The Trump campaign has filed a new lawsuit in Michigan, asking to stop the certification of results until the election process can be reviewed.
They filed the lawsuit in the Western District of Michigan early Wednesday morning, claiming irregularities and unlawful vote counting, in a state the president lost by nearly 150,000 votes.
The president’s lawyers say Republican challengers were impeded in watching the processing and counting of ballots at the TCF CEnter in Detroit.
They also claim some election officials altered the date some ballots were received.
Though in the hundreds of affidavits, while GOP challengers claim election misconduct, they don’t point to concrete evidence of anything that could be considered widespread fraud.
The large majority of them claim they were not allowed to properly observe ballots being counted, duplicated or to verify signatures. Adding they were treated unfairly in comparison to Democratic challengers.
A challenger named Beverly says, “I witnessed a pattern of intimidation, secrecy and hostility by the poll workers.”
Others made broader claims, Articia says election workers opened ballots with Donald Trump votes and rolled their eyes, that’s why she believes they may not have been properly counted. She also alleges that people were “changing votes,” but didn’t cite any specific evidence to back her up.
Another challenger named Braden found it odd that the military ballots he saw counted heavily favored Joe Biden.
The lawsuit also contains a sworn statement from lawyer Jessica Connarn, who claims that a poll worker in Detroit told her that she was being asked to change the date on ballots to reflect that they were received earlier.
She included a photo of a post it note she claims the poll worker gave her, the same claim used in the campaign’s first lawsuit in Michigan that was dismissed.
“This lawsuit is simply a rehash of baseless claims that have already been rejected by four courts,” Legal Expert and Lawyer Randall Levine told FOX 17.
“It's what we sometimes jokingly as lawyers refer to as a ‘spaghetti lawsuit.’ Let's throw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks. One of those strands of spaghetti thrown is the claim that the people couldn't observe they were too far away yet. On the other hand, they were close enough to be able to observe irregularities,” Levine said.
“It's in the most polite way, nonsense,” he added.
Levine says nothing in the Trump campaign lawsuit points to widespread fraud or anything that could potentially overturn the results in Michigan.
“Let's presume that somehow they could prove, which is a wild leap that 10% of those votes in the counties that he's challenging are bad. He still wouldn't get anywhere near to what he needs in order to overcome the election,” Levine added.
The lawsuit also asks for info about the software that caused the problem in Antrim County, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has already said it was user error by the county clerk, not a software problem.
In general, state election officials have already refuted several of these claims, as for the alleged backdating of ballots, they say poll workers in some cases had to input dates and that nothing received after 8:00 PM on Election Day was put into the system. They say more than 100 challengers were in the TCF Center at any given time.
As of right now bipartisan canvassers are reviewing votes, which unless a judge blocks them from continuing, should be done statewide within a couple weeks.
