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The city of Detroit has dismissed the cheating allegations made by Trump supporters, saying in a court filing that the allegations made by a handful of election observers and an election worker were based on a lack of understanding of the processes that they were watching.
“Most of the objections raised in the affidavits submitted are based on an extraordinary inability to understand how elections work,” the city’s lawyers wrote in a response filed Wednesday at Wayne County Circuit Court.
Lawyers pointed out that President Trump received nearly three times as many votes in Detroit in the 2020 election than he did four years ago: 12,654, up from 4,972 in 2016.
The city also said it explained its vote counting process to their party-trained Republican observers and resolved any issues without challenge or complaint from those observers.
A pro-Trump lawsuit against the city, filed Monday by the Great Lakes Justice Center, was brought in part on behalf of observers who “ did not operate through the leadership of their challenger party because the issues they raised were basically discussed and resolved with the leadership of their challenger party, ”the city said.
Complaints in the Great Lakes lawsuit were actually only filed after the vote count showed Democrat Joe Biden leading Trump in the Michigan tally.
Lawyers said Michigan’s request to delay certification of election results based on this lawsuit would be undemocratic.
“Depriving millions of voters on the basis of isolated speculation and debunked conspiracy theories has no place in our democracy,” the city’s lawyers wrote.
The dossier also highlighted evidence on social media that two of the people who signed affidavits in the Great Lakes trial were adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, in which followers promote the bizarre lie that Trump s ‘is beaten to expose a child trafficking ring. by prominent Democrats.
The city reported social media posts in which the two used QAnon hashtags and slogans, and said ahead of the election that it was rigged, without evidence, and based solely on baseless statements made by Trump.
The Great Lakes trial claimed election workers were ordered not to verify signatures on mail-in ballots, that additional ballots were introduced and all counted for Biden, that election workers had back-dated the postal ballots so that they could be counted, and that they “used false information to process the ballots” – such as the addition of birthdays in 1900 to some voter entries .
The lawsuit also claimed that election observers were prevented from watching the vote count at key times, that the votes of ineligible voters were being counted and that a handful of city workers had “trained” voters to vote. for Biden.
The City of Detroit record refuted all of these claims.
Election officers at the TCF Center, a Detroit convention center where much of the county’s vote counting took place, were instructed not to verify the signatures of the mail-in ballots during the count, the count said. city. This was due to the fact that the signature matching had already been done before the arrival of the ballots at the TCF Center.
“The signature verification was not done at TCF counting council inspectors, as it was done by staff of the city clerk,” the city said.
Complaints in the Great Lakes trial about the mail-in ballots – known in Michigan as missing ballots – being backdated, with the implication that they arrived after Election Day, were also quite bogus, the city said. “No ballot received by the City of Detroit clerk after 8:00 p.m. on November 3, 2020 was even cast at the TCF Center,” the city’s attorneys wrote. “No ballot could have been ‘backdated’, because no ballot received after 8:00 p.m. on November 3, 2020 has ever shown up at the TCF Center.”
As to the idea that ineligible votes were counted, or that the votes were concocted from scratch and assigned to names of people who did not vote, the city said what Republican observers at l Inside the TCF really saw was that the election workers were correcting a certain mistake. election workers at satellite sites, who failed to complete a process to count some postal ballots. It was necessary to enter the date of these polls to allow them to count, the city said.
“Each ballot delivered to the TCF Center had already been verified as having been completed by an eligible voter,” the city said.
The additional ballot burden was linked to the arrival of blank ballots that were sent to TCF for use by election workers. These ballots were given to election workers so that they could function as duplicate ballots in case legitimate ballots were damaged and could not be read by the voting machines, according to the file.
“Michigan Election Law does not call for the presence of partisan challengers when a ballot is duplicated; instead, when a ballot is duplicated as a result of a “false reading,” the duplication is overseen by a Republican and a Democratic inspector coordinating together, “the Detroit lawyers wrote. “This process has been followed and the applicants do not – and cannot – present any evidence to the contrary.”
The Trump campaign, in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in US District Court for the Western District of Michigan, claimed there were instances in which “duplication of ballots was only carried out by Democratic election workers, not by bipartisan teams ”. That claim has already been dismissed in a lawsuit brought by the Trump campaign last week in Michigan Claims Court.
Detroit City attorney David Fink said in a statement provided to Yahoo News that the Trump campaign trial “only repeated baseless claims that have been made in four separate lawsuits that have already been made. refuted by every court that has ruled so far.
Observers were allowed at all times and the city had large computer screens so they could observe each counting station from a safe distance given concerns about COVID-19, the city said. At one point the room was so packed with observers – there were “over 200” Republican observers there, the city said – that it was “overcrowded” and for a limited time the city would not allow. to no additional observers inside until someone from their party has left.
And regarding the charge of “false information,” the city said some mail-in ballots arrived between Sunday evening and Tuesday – all before the polls closed on Tuesday evening – must have the date of birth entered manually. due to some software quirk. . “
Election officers who entered the date of birth on these ballots used January 1, 1900 as a “surrogate date” until the ballot entry could match the elector’s entry in the file. electoral state. “This anniversary will appear in several places in the electronic poll book for a limited period of time,” the city said.
That leaves the claim of city workers “leading” voters to vote for Biden, a claim made by a city employee named Jessy Jacob in the lawsuit.
The city said if this were true it would “be against the instructions given to workers at satellite sites”, but also said it was “curious that Ms Jacob waited until after the election to raise these allegations.”
Jacob also said he saw voters vote in person in cities without signing a form saying they lost their mail-in ballot. The city said it has procedures in place to prevent anyone from voting twice.
And another complaint from Jacob, that she was instructed to “adjust the mailing date of … absentee ballots to be dated before they were sent,” was treated as an oddity in the law. city response.
“It is not clear what the purpose of his claim is – the date on the ballot sent to voters has no legal significance. What matters is the return of the ballot. If it was not returned and received by 8:00 pm on November 3, 2020, it was not counted, ”the city said.
The city noted that Jacob was put on leave before the election, was brought back to work during the election season in September, and was fired again immediately after the election.
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