Nov. 9: Daily Update on Contested 2020 Election

Absentee ballots at the Central Counting Board sit on a desk as they wait to be processed in the TCF Center in Detroit, Mich., on Nov. 4, 2020. Elaine Cromie/Getty Images

A third party filed a major election-fraud lawsuit in Michigan on Nov. 9, citing sworn witness statements alleging that election officials in Wayne County instructed poll workers to ignore signature mismatches, backdate late-arriving absentee ballots and push through potentially invalid ballots.

The lawsuit also alleges that after a vote-counting center in Detroit announced the receipt of the last batch of ballots, tens of thousands of unsealed and unsecured ballots arrived in open boxes purportedly in cars with out-of-state license plates. The witnesses claim that the ballots in these boxes were counted even though the names on them didn’t show up on the voter registry files. The poll workers went on to process the ballots by registering the voters in the database with the birth date 01/01/1900 for every voter.

As the Trump campaign planned additional legal challenges in Pennsylvania and Nevada, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the president is within his rights to pursue court remedies.

In Arizona, where a lawsuit by the Trump campaign is ongoing, a new batch of votes again closed the gap between President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. With 75,000 votes left to count, the president is on track to capture the state if he continues to close the gap at the same rate.

In Georgia, which is heading toward a recount, a top election official said the canvassing and recount process will inevitably turn up people who voted illegally.

“We are going to find that people did illegally vote, there are going to be double voters, and people that did not meet the qualifications to be a registered voter to vote in this state. That will be found,” said Gabriel Sterling, a spokesman for the office of Georgia’s secretary of state.

In a sign of the seriousness of the voting irregularities, the two Republican Georgia senators facing runoff elections in January—David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler—called on the Republican secretary of state to resign.

“The management of Georgia elections has become an embarrassment for our state,” Loeffler and Perdue said in a joint statement.

No state has yet certified the results of the 2020 election. Delaware was scheduled to certify its results on Nov. 5, but the state’s elections page still displays unofficial results. Several states are scheduled to certify their results on Nov. 10.

The General Services Administration (GSA), which has been under pressure from the Biden campaign to initiate the transition process, stated on Nov. 9 that “an ascertainment has not yet been made” about the winner of the election.

Biden, who declared a victory over the weekend despite legal challenges and recounts pending in key states, delivered a 10-minute speech on Nov. 9 about his plans for handling the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus. He painted the months ahead as a “dark winter” and called on Americans to wear masks.

Republican attorneys general from Missouri and Kentucky on Nov. 9 joined the Supreme Court challenge of Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot deadline extension. The Supreme Court over the weekend ordered the state to segregate all ballots received after the deadline, pending a potential Supreme Court order. The fate of these late-arriving ballots is still up in the air.