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Texas v. Pennsylvania (view source)
Revision as of 02:39, February 12, 2021
, 02:39, February 12, 2021Added to page
"The Settlement" thus made it nearly impossible to challenge ballots with a defective signature. The case observed that the rejection rate of absentee ballots was only 0.37% in the election, compared to 6.42% in the 2016 presidential election (prior to the adoption of these new rules). Since absentee ballots favored Biden by a nearly two-to-one margin, it continued, there is no reason to doubt that "The Settlement" was arrived at for the express purpose of favoring him in the election; indeed, simply normalizing the rejection rate would be far more than enough to flip the state to Trump. As in Pennsylvania, however, the constitutional issue in Georgia wasn't the number of ballots affected, or which candidate they favored, but the fact that state law was broken to count them.
"The Settlement" thus made it nearly impossible to challenge ballots with a defective signature. The case observed that the rejection rate of absentee ballots was only 0.37% in the election, compared to 6.42% in the 2016 presidential election (prior to the adoption of these new rules). Since absentee ballots favored Biden by a nearly two-to-one margin, it continued, there is no reason to doubt that "The Settlement" was arrived at for the express purpose of favoring him in the election; indeed, simply normalizing the rejection rate would be far more than enough to flip the state to Trump. As in Pennsylvania, however, the constitutional issue in Georgia wasn't the number of ballots affected, or which candidate they favored, but the fact that state law was broken to count them.
===Michigan===
As with Pennsylvania and Georgia, the suit singles out the blatant violation of state electoral law by Michigan's executive-level officials, specifically Secretary of State [[Jocelyn Benson]]. Indeed, of all the Secretaries of State named in the suit, Benson's behavior might be considered the most brazen.
Since 2018, the Michigan constitution has contained a statute (M.C.L. § 168.759(3)) which specifies the means by which registered voters may request a mail-in ballot, if they so desire: 1) By a written request, signed by the voter in question; 2) by filling out an absentee voter ballot application form, provided by the clerk of the voter's city or township; and 3) by completing a federal postcard application. These are the only three conditions permitted for a Michigan voter to receive a mail-in ballot; prior to the 2020 election, however, and citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as justification, Benson's office mailed ballots to all of the state's ~7.7 million voters. This action was arguably the most audacious of the violations: not only is there no mention in the state constitution of the Secretary of State mailing voters a ballot without request, but that official is specifically excluded from the distribution of absentee ballots, a task delegated to the local clerk instead. At least as blatant was Benson's decision to allow absentee ballots to be requested online, without a signature or any other verification of identity: which was not only another violation of existing law in itself, but also, since absentee ballots in Michigan (as in Pennsylvania and Georgia) are predominantly Democratic, could only have had the result of pushing the final vote tallies in favor of Biden.
At least two other laws were broken during the vote-counting process on Election Day: one, that poll watchers and inspectors must have access to the counting and registering of votes, and two, that strict signature-verification requirements must be followed where absentee ballots are concerned. These requirements include the presence of a stamp or a written statement on the envelope containing the mailed ballot, indicating that the voter's signature was in fact checked and proven to match the signature on file with the state. Both of these were violated by local election officials in Wayne County (the city of [[Detroit]] and nearby suburbs), who allegedly (in the words of the suit) "made a conscious and express policy decision not to follow [the law]." In support of this, the suit cites an affidavit from Jesse Jacob, a long-time employee of the City of Detroit, who stated that she was "instructed not to look at any of the signatures on the absentee ballots" or "to compare the signature on the absentee ballot with the signature on file."
Like Benson's actions (and those of her counterparts in Pennsylvania and Georgia), these actions by Wayne County electoral officials were not only alterations to state election law that were unapproved by the legislature, and therefore unconstitutional; they also, the filing continued, "resulted in a number of constitutionally tainted votes that far exceeds the margin of voters separating the candidates in Michigan." In this particular instance, it can also provide a specific estimate of such votes: all absentee ballots have registration numbers to track them back to individual voters; however, 174,384 of the ballots counted in Wayne County (31% of the total) did not have such numbers, strongly suggesting that they were counted multiple times. Those ballots alone exceed the reported vote margin in the state between Trump and Biden, and since Republican poll watchers in the county were (illegally) kept out of the room where counting occurred, they cannot be legitimately accounted for. This, and the unconstitutionality of what state and local officials did, the suit concludes, is reason to toss the state's results.
==References==
==References==
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