LANSING, Michigan (PNN) - November 11, 2020 - The President Donald Trump campaign has requested an emergency injunction in a federal lawsuit aimed at preventing the State of Michigan from certifying the results of last week’s election until election officials can certify that only legally cast, on time, and legally observed ballots are included in the count. The campaign is alleging several types of fraud, misconduct, and invalidated ballots based on a number of reasons - including “malfunctioning” vote counting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems.
The Tuesday night filing in the Fascist Police States of Amerika District Court for the Western District of Michigan alleges, among other things, that officials prevented certified GOP poll watchers from observing the count, scanned “batches of the same ballots multiple times, illegally accepted and pre-dated late ballots, including from unmonitored drop boxes, and that election workers illegally duplicated ballots,” according to a statement from the campaign. The lawsuit requests that the court toss all ballots not observed by a GOP poll watcher who has been “allowed to meaningfully observe the process and the handling and counting of the ballot.”
The complaint includes “more than one hundred credentialed (poll watchers)” who have provided “sworn affidavits” that they were prevented from reviewing the ballot count, or validate the legitimacy of absentee ballots. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is accused in the lawsuit of failing to follow state election code, which allowed “fraud and incompetence to corrupt the conduct of the 2020 general election.”
Certified GOP poll watchers have signed affidavits under penalty of perjury that attest:
- Many poll watchers testified that their ability to view the handling, processing, and counting of ballots was physically and intentionally blocked by election officials.
- At least three poll watchers said they were physically pushed away from counting tables by election officials to a distance that was too far to observe the counting.
- Republican poll watchers who left the TCF Center were not allowed to return, while Democrats were, resulting in “many more Democrat poll watchers were allowed to observe the processing and counting of absentee voter ballots.”
- Many poll watchers testified that they were intimidated, threatened and harassed by election officials during the ballot processing and counting process.
Multiple GOP poll watchers attested that “batches of ballots were repeatedly run through the vote tabulation machines,” with one poll watcher saying she observed “a stack of about fifty ballots being fed multiple times into a ballot scanner counting machine.” Another poll watcher claims he “observed a station where election workers were working on scanned ballots that had issues that needed to be manually corrected,” adding, “I believe some of these workers were changing votes that had been cast for Donald Trump and other Republican candidates.”
When poll watchers did bring up issues with ballots, they were “ignored and disregarded,” according to the complaint, with one claiming that “ballots with votes for Trump were separated from other ballots,” and that when they raised challenges over ballot numbers that didn’t match their envelopes, they were “disregarded and ignored by election officials,” and the “ballots were processed and counted.”
The filing also claims that ballots that could not be read by a machine were unlawfully duplicated out of the view of poll watchers, and weren’t conducted by a bipartisan pair of election inspectors.
The lawsuit notes that in Antrim County, Michigan, voting machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems "were at fault" when they erroneously gave over 6,000 Trump votes to former Vice President Joe Biden. The “error” - potentially affecting the same machines used in Wayne County - was blamed by Secretary of State Benson on a county clerk who failed to update certain media drives.
Also noted were Dominion machine errors in Oakland County, Michigan, which resulted in a Democrat being wrongly declared the winner of a commissioner's race by 104 votes - only to have his seat flip back to the rightful Republican candidate after the error was caught.
“These vote tabulator failures are a mechanical malfunction that, under MCL 168.831-168.839, requires a ‘special election’ in the precincts affected,” reads the filing.
The filing also alleges backdating of ballots, after attorney and GOP challenger Jessica Connarn says that a poll worker told her he was “being told to change the date on ballots to reflect that the ballots were received on an earlier date.”
Connarn has provided a photograph of a note handed to her by the poll worker as evidence he was instructed to change the date so that absentee ballots received after 8:00 p.m. on Election Day would be counted.
The Trump campaign also says that ballots were deposited in remote, unattended drop boxes that are “essentially equivalent to a polling place where a person can deposit a ballot,” but “there is no validation that the individual deposing a ballot in the box is an individual who is qualified to cast a vote or to lawfully deliver a ballot cast by a lawful voter.” The filing says that according to Michigan law, a remote ballot drop box “must use video monitoring of that drop box to ensure effective monitoring.”
Now we wait to see if over 100 affidavits and Trump Campaign attorney Thor Hearne are able to persuade a Michigan judge to halt certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the state.