Across the country, Republicans have been fighting in court against the results of the recent presidential election — and across the country, they have been failing. Now, the Republican plaintiffs in a court case in Michigan that sought to invalidate election results from a handful of counties have abandoned their claim. In their original court filing, the Republican plaintiffs insisted that “the proper remedy” for the “constitutional violation” that they alleged took place was “to exclude presidential-election results from [certain] counties for the Presidential Elector certification.” The counties that the plaintiffs targeted included Wayne County, which includes Detroit, which leans heavily Democratic and helped hand President-elect Joe Biden his win in the state.
In their filing notifying the court that they were abandoning their case, the Republican plaintiffs in question merely said that they “voluntarily dismiss the above-titled action.” The filing does not note the consistent lack of conclusive evidence for the election fraud that Republicans have baselessly alleged plagued the recent presidential election on a massive scale.
🚨BREAKING: Plaintiffs DISMISS lawsuit claiming that illegal ballots were counted to change the results and seeking to exclude presidential-election results from Wayne, Washtenaw, and Ingham counties.
Trump and allies are now 1-21 in court.https://t.co/FZFuIRGMX3
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) November 16, 2020
In a recent ruling in a separate election-related case in which plaintiffs sought to delay the official certification of Michigan’s election results, Michigan Judge Timothy Kenny tore into the validity of a slew of affidavits that Republican plaintiffs had filed. The affidavits did not conclusively prove that election fraud had plagued the state — in fact, the judge noted, Republican ballot-processing observers who’d filled out the forms had not even attended a pre-Election Day walk-through of a vote-processing center in Detroit that Republicans have targeted for complaints. If the Republicans had been serious about conclusively answering any legitimate concerns, then they could have attended this session, but they did not do so.
On Twitter, Trump recently addressed some of the recent court losses for his side, trying to distance himself from the cases altogether, despite his own campaign’s close involvement in the legal fight against the election results. Even if his own name isn’t listed among the plaintiffs, many of these cases have clearly come from Trump’s political coalition and base — and Trump’s own campaign has been explicitly listed among the plaintiffs on plenty of occasions. For example, the Trump campaign got hit with a slew of losses in Pennsylvania court cases last Friday.
