11/17 Ash Event: “Voting in the Extraordinary 2020 Elections: What Worked for Voters, What Didn’t?”

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RSVP details:

Date: 

Tuesday, November 17, 2020, 12:00pm to 1:15pm

Location: 

Virtual Event (Registration Required)

While it is way too early for a ‘retrospective’ given just how extraordinary this year’s election has been, we do now know a lot about the voting processes up to and including Election Day. The 2020 elections were a dramatic interplay of major procedural changes brought about as a result of COVID-19, multiple attempts to limit and discourage voting and a strong pushback against them, and extraordinary efforts to mobilize citizens to vote.  The Ash Center is glad to bring four deeply immersed leaders in these areas to share what they saw and what they know:

  • David Becker, Executive Director and Founder, Center for Election Innovation & Research
  • Alexis Anderson-Reed, CEO, State Voices
  • Kristen Clarke, President, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
  • Chiraag Bains, Director of Legal Strategies, Demos
  • Miles Rapoport (Moderator), Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy, the Ash Center
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Brendan Nyhan Talks to NPR About the Erosion of Democratic Norms in the 2020 Election Season

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You can listen here.

NYHAN: That’s right. I think coup is the wrong way to think about this. We’re not seeing an attempted military takeover. What we’re seeing instead is a violation of the norms of democracy that we depend on to make the peaceful transfer of power possible. And as those norms get called into question, we start to see more of what political scientists call democratic erosion, where a system of government remains a democracy, but the norms and values that make democracy work start to be called into question.

Now, Joe Biden will almost certainly be sworn in on January 20, but a lot of damage could still be done in the meantime. And I think people should avoid thinking that the question is just, will Trump leave, or won’t he? He will leave, but the damage he could leave us is really significant.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. We’ve seen this happen in other countries. As you say, democracy is fragile. There’s always been this sense that the U.S. is exceptional immune somehow. You are most worried in particular about how Republican leaders are promoting and supporting the president’s actions. Why?

NYHAN: Well, we’ve seen throughout the Trump administration that too many Republicans are willing to acquiesce to his false claims. What we’re seeing now, though, is different. What the president is doing challenges the very basis for democracy.

And we’re not just seeing Republicans stand idly by on the sidelines. We’re seeing many leading Republicans endorsing or at least suggesting there’s something to these attacks on our electoral system. And that’s very dangerous because the party system is the engine of democracy. What happens to the Republican Party will shape our politics long after Donald Trump leaves. And if his worst norm violations aren’t just something Republicans pretend not to hear but are instead something that they emulate and amplify, we’re in really big trouble.

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“How a post-election crisis was manufactured in Pennsylvania”

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Marshall Cohen for CNN:

It was the nightmare scenario everyone saw coming: a nail-biter presidential election that was too close to call on election night, with the entire world forced to patiently wait on slow results from Pennsylvania as it sifted through millions of mail-in ballots.

President Donald Trump held Florida and Ohio, which quickly reported their mail-in results on election night. By the next afternoon, Democratic nominee Joe Biden had flipped Michigan and Wisconsin. But for four arduous days, the outcome of the 2020 election lingered in purgatory.

All eyes fell on Pennsylvania, with millions of still-uncounted votes. The delay was largely caused by Republican state lawmakers who defied local officials and nonpartisan experts, and refused to let counties process mail ballots before Election Day, as is allowed in other states.So the election went into overtime. As the days crept by, Trump’s massive election night lead of 700,000 votes slowly disappeared as Pennsylvania’s 67 counties churned through their mail-in ballots, revealing a narrow win for Biden.

This predictable shift gave rise to a bevy of conspiracy theories, disinformation and baseless accusations of voter fraud, stoked chiefly by the President…

Rick Pildes, a CNN contributor who’s a law professor at New York University, recently wrote that the federalism at the heart of American elections has become more of a liability than a strength. He said federal voting legislation is needed to “adapt to the reality of the political culture within which we now exist,” which is a culture overrun by partisanship, distrust and disinformation.

At least two Republicans, Sens. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Josh Hawley of Missouri, now say states should be allowed to process absentee ballots much earlier. Experts are hoping that with a Biden presidency and a likely GOP-run Senate, there could be room for compromise.

“We face a vicious cycle,” said Larry Diamond, a democracy expert at the conservative Hoover Institution. “We need to reform and improve our voting procedures precisely because distrust and disinformation are so rampant. But it’s hard to get agreement on these reforms because of the partisan polarization that distrust, disinformation and irresponsible politics are fomenting.”

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“Stop the Steal’s massive disinformation campaign connected to Roger Stone”

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CNN:

It is an internet battle cry: Stop the Steal has swept across inboxes, Facebook pages and Twitter like an out-of-control virus, spreading misinformation and violent rhetoric — and spilling into real life, like the protest planned for DC this weekend.

But while Stop the Steal may sound like a new 2020 political slogan to many, it did not emerge organically over widespread concerns about voting fraud in President Donald Trump’s race against Joe Biden. It has been in the works for years.

Its origin traces to Roger Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described “dirty trickster” whose 40-month prison sentence for seven felonies was cut short by Trump’s commutation in July.

Stone’s political action committee launched a “Stop the Steal” website in 2016 to fundraise ahead of that election, asking for $10,000 donations by saying, “If this election is close, THEY WILL STEAL IT.”

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NYT Traces Trump Voter Fraud Charges Over Time

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NYT:

Like similar episodes in Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the scene in Detroit was the culmination of a yearslong strategy by Mr. Trump to use the power of the executive branch, an army of lawyers, the echo chamber of conservative news media and the obedience of fellow Republicans to try out his most audacious exercise in bending reality: to turn losing into winning.

Obscured by the postelection noise over the president’s efforts to falsely portray the election system as “rigged” against him has been how much Mr. Trump and his allies did ahead of time to promote a baseless conspiracy devised to appeal to his most passionate supporters, providing him with the opportunity to make his historically anomalous bid to cling to power in the face of defeat.

That bid is now in its last throes. Judges are dismissing the president’s lawsuits, as various bits of supposed evidence — an alleged box of illegal ballots that was in fact a case containing camera equipment and “dead voters” who are alive — unravel. And yet Mr. Trump has still not given up on seeding doubt about the election’s integrity as he seeks to stain Mr. Biden’s clear victory — by more than 5.5 million votes and also in the Electoral College — with false insinuations of illegitimacy. On Sunday alone, he posted more than two dozen election-related tweets, seeming to briefly acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory before declaring, “I concede NOTHING!”

The roots of Mr. Trump’s approach date to before his election in 2016, and he advanced his plans throughout his term. But his strategy for casting doubt on the outcome of the 2020 campaign took shape in earnest when the coronavirus pandemic upended normal life and led states to promote voting by mail.

From the start, the president saw mail-in ballots as a political threat that would appeal more to Democrats than to his followers. And so he and his allies sought to block moves to make absentee voting easier and to slow the counting of mail ballots. This allowed Mr. Trump to do two things: claim an early victory on election night and paint ballots that were counted later for his opponent as fraudulent.

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“Georgia Recount Yields Few Changes in Vote Totals, Democrats Say”

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Bloomberg:

Georgia’s hand audit of ballots cast in the presidential election is proceeding rapidly with little change in the results so far, according to lawyers working for President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign.

Some 48 of the state’s 159 counties have finished their examination of the ballots with either no change or minor shifts — differences of fewer than five votes in some instances, they said. Four counties that have finished their retallies reported having no changes.

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“Trump campaign jettisons major parts of its legal challenge against Pennsylvania’s election results”

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WaPo:

President Trump’s campaign on Sunday scrapped a major part of its federal lawsuit challenging the election results in Pennsylvania.

Trump’s attorneys filed a revised version of the lawsuit, removing allegations that election officials violated the Trump campaign’s constitutional rights by limiting the ability of their observers to watch votes being counted.Follow the latest on Election 2020

Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal attorney, have said repeatedly that more than 600,000 votes in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh should be invalidated because of this issue.

Trump’s pared-down lawsuit now focuses on allegations that Republicans were illegally disadvantaged because some Democratic-leaning counties allowed voters to fix errors on their mail ballots. Counties have said this affected only a small number of votes.

Cliff Levine, an attorney representing the Democratic Party in the case, said on Sunday evening that Trump’s move meant his lawsuit could not possibly change the result.

“Now you’re only talking about a handful of ballots,” Levine said. “They would have absolutely no impact on the total count or on Joe Biden’s win over Donald Trump.”

Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s Democratic secretary of state, submitted a court filing in response to the Trump campaign’s actions reiterating her request for the judge to dismiss the lawsuit.

The shift comes amid a string of losses in the Trump campaign’s post-election legal effort, which claimed without evidence that voter fraud, irregularities and rule-breaking led to Biden’s victory. The flurry of post-election litigation has affirmed the integrity of the election: Many of the complaints have been tossed, and not a single vote has been invalidated.

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“The federal government’s chief information security officer is helping an outside effort to hunt for alleged voter fraud”

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WaPo:

The federal government’s chief information security officer is participating in an effort backed by supporters of President Trump to hunt for evidence of voter fraud in the battleground states where President-elect Joe Biden secured his election victory.Follow the latest on Election 2020

Camilo Sandoval said in an interview that he has taken a break from his government duties to work for the Voter Integrity Fund, a newly formed Virginia-based group that is analyzing ballot data and cold-calling voters in an attempt to substantiate the president’s outlandish claims about illicit voting.

Sandoval is one of several Trump appointees in the federal government — some in senior roles — who are harnessing their expertise for the project, according to the group’s leader.

The participation of administration officials in the project shows the extent of the efforts by the president’s allies to justify his unfounded allegations of widespread ballot fraud.

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“Pro-Trump forces spin legal wheels in challenging Michigan election results”

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Detroit Free Press:

Lawsuits filed in the wrong courts.

Naming the wrong defendants.

Alleging facts with no connection to the defendants being sued.

Forces backing Republican President Donald Trump have filed at least five lawsuits in state and federal courts in Michigan seeking to delay or stop the state’s certification of 16 electoral votes for Democratic President-elect Joe Biden.

With every Michigander’s vote cast and counted in the presidential contest, showing Biden defeating Trump by close to 150,000 votes according to the unofficial tally, elections workers statewide are now undertaking the tedious process of officially certifying the vote and converting the state’s popular vote into the state’s Electoral College votes. That process relies on local and state election officials meeting a series of tight deadlines and fulfilling their legal duties. And derailing this process appears to be a goal the lawsuits all share.

The suits could create significant complications if they produced court orders delaying certification of election results in key Michigan counties beyond Tuesday’s deadline, or dragged out thecertification of statewide results beyond the Dec. 8 “safe harbor” date by which Congress is required to accept Michigan’s electoral votes.

But the suits have been marked by unusual legal missteps and repeated judicial setbacks. Some analysts say it is difficult to discern a coherent strategy, other than to seek to undermine overall confidence in the elections process….

Sam Bagenstos, a U-M law professor who was a Democratic nominee to the Michigan Supreme Court in 2018, said the True the Vote federal lawsuit “picked the big Democratic jurisdictions and said, ‘Let’s invalidate all the votes of the people there.’ It’s outrageous and anti-democratic and it’s based on nothing in terms of the allegations,” he said.

I think Sam is being overly generous in his description of this True the Vote suit, which I consider to be racist.

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“Trump acknowledges Biden’s win, but quickly reverses, saying ‘I concede NOTHING!’”

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NYT:

WASHINGTON — President Trump appeared to briefly acknowledge for the first time Sunday morning that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had defeated him in the presidential election, but quickly reversed himself less than two hours later, insisting that “I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go.”

The dueling tweets came as Mr. Trump continued to lie about the conduct of the vote-counting process, falsely insisting that Mr. Biden’s victory was the result of a “Rigged” election orchestrated by the “Fake & Silent” media.

His first tweet came Sunday morning at 7:47. Referring to Mr. Biden, the president said that “he won.” That represented the first time Mr. Trump had publicly said what his advisers have been telling him for days privately: His re-election bid failed and Mr. Biden will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.

After a flurry of tweets and news reports about his “concession,” Mr. Trump insisted that he had been misunderstood.

At 9:16, he insisted falsely: “RIGGED ELECTION. WE WILL WIN!” And three minutes later, he wrote that Mr. Biden “only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”

The rapid online flip-flop made it clear that Mr. Trump is still refusing to abandon the lies about the election being rigged and stolen that he has been spreading since Election Day, inflaming anger among his supporters about his defeat.

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“Giuliani adds fuel to discredited theories about voting machines.”

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NYT:

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, continued on Saturday his effort to delegitimize votes cast through electronic voting machines, citing several conspiracies connected to the companies that make the machines and the software they run in a post on Twitter.

Looking to sow doubt about the vote count in multiple swing states that were recently called for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Giuliani hinted support for a discredited theory that one of the companies that manufactures the voting machines used in some states, Smartmatic, is controlled by the billionaire philanthropist George Soros.

“Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?” Mr. Giuliani wrote. “It will all come out.”

Hours later, President Trump picked up a similar refrain, stating in a tweet that the election was “stolen” by “privately owned Radical Left company, Dominion,” without providing evidence or explaining why Dominion was distinct among the many other privately owned election system vendors that routinely administer elections in the United States.

Speculation that Mr. Soros has any influence over Smartmatic or its operations has been thoroughly debunked, and he does not own the company. Mr. Soros’s distant connection to the company is through his association with Smartmatic’s chairman, Mark Malloch-Brown, who is on the board of Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

Smartmatic has been used in elections around the world. In Venezuela’s election, the software was manipulated to report a skewed tally. But the company said that it was an anomaly and cited the lack of election monitors as part of the problem. In the United States, monitors from both parties are allowed to watch vote counting.

In the tweet, Mr. Giuliani appeared to backtrack on an earlier claim that Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the secure software used by voting machines, was involved in changing tallies, claiming that the company was in fact a “front” for Smartmatic, which he claimed was really doing the computing. Mr. Giuliani had previously said he was in contact with “whistle-blowers” from Dominion, and he claimed, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the company had altered vote tallies in battleground states that had elected Mr. Biden such as Michigan and Georgia.

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“Trump Lawyers Pressured to End Role in Election Challenges”

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WSJ:

Some law firms representing President Trump’s legal push to remain in the White House are withdrawing from cases or clarifying their roles amid pressure to end their involvement.

Ohio-based law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP withdrew Thursday from a Trump campaign federal lawsuit seeking to stop certification of election results in Pennsylvania. International law firm Jones Day has tried in recent days to publicly distance itself from any voter-fraud suits tied to the president. Another large firm withdrew from an Arizona case a day after filing it, and other lawyers working on Trump cases have faced onslaughts of online criticism.

The Associated Press has said President-elect Joe Biden is the winner of the election after it called enough states to give him a majority in the Electoral College. Mr. Trump hasn’t conceded and has told aides to keep fighting.

The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in five battleground states, with a mix of local and national lawyers on their side. Judges have ruled against some of the claims, and Trump lawyers have voluntarily dismissed others.

The Lincoln Project, a political-action committee run by Republicans critical of the president, launched a social-media campaign attacking Jones Day and Porter Wright. Twitter temporarily blocked the group because it posted contact information for Porter Wright attorneys and urged followers to “make them famous.” The account was restored once the tweet was deleted.

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“Christopher Krebs Hasn’t Been Fired, Yet”

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NYT:

Christopher Krebs is a 43-year-old former Microsoft executive who had the unenviable government job of protecting the nation’s election machinery from manipulation by Russia or other foreign hackers. It turns out, though, that some of the most dangerous interference has come not from the Kremlin but from the White House, where the president called the election “rigged” before a single vote was cast.

Mr. Krebs’s organization, the Department of Homeland Security’s new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has systematically shot down Mr. Trump’s false claims — that mail-in ballots would lead to extensive fraud and that voting machines were programmed to give votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr. — as part of its “rumor control” initiative to keep Americans from doubting the integrity of the election system.

To no one’s surprise, speculation swept through cybercircles in Washington on Thursday that Mr. Krebs was high on President Trump’s list of officials to be fired after his agency, known as CISA, released a statement from a government-led coordinating council saying that “there is no evidence” any voting systems were compromised and that the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history.” This occurred only hours after Mr. Trump had repeated a baseless report that a voting machine system had “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.”

As of Friday night, Mr. Krebs was still employed, and still at his office, and shrugging it all off. As a father of five children, ages 2 through 10, he says he is used to living in chaos.

His department’s rumor control website, he said, was never devised with the president in mind. It was instead for “inoculating the American public” to make clear that even if there were fake websites created by the Russians and Iranians to stir up divisions before the election, “it wouldn’t mean that votes were affected, or tabulations were wrong.” A case in point: An Iranian effort to imitate the far-right Proud Boys was caught by American intelligence, and threatening emails the group had supposedly sent voters were debunked.

If anyone believed the warnings about false information posted on the website were about the president, he said, that was their interpretation. “We’ll stand up for all our work,” he said.

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Boies and Olson WaPo oped: “We opposed each other in Bush v. Gore. Now we agree: Biden won.”

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Oped:

Twenty years ago, we represented the opposing sides in Bush v. Gore. We still don’t agree about how the Supreme Court ruled, but we completely agree that nothing in that case — or in the Supreme Court’s decision — supports the challenges now being thrown about in an attempt to undermine President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Yet, over the past week, we have heard repeated assertions that the outcome of this election is somehow in doubt, as it was in 2000.

It is not. Biden will be president. There are many areas of policy on which we disagree. But no matter how you voted in this election, that is the clear outcome. The nation’s laws and shared values dictate that Americans now unite to support democracy, national security, the public trust in institutions and the urgent work of the next administration.

It is also important for the public to understand why 2020 bears no resemblance to 2000.

The presidential-election controversies currently playing out in various parts of the country are not repeats of Bush v. Gore.

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“GOP leaders in 4 states quash dubious Trump bid on electors”

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AP:

Republican leaders in four critical states won by President-elect Joe Biden say they won’t participate in a legally dubious scheme to flip their state’s electors to vote for President Donald Trump. Their comments effectively shut down a half-baked plot some Republicans floated as a last chance to keep Trump in the White House.

State GOP lawmakers in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have all said they would not intervene in the selection of electors, who ultimately cast the votes that secure a candidate’s victory. Such a move would violate state law and a vote of the people, several noted.

“I do not see, short of finding some type of fraud — which I haven’t heard of anything — I don’t see us in any serious way addressing a change in electors,” said Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s Republican House speaker, who says he’s been inundated with emails pleading for the legislature to intervene. “They are mandated by statute to choose according to the vote of the people.”

The idea loosely involves GOP-controlled legislatures dismissing Biden’s popular vote wins in their states and opting to select Trump electors. While the endgame was unclear, it appeared to hinge on the expectation that a conservative-leaning Supreme Court would settle any dispute over the move.

Still, it has been promoted by Trump allies, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and is an example of misleading information and false claims fueling skepticism among Trump supporters about the integrity of the vote.

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Following Third Circuit Ruling, Trump Campaign Abandons Half Its Pennsylvania Federal District Court Case; Other Half Faces Tough Road

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As I expected, yesterday’s Third Circuit ruling finding no standing for a challenge under the Elections and Elector Clauses has had an impact on the federal district court case brought by the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania: the campaign has abandoned those issues, leaving only its Bush v. Gore type equal protection claim.

The court may not even reach the merits of the equal protection case. See pages 7-9 of this DNC filing on the potential lack of standing in these cases. The claims also are brought too late and a federal court may abstain from getting involved.

Even if the court reached the merits, Ned Foley argues that disenfranchising voters is not the right remedy, as shown by the Franken v. Coleman race. And even if it were a cognizable equal protection claim, it does not appear to involve nearly enough ballots to change the results in Pennsylvania. And even if it changed the results in Pennsylvania that would not be enough to change the electoral college outcome.

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“Trump Loses String of Election Lawsuits, Leaving Few Vehicles to Fight His Defeat”

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NYT:

President Trump suffered multiple legal setbacks in three key swing states on Friday, choking off many of his last-ditch efforts to use the courts to delay or block President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

In quick succession, Mr. Trump was handed defeats in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan, where a state judge in Detroit rejected an unusual Republican attempt to halt the certification of the vote in Wayne County pending an audit of the count.

The legal losses came as Mr. Biden was declared the victor in Georgia and a day after an agency in the president’s own Department of Homeland Security flatly contradicted him by declaring that the election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” any voting systems malfunctioned.

On Friday, 16 federal prosecutors who had been assigned to monitor the election also directly debunked claims of widespread fraud, saying in a letter to Attorney General William P. Barr that there was no evidence of substantial irregularities.

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“‘Purely outlandish stuff’: Trump’s legal machine grinds to a halt”

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Politico:

Michigan lawyer for Donald Trump’s campaign filed a case in the wrong court. Lawsuits in Arizona and Nevada were dropped. A Georgia challenge was quickly rejected for lack of evidence. His Pennsylvania legal team just threw in the towel.

The president’s legal machine — the one papering swing states with lawsuits and affidavits in support of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud — is slowly grinding to a halt after suffering a slew of legal defeats and setbacks.

In the effort to stop Joe Biden’s victory from being certified, so many lawsuits have been filed in so many state and federal courts that no one has an exact number. But one thing is certain: the Trump campaign has an almost perfect record, having won only one case and lost at least a dozen.

Along the way, Trump lawyers have abruptly dropped core claims, been admonished in court for lack of candor and even been forced to admit they had no evidence of fraud, while their client inaccurately rails to the contrary on Twitter.

The sole Trump campaign victory came Thursday night: a Pennsylvania ruling that the secretary of state overstepped her authority by giving citizens extra days to fix signature mismatches on their mail in ballots. The ruling concerns a relatively small number of voters that are not even included in the election results for the state, where Biden leads by 62,000 votes with more than 98 percent of estimated votes reported.

On Friday, in another Pennsylvania case, the Trump cause was torpedoed yet again: an appeals court upheld the state’s method of handling post-Election Day absentee ballots, which could add more votes to Biden’s total.

“They’re throwing the kitchen sink against the wall to see what sticks — a mixed metaphor that’s deserving of this legal strategy. And ‘legal strategy’ should be in quotes,” said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election law attorney who headed the famed Florida recount team that ultimately led to George W. Bush becoming president.

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“Giuliani wrecks Trump campaign’s well-laid legal plans”

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Politico:

Much of the focus, however, has been on crafting lawsuits in three states that zero in on specific allegations of voting irregularities. In Arizona, the campaign has drawn attention to issues with voting machines. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, it is complaining about not having adequate observation at voting sites.

The Pennsylvania suit also revolves around the idea that voters in Democratic-heavy Philadelphia had more of an opportunity to “cure” improperly cast ballots than those in the more conservative parts of the state. While the Arizona case was dropped Friday, the Michigan and Pennsylvania cases are pending.

Campaign officials describe it as an incremental approach aimed at chipping away at Biden’s leads and creating margins that are small enough to force recounts. While they concede their lawsuits are unlikely to succeed, they insist they’re not frivolous.

But their strategy has resulted in a clash with Giuliani, who has advocated for more of a damn-the-torpedoes approach. The former New York City mayor has been working independently of the Trump legal apparatus. He’s gone on Fox News and made allegations of widespread voter fraud. Early on, he ordered lawsuits to be filed without the consent of the campaign’s legal team.

Things came to a head during a meeting at the White House last Friday, one day before the Four Seasons Total Landscaping imbroglio. As the group batted around options before the president, Giuliani interjected and derided them as insufficiently aggressive. Some in the room were taken aback.

During a Thursday meeting at the White House that was attended by the president, Giuliani accused Trump aides of lying to Trump about his chances. Clark aggressively pushed back, and the two shouted at one another. Vice President Mike Pence was also present. The encounter was first reported by the Times.

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“Trump’s originalist judges should reject his lawsuits usurping states’ rights. The framers would.”

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Ned Foley for WaPo:

Conservatives believe in federalism, so they wouldn’t be happy about federal courts telling states how to count their votes — right? Conservatives believe in judicial restraint, so they wouldn’t be happy about federal judges stretching the law to stop states from counting votes — right?Follow the latest on Election 2020

Think again. President Trump’s campaign and its supporters have filed lawsuits in federal courts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that would appall the framers of the Constitution and should be rejected by the kind of originalist judges that Trump has helped install on the federal bench.

Indeed, Trump’s foray into federal court is asking for unprecedented intervention in a presidential election, a move that would contravene basic premises of how the resolution of a dispute over presidential ballots is designed to operate.

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“Could State Legislatures Pick Electors to Vote for Trump? Not Likely”

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NYT:

President Trump’s last-ditch efforts to reverse the election seem to come down to a far-fetched scenario, one in which Republican-led state legislatures choose the members of the Electoral College, overturning the will of voters.

Could it work? Election law experts are highly skeptical. And leaders of the Republican majorities in legislatures in key states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, told The New York Times this week through their offices that they saw no role for themselves in picking electors.

That has not stopped some high-profile supporters of the president, including the talk radio host Mark Levin and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, from suggesting that Republican-led legislatures should consider ignoring the popular vote in close-fought states won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and handing their electoral votes to Mr. Trump.

This political gambit, to the degree that it’s an organized strategy at all, has a theoretical basis in law, according to experts. But if it were to proceed, it could cause widespread outrage and be seen as an attempt to subvert the democratic process.

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“Trump’s attempts to challenge the election results suffer more setbacks in court”

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WaPo:

President Trump’s faltering legal efforts to challenge the results of the election hit additional hurdles Friday as Republicans contended with setbacks in courtrooms in Michigan and Arizona and another major law firm withdrew from a case.

A state judge in Michigan rejected a request by two Republican poll watchers to delay the certification of the vote countin Detroit, saying he saw no convincing evidence of election fraud at the center where election workers tallied absentee ballots….

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the Trump campaign acknowledged to a judge in a court filing Friday that its lawsuit there would make no difference to the result of the presidential election.

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“Supreme Court goes idle on Trump-related disputes and time is running out”

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Bob Barnes for WaPo:

Has the Supreme Court hit the pause button on all things President Trump?

The justices for more than three weeks have been holding on to the president’s last-ditch plea to shield his private financial records from Manhattan’s district attorney.Follow the latest on Election 2020

And all has been quiet on the election front.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. last Friday directed Pennsylvania election officials to segregate mail-in votes received in the three-day window after Election Day, and said he was referring the matter to the full court for further action.

No further action has come. Nor has the court acted on a separate request from the Trump campaign, pending for a week, to intervene in the case.

There is no deadline for the court to answer those questions, so the justices appear to be taking their time during the president’s battle to dispute his election defeat — and maybe even allowing the clock to run out.

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“Federal prosecutors assigned to monitor election malfeasance tell Barr they see no evidence of substantial irregularities”

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WaPo:

Sixteen assistant U.S. attorneys specially assigned to monitor malfeasance in the 2020 election urged Attorney General William P. Barr on Friday to rescind his recent memorandum allowing investigators to publicly pursue allegations of “vote tabulation irregularities” in certain cases before results are certified, saying they had not seen evidence of any substantial anomalies.Follow the latest on Election 2020

In a letter — an image of which was shown to The Washington Post — the assistant U.S. attorneys told Barr that the release of his Monday memorandum — which changed long-standing Justice Department policy on the steps prosecutors can take before the results of an election are certified — “thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics.”

The signers wrote that in the places where they served as district election officers, taking in reports of possible election-related crimes, there was no evidence of the kind of fraud that Barr’s memo had highlighted. Barr’s memo authorized prosecutors “to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases,” particularly where the outcome of an election could be impacted.

“The policy change was not based in fact,” the assistant U.S. attorneys wrote.

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“Trump team persists in Pa. court fights despite COVID quarantine, quitting lawyers and courtroom losses”

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Philly Inquirer:

President Donald Trump’s effort to contest the Nov. 3 election in court suffered a series of setbacks Friday, leaving his house-of-cards legal strategy to reverse the results teetering on the edge of collapse.

The law firm leading Trump’s battles in Pennsylvania, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, abruptly withdrew its representation — a decision a campaign spokesperson dismissed as the lawyers “buckling” under attacks from “liberal mobs.”

That left Linda Kerns, a solo practitioner in Philadelphia, as the primary attorney now representing the campaign on multiple legal fronts. But her in-person appearance in a Philadelphia courtroom Friday was scuttled, after the judge announced Trump’s legal team had been exposed to the coronavirus through meetings with campaign staff.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected a request to overturn an earlier ruling on Pennsylvania’s three-day grace period for late-arriving mail ballots postmarked by Election Day — a fight Trump’s campaign has sought to take to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And defeats continued to add up elsewhere, including in Michigan, where a judge dismissed campaign accusations of fraud as “incorrect” and “not credible” and in Arizona, where Trump lawyers dropped a suit there, acknowledging the president trailed too far behind in that state’s vote tally for the legal challenge to make a difference. In Georgia, major news networks declared Biden the victor even as a state-mandated recount began.

All of that came as Joe Biden’s lead over Trump in Pennsylvania continued to widen — up to 60,000 votes — with vote counting drawing toward completion.

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“Detroit judge denies request to stop election certification in Wayne County”

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Detroit Free Press:

Wayne County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy M. Kenny on Friday denied a request for an independent audit of the votes cast by Wayne County voters, separate from the one already being undertaken by the county’s board of canvassers.

The lawsuit, filed this week against local election officials, alleges that they oversaw a fraudulent election in Detroit. The lawsuit asked the court to stop the certification of the county’s election results, void the Nov. 3 election and order a new one. President-elect Joe Biden won the county by a margin of nearly 323,000 votes.

In his opinion, Kenny wrote: “It would be an unprecedented exercise of judicial activism for this Court to stop the certification process of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.” David Fink, the attorney who represented the City of Detroit, its Election Commission and City Clerk Janice Winfrey in the case, was pleased with Kenny’s ruling. “Once again, the court record showed conclusively the Detroit City Clerk ran a fair and proper election.” David Kallman, the lawyer who filed the lawsuit on behalf of two Wayne County residents, said he plans to file an emergency appeal in the Michigan Court of Appeals.

During a hearing Wednesday, Kallman accused local election officials of running a fraudulent election and argued that he had the right to ask the court to stop the certification of the election results….

One of the affidavits filed by a Republican challenger at TCF, who heard from other challengers that vehicles with out-of-state license plates delivered tens of thousands of ballots to TCF at 4:30 a.m., claimed that every one of these ballots were cast for president-elect Joe Biden. Kenny wrote that the affidavit was “rife with speculation and sinister motives.” The state’s deadline for returning absentee ballots is 8 p.m. on Election Day and all ballots were verified as having been cast by eligible voters before they were delivered to TCF, Thomas explained in his affidavit.

In evaluating another affidavit filed by a Republican challenger, Kenny wrote that the challenger posted on Facebook that the Democrats had planned to commit fraud on Election Day. “His predilection to believe fraud was occurring undermines his credibility as a witness,” the judge wrote.

Kenny also refuted the claim that Republican challengers were singled out in being prevented from reentering TCF when the counting area became overcrowded. During Wednesday afternoon’s hearing, Kallman resurfaced a false claim that went viral on social media channels and was repeated by President Donald Trump in a speech last week, that election officials barred Republican challengers from observing the counting process….

Judge Kenny denied a previous request to stop the certification of Wayne County’s election results in a separate case.

Two federal cases filed in the U.S. District Court for Western Michigan making similar allegations of election fraud are pending. One lawsuit — filed by four voters — asks the court to exclude the votes cast by Ingham, Washtenaw and Wayne county voters from the final tallies in the presidential contest and stop the certification of Michigan’s presidential electors if these counties’ votes are not excluded. That would amount to throwing out more than 1.2 million votes and would hand a victory in Michigan to President Donald Trump by a margin of over 323,000 votes. But the lawsuit faces a significant hurdle: Washtenaw’s Board of Canvassers certified the county’s election results Thursday. Another lawsuit — filed by the Trump campaign — asks the court to stop the Board of State Canvassers from certifying the election results.

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Trump Promoting Fantasy View of His Election Challenges

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Politico:

The unrealistic prediction from the president, published in the Friday edition of Washington Examiner correspondent Byron York’s newsletter, represented some of Trump’s first remarks to a member of the news media since Biden was declared the winner of the election last weekend.

In his interview with York, Trump argued he was still competitive in several key swing states where Biden had already emerged victorious, saying he was “going to win Wisconsin” — a state called for Biden last Wednesday where Trump is currently trailing by more than 20,000 votes.

In Arizona, which was also called for Biden as early as last Wednesday, the race will “be down to 8,000 votes,” Trump said, even though he is behind by more than 11,000 votes there. “If we can do an audit of the millions of votes, We’ll find 8,000 votes easy. If we can do an audit, we’ll be in good shape there,” he said.

Trump went on to say he was “going to win” Georgia, where Biden has a lead of more than 14,000 votes and which was called for him Friday afternoon. Georgia’s top election official announced Wednesday that the state would conduct a hand recount of every ballot cast in the presidential race.

“Now we’re down to about 10,000, 11,000 votes, and we have hand counting,” Trump told York, incorrectly stating his vote deficit in Georgia. “Hand counting is the best. To do a spin of the machine doesn’t mean anything. You pick up 10 votes. But when you hand count — I think we’re going to win Georgia.”

Trump also asserted that he would win North Carolina, which was called for him Friday afternoon and where he is ahead of Biden by more than 71,000 votes, and said his campaign’s litigation could result in him picking up both Michigan and Pennsylvania — two states that were called for Biden last week where Trump trails by more than 146,000 votes and more than 60,000 votes, respectively.

Trump was less certain about the timeline for his campaign’s various legal actions, speculating that he may be able to overturn the election results in “probably two weeks, three weeks.” And despite his rosy assessments of the race, the president revealed that he entertained the prospect of losing his reelection bid at some point last week.

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“Top CEOs met to plan response to Trump’s election denial”

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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.

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“Trump Cries Election Fraud. In Court, His Lawyers Don’t.”

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WSJ:

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.

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Wisconsin: “Lawsuit on behalf of Trump seeks to exclude votes from Milwaukee, Dane and Menominee counties”

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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. 

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“Law Firm Stops Representing Trump Campaign in Pennsylvania Suit”

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NYT:

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.

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“Va., Md. Republicans follow Trump playbook, questioning his defeat and refusing to concede.”

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WaPo:

“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).

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“Exclusive: Top official on U.S. election cybersecurity tells associates he expects to be fired”

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Reuters:

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.

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