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As the vote balance in Michigan shifted from Republican Donald Trump in favor of Democrat Joe Biden yesterday, the president’s campaign began a legal effort to stop the ballot count.
A lawsuit was filed late yesterday afternoon on behalf of one man. Eric Ostergren is a Trump supporter from Roscommon County. He says he was inappropriately removed from a vote-counting facility in Oakland County, where he was acting as a poll challenger.
The suit also claims that officials are violating the state constitution by not allowing challengers to view video surveillance of ballot drop boxes.
The law recently passed by the legislature that governs the deployment of drop boxes requires that video surveillance be maintained. It does not say that vote challengers have a right to watch it.
Michigan law does allow state citizens to observe the election, and the absentee vote counting process.
That became an issue in Detroit yesterday, where Trump supporters claimed that they were denied access at the TCF Center.
Officials first turned away some prospective challengers because they came from other states. They then limited the number of observers inside because of COVID-19 safety rules.
Trump supporters cried foul, and hundreds began chanting “Stop the vote” in the building’s lobby and outside.
Sign-in records show that each party had more than 225 observers in place at the time.
Despite the disturbance and the late legal challenge, the vote count is essentially complete.
With 99.13 percent of precincts reporting, the latest figures show Biden with a 135,000 vote lead in the presidential race, out of 5.4 million votes cast. That’s a thin margin, although it’s a dozen times larger than Trump’s victory in the state four years ago.
Democratic Senator Gary Peters holds a 74,000 vote lead over Republican challenger John James.
Last night, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson thanked those who enabled the count to be completed much more quickly than was originally anticipated…
She decried efforts to delegitimize the count…
The results will next be reviewed by the bipartisan Board of State Canvassers.
One of the most widely-spread false images about Michigan’s vote shows what appears to be a reporting update in which Biden received votes, but Trump received absolutely none.
It started with a tweet by Texas conservative commentor Matt Mackowiak, who had been following vote totals provided by a company called Decision Desk HQ.
Decision Desk HQ has since acknowledged that the reporting error was theirs.
Mackowiak deleted the post, and acknowledged the source of the mistake, but not before President Trump had re-tweeted it.
