President Donald Trump’s campaign has resurrected a Michigan voter fraud lawsuit with a new appeal, recycling old allegations of problems at the TCF Center – where Detroit’s absentee ballots were being counted.
Trump’s team filed the appeal at 11:21 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 30. The case would have been dismissed if the appropriate paperwork wasn’t filed by midnight, officials said.
Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens ruled against Trump on Nov. 5 in the lawsuit targeting Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
Trump’s campaign attempted to appeal later that week, but didn’t submit the correct paperwork. It had 21 more days to fix the “defective” submission to the Michigan Court of Appeals, otherwise the case would be thrown out.
One of the handful of reasons Trump’s campaign lost the court battle is because the remedy sought – to stop counting the votes until certain measures could be implemented – wasn’t possible since all votes had already been counted.
But Trump’s campaign claims there’s still time to halt the process since the Electoral College doesn’t meet until Dec. 14.
“The conduct of the general election in Wayne County was a disaster,” the campaign says in the appeal . “The Wayne County board of county canvassers found that more than seventy-one percent of the precincts did not balance. More than seventy-one percent!”
The appeal doesn’t mention that the largest discrepancy in unbalanced votes in a precinct came in the suburb of Livonia, where 27 more ballots were counted than what was on record in a precinct.
The lawsuit focuses on the city of Detroit, where Joe Biden beat Trump 233,908 to 12,654 – which is tighter than the margin Hillary Clinton beat Trump by in the city in 2016. Overall, Biden won Michigan by more than 150,000 votes.
Trump’s campaign fights three main points in the appeal: It believes the case isn’t moot yet despite the fact the vote counting has finished, it claims Benson is the correct defendant and it says an affidavit from a poll challenger shouldn’t be considered hearsay.
“Judge Stephens is wrong on all three points,” the campaign wrote in the appeal.
The hearsay issue comes from an affidavit filed by poll worker Jessica Connarn, who heard from another worker that she was instructed to change the date on ballots so they could be counted. Connarn didn’t get the woman’s name, but has a sticky note with the allegation on it.
City and state officials said there was a “clerical error” in which the date stamped on absentee ballot envelopes wasn’t entered into the system like it should have been. Officials decided to have workers enter the date stamped onto the envelope into the system – all of which were from before the 8 p.m. deadline. Republican challengers were consulted and decided not to challenge the procedure at the time.
Connarn’s affidavit details her conversation with a fellow poll worker who was in tears, claiming she was being forced to backdate ballots.
Hearsay is defined by law as an oral or written assertion or the nonverbal conduct of a person, if it is intended as an assertion.
“Crying can hardly be considered an oral or written assertion,” the Trump campaign’s appeal said. “The record before us is void of any indication that the victim intended to make an assertion by her spontaneous act of crying. This is an instance of behavior so patently involuntary that it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be treated as a verbal assertion by the victim.”
There is one allegation plaintiffs and defendants agree on – that poll challengers weren’t allowed to review surveillance video of drop boxes where ballots were collected in the weeks prior to the election. State law doesn’t give challengers the right to view such video, state attorneys said.
This lawsuit was filed the day after the election and was the first of many in Michigan to allege widespread voter fraud. None have seen success so far.
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