when those rules were drafted.
The audit rules call for a random sample of ballots to be pulled, and the text or bubbles to be reviewed and counted. The audit would have concluded when all ballots were counted and the odds that the full tabulation was incorrect was less than 10%, according to State Election Board rules.
But instead of pulling a smaller sample of ballots, Raffensperger plans to audit every ballot. The sample would have had to be over 1 million ballots, according to the secretary of state’s office, so Raffensperger decided a full count was justified given the closeness of the race.
“You actually have to do a full hand-by-hand recount of all ballots because the margin is so close right now,” Raffensperger said.
Georgia’s recount rules wouldn’t have allowed a hand recount.
A State Election Board rule passed this year, which Raffensperger supported, required only scanned recounts.
Election integrity advocates protested, but state election officials said scans were faster and more accurate. The audit process was envisioned as a way to check the accuracy of tabulations by looking at the ballots themselves instead of relying on computers.
Georgia rules and laws don’t authorize the secretary of state to leap from an audit to a full hand-based recount, said Bryan Sells, an election law attorney.
“If the goal here is clarity, the secretary of state should not step into murky legal territory,” Sells said. “The secretary of state should not be making any questionable calls here to give either side the opportunity to question the fairness of what he’s doing.”
The secretary of state’s office said an audit of the full ballot count is merited and allowed. State law permits the secretary of state to set a risk limit “not greater than 10%,” which could be read to mean Raffensperger could set the limit at a lower level that would mandate a full recount….
The recount was scheduled to begin Thursday and Friday in Georgia’s 159 counties, and they face a Nov. 20 deadline to finish it. That’s the state’s election certification deadline, which can only be extended “for just cause” by a superior court judge’s order, according to state law.
Even then, another recount is possible.