President Donald Trump and his campaign are now facing a lawsuit over their challenges to the results of the recently concluded presidential election, which Trump decisively lost to President-elect Joe Biden. A group of Michigan voters are among those behind the new lawsuit, and as POLITICO explains, their suit — in which they’re represented by lawyers from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund — alleges that “the Trump campaign is attempting mass voter suppression — particularly among Black voters — by pressuring election officials into not certifying the election results in their state.” Wayne County, which includes Detroit and has a significant Black population, has been high on the list of Trump campaign targets.
The lawsuit “aimed to halt any efforts by the Trump campaign and the president to push state officials into canceling their ballots or appointing electors who do not represent the election results in their state,” POLITICO says. The new lawsuit states, in part, as follows:
‘Repeating false claims of voter fraud, which have been thoroughly debunked, Defendants are pressuring state and local officials in Michigan not to count votes from Wayne County, Michigan (where Detroit is the county seat), and thereby disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters. Defendants’ tactics repeat the worst abuses in our nation’s history, as Black Americans were denied a voice in American democracy for most of the first two centuries of the Republic.’
Recently, Trump hosted two top Michigan legislative leaders at the White House, stoking fears of potential presidential pressure on the state’s leaders to dedicate Michigan’s electoral votes to Trump in spite of Biden’s decisive win in the state’s popular vote. Following the White House meeting, the Michigan legislators re-affirmed their commitment to abiding by the will of the people — but the antagonism towards the basic electoral process from Trump and his allies still stands.
Other presidential outreach has proven more advantageous for the Trump team’s political position. After a contentious debate over the then-prospective certification of results in Wayne County, Trump reached out to two Republican members of the county’s canvassing board, whose job responsibilities include certifying the county’s election results before a follow-up round of state approval. After Trump’s outreach, these canvassing board members sought to rescind their votes in favor of certifying the county’s results, but there’s no legal way by which they could actually do so. Strangely, this hurdle didn’t stop the Trump team from claiming, wrongly, that the Wayne County results weren’t certified after all.
