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(CNN) To hear some people tell it -- including a handful of prominent Republicans, such as members of President Trump's family and supporters like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell -- you might think that Democrats were using dead people to steal Michigan's Electoral College votes from Trump.

But, like much of the misinformation circulated online this week by some Trump supporters, the claim falls apart under scrutiny. A CNN analysis of the claim and the purported backing for it did not find a single instance of that happening.

One of the supposed pieces of evidence was a list that circulated on Twitter Thursday evening allegedly containing names, birth dates, and zip codes for registered voters in Michigan. The origin of the list and the identity of the person who first made it public are not known.

CNN examined 50 of the more than 14,000 names on the list by taking the first 25 names on the list and then 25 more picked at random. We ran the names through Michigan's Voter Information database to see if they requested or returned a ballot. We then checked the names against publicly available records to see if they were indeed dead.

Of the 50, 37 were indeed dead and had not voted, according to the voter information database. Five people out of the 50 had voted -- and they are all still alive, according to public records accessed by CNN. The remaining eight are also alive but didn't vote.

The sample CNN reviewed is not representative, but the trend was clear -- not a single one of the names examined was of a dead person voting.

The version of the list CNN found has since been removed from the site hosting it.

Viral videos

Falsehoods about dead people casting ballots in Michigan began spreading through videos posted to social media late Wednesday night.

A typical clip showed a person entering a name, birth date and zip code into Michigan's state-run voter lookup website. The videos would show the search results for a voter who, despite being over 110 years old, had supposedly requested and successfully returned a ballot.

Right-wing personality Austen Fletcher, who goes by the name "Fleccas" online, created some of the videos that went viral.

Fletcher's first video, posted shortly after midnight Thursday morning, shows him search for a voter named William Bradley who was born in March 1902.

"Turns out 118-year-old 'William Bradley' voted via absentee ballot in Wayne County, Michigan," Fletcher tweeted Thursday. "How long has this been going on?" he added.

A search of public records revealed a man named William Bradley was born in March 1902 and died in I984 in Michigan's Wayne County. But public records also show that his son, also named William Bradley and living at the same address, is very much alive -- and a voter.

Lawrence Garcia, the principal attorney for the city of Detroit, confirmed to CNN that "a man with a nearly identical name [to the deceased Bradley] requested a ballot and voted properly in both the primary and general elections."

"When his ballot was initially logged, however, it was incorrectly attributed to the William Bradley born 118 years ago through a clerical error," Garcia added.

The younger Bradley told PolitFact that he reached out to the city after Fletcher's video was posted but was told not to worry since officials check for a matching signature and date of birth.

Some prominent figures on the right, including Donald Trump Jr, actor James Woods, and activist Candace Owens shared Fletcher's videos, which have collectively garnered millions of views across Twitter.

Others, like Juan Andres Caro, a White House policy adviser, made their own videos replicating Fletcher's search.

Grenell retweeted Caro's video, which has more than a million views on Twitter.

CNN reached out to Fletcher and Caro for comment. Fletcher did not respond and Caro did not comment.

Tracy Wimmer, the director of media relations for Michigan's Secretary of State, told CNN that, on rare occasions, errors like this can occur with "voters with similar names, where the ballot is accidentally recorded as voted by John Smith Sr when it was actually voted by John Smith Jr."

She added that ballots for deceased voters are rejected and that "local clerks can correct the issue when it is brought to their attention."

Later on November 5, the Michigan Secretary of State's office replied directly to Fletcher's tweet, calling it "misinformation." By then the post had been retweeted tens of thousands of times.

Errors and quirks

Clerical errors, database quirks, and genuinely long-living individuals can sometimes explain why it looks like people are casting ballots from beyond the grave.

Occasionally living voters submit ballots with incorrect birth years that make it appear as if they're actually deceased, according to Wimmer. "In such scenarios, no one ineligible has actually voted," she said.

Other videos Fletcher produced feature voters who returned ballots and are listed in Michigan's voter information website as having been born in January 1900 or 1901.

Of course, that's not what happened. There's a much simpler and less sinister explanation.

Detroit's Director of Elections, George Azzouz explained to CNN that "the date of January 1, 1900 is often used in the electronic poll book as a temporary placeholder for absentee ballots arriving just before Election Day."

"The placeholder information has to be inserted in order for the electronic poll book to accept the entry," Azzouz added.

A 2017 report about duplicate voting from the Government Accountability Institute echoed this explanation as well.

"It is important to note that some state registration systems indicate a missing date of birth by adopting filler dates, such as 01/01/1900, 01/01/1850, or 01/01/1800," the report noted.

"The vast majority of votes cast by individuals appearing to be over 115 years old had these three erroneous birthdates."

A search of public records for a different voter Fletcher featured in his videos supports this. Donna Brydges, despite being 75 years old, has a voter registration entry with a 1901 year of birth.

Catherine Lewis, the clerk for the township where Brydges lives, explained to CNN that "it is not uncommon for voters in Michigan to have 01/01/01 mistakenly listed as their date of birth in the qualified voter database."

"The voter in question properly applied for an absentee ballot, provided her state-issued driver's license with her application, and returned her absentee ballot in the properly signed and sealed envelope as required by state law," Lewis said in a statement.

"The board of election inspectors, consisting of Republican and Democratic members, had no question that the voter was who she purported to be or that her signatures matched," she added.

The fact that these birthdates showed up repeatedly by itself should have been a clue. After all, if someone wanted to steal an election using votes from dead people without getting caught, it would be silly to pick people who all happened to have been born in the same month and year, not to mention people whose incredibly advanced age would immediately raise suspicion.

Why the dead don't vote

The Michigan Secretary of State's office says casting a vote in the name of a dead person is almost impossible.

"In the unlikely event that someone who was alive and had their identity verified when they requested a ballot died before receiving it, and someone else attempted to vote as them, the signature mismatch/deceased flag in the [Qualified Voter File] would once again flag it for rejection," Wimmer explained.

In fact, CNN previously reported on a 20-year-old cancer patient in Wisconsin who voted early but sadly died before election day. Her vote was thrown out under Wisconsin law.

This assessment is backed up by research from independent organizations like the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan but liberal-leaning law and policy institute.

"The consensus from credible research and investigation is that the rate of illegal voting is extremely rare, and the incidence of certain types of fraud -- such as impersonating another voter -- is virtually nonexistent," the institute notes in the resources section of their website.

-- Claims that dead people voted went viral. These are the facts, By Konstantin Toropin, Holmes Lybrand and Annie Grayer, CNN, Updated 10:47 AM ET, Sun November 8, 2020

No absentee ballots in the key battleground state of Wisconsin were found in rivers last week, and though local authorities reported some absentee ballots were temporarily lost in a batch of mail found on the side of the road near Appleton, Wisconsin, none of the ballots were from the state, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said on Thursday.

Unanswered questions about what happened to the batch of mail found in eastern Wisconsin are likely to be addressed by an ongoing Postal Service investigation, but the incident has come under intense and perhaps premature scrutiny because of unsubstantiated claims the president made during the first presidential debate on Tuesday, when he said that mail-in ballots were being "dumped in rivers."

"Did you see what's going on?" Trump said onstage. "They are being dumped in rivers. This is a horrible thing for our country."

"There is no evidence of that," responded Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany later made it clear that Trump was talking about the investigation in Wisconsin.

McEnany was repeatedly pressed by a reporter on Thursday to clarify where the "river" that Trump talked about was located, but she declined to answer.

"You're missing the forest through the trees here," she responded to the reporter.

The lost mail in Wisconsin was actually found on the side of a road and in a ditch line in Greenville, Wisconsin, a small town of about 12,000 people outside the city of Appleton. The mail was supposed to be in transit to the post office, according to the Outagamie County Sheriff's office. "Several" absentee ballots were found among three "trays" of mail, according to the sheriff's office.

Outagamie County Sheriff's Office Lt. Ryan Carpenter described each "tray" as about 18-inches high with an estimated few hundred pieces of mail. Officers who reported to the scene didn't count how many absentee ballots were in the mix, Carpenter said.

The U.S. Postal Service, which is in charge of the investigation going forward, declined to comment, but Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe announced on Thursday that she'd been informed by post office officials that no Wisconsin ballots were among the lost mail.

Wolfe said she was not informed what state the ballots were from.

"There was mail found outside of Appleton, and that mail did not contain any Wisconsin ballots, no Wisconsin ballots were part of what was found, no Wisconsin ballots were involved or impacted by the incident," Wolfe said Thursday afternoon.

"But if there were ever an issue with Wisconsin ballot, it's a very intentional, deliberate process with many safeguards in place, where we would be able to identify issues," Wolfe added.

Wisconsin began sending out absentee ballots to voters on Sept. 17. The state is a vital win for either candidate in the path to victory this November.

Greenville town clerk Wendy Helgeson said she hopes USPS investigators can offer clear information to the public sooner rather than later, so as not to undermine the integrity of the process.

"If there's one thing that I would hope that people know about our state is that there's a huge amount of integrity in the job that we do, and people take a lot of pride in it, nobody wants to be in the newspaper," Helgeson said.

Trump's claims about fraud in the mail-in ballot process have grown as the country nears Election Day, which is about a month away, but there is no evidence that voter fraud will increase as mail-in voting becomes a more popular choice due to the pandemic.

Election officials in Democrat and Republican states alike have been clear that they have confidence in their election process, and experts agree that the risk of fraud is very low.

"There is no evidence that widespread or systematic absentee voter fraud is a real phenomenon. There have been scattered instances of both in-person and absentee voter fraud throughout history. But that's something that both Democratic and Republican campaigns have engaged in. And there is just no evidence that it happens on a widespread or systematic basis," said Kate Shaw, law professor at Cardozo Law School and ABC News legal contributor.

And for voters both in Wisconsin and across the country who don't want to rely on the mail to vote this year, there are other ways to safely cast a ballot without increasing the risk of contracting coronavirus. In many states, early voting or absentee in-person voting is an option, which allows voters to cast their ballots in person ahead of Election Day. There are also drop boxes, where voters can drop their absentee ballots off directly with their election clerks instead of sending it through the mail.

In Wisconsin, voters have already started receiving and returning absentee ballots at a rate that far surpasses what was seen in 2016: 1.2 million absentee ballots have been requested as of Oct. 1, per the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is 16 times more ballots than were requested by this time last year. Already, 395,000 ballots have been returned, which is seven times more than the same time last year.

The deadline to request an absentee ballot in Wisconsin is Oct. 29, but voters should give themselves at least a week before the Nov. 3 deadline to return it by mail. Voters can also submit their ballots to a dropbox, vote absentee in-person with their ballot at a clerk's office beginning on Oct. 20, or vote in person on Election Day.

No matter how Wisconsin voters choose to cast their absentee ballots, they can track their ballots online through the whole process. Each Wisconsin absentee ballot has an intelligent barcode, so its movements can be tracked much like an Amazon package.

-- Trump claimed ballots were 'dumped in a river.' The reality is far from it. No ballots were dumped in a river, nor were any Wisconsin ballots lost, by Cheyenne Haslett, October 1, 2020, 7:06 PM

On September 10, Nora Dannehy resigned as the deputy to John Durham, the federal prosecutor investigating the government’s probe into the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Dannehy left her post and the Justice Department in part because of Attorney General William Barr’s pressure on Durham to release a report on his investigation’s findings before Election Day, according to a person familiar with her thinking. Trump had long been hoping a report out this fall would damage Democrats, including Joe Biden, and help him win reelection. In Trump’s terminology, Durham’s report would reveal an “attempted overthrow” of his administration by Democratic insiders. But Justice Department guidelines restrict prosecutors from taking such actions within 60 days of an election because they might affect the outcome of the election. Both Durham and Dannehy believed that if they complied with Barr’s demands they would be violating this doctrine, according to two people familiar with their thinking.

Durham, who is the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, and Dannehy were also troubled that Barr had purposely misrepresented their work in numerous public comments, the two people said. According to two sources familiar with the probe, there has been no evidence found, after 18 months of investigation, to support Barr’s claims that Trump was targeted by politically biased Obama officials to prevent his election. (The probe remains ongoing.) In fact, the sources said, the Durham investigation has so far uncovered no evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden or Barack Obama, or that they were even involved with the Russia investigation. There “was no evidence … not even remotely … indicating Obama or Biden did anything wrong,” as one person put it.

Shortly after the resignation of his prized deputy and with the election looming on the horizon, Durham phoned Barr. He forcefully told the attorney general that his office would not be releasing a report or taking any other significant public actions before Election Day, according to a person with knowledge of the phone call. Dannehy’s resignation constituted an implied but unspoken threat to Barr that Durham or others on his team might resign if the attorney general attempted to force the issue, according to a person familiar with Durham’s thinking.

After hearing from Durham in September, Barr informed the president and allies that there would be no October surprise, causing Trump to lash out. “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crimes in the history of our country — then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win,” he told Fox Business last month. “[These] people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. And that includes Obama and it includes Biden.”

The president had been hoping for a repeat of what happened during the 2016 election, when, with just 11 days left, then-FBI director James Comey announced the reopening of the bureau’s Hillary Clinton email investigation. Comey’s decision is widely seen to have hurt Clinton at a crucial moment and helped Trump pull off a come-from-behind victory. For more than a year and a half, Trump believed that Durham’s investigation would confirm the conspiracy theory that the “deep state” — senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence community — had worked to sabotage his presidency with false accusations that he had colluded with Russia. The Justice Department’s inspector general last year reported finding no “evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions” of the Russia investigators, and so far, the only charge brought by Durham’s office has been against an ex-FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to falsifying an email used to obtain a warrant for electronic surveillance on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

For his part, Barr was hyping what the Durham investigation would find since at least the spring and suggested it would be bad for Democrats. “There is a difference between an abuse of power and a federal crime. Not every abuse of power, no matter how outrageous, is a federal crime,” Barr told reporters in May. “As to President Obama and Vice-President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man. Our concern over potential criminality is focused on others.” One person familiar with the Durham investigation called Barr’s comments a backhanded attempt to insinuate that Obama and Biden had abused their powers. Barr’s ongoing commentary regarding Durham’s investigation appears to have violated Justice Department policy that officials should “not confirm the existence or otherwise comment about ongoing investigations.”

While discussing Durham’s investigation, Barr’s rhetoric also increasingly paralleled Trump’s. In contrast to the president, Barr delivered his comments in a measured and restrained manner, while Trump’s claims have been coarse and hyperbolic. Barr has suggested that the DOJ and FBI’s investigations of the president was “one of the greatest travesties” in American history and a “bogus scandal,” whereas Trump simply called the investigations a “hoax.” Barr has said the “greatest danger to our free system” is when law enforcement and intelligence agencies try to “affect the outcome of an election.” Trump accused them of an attempted “coup” against him. Barr has said that the “completely bogus narrative” caused by the investigations “was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press.” Trump blamed the “fake media,” period.

After hearing there would be no October surprise, Trump excoriated Barr, telling Rush Limbaugh: “I think it’s a terrible thing, and I’ll say it to his face.”

-- How Trump and Barr’s October Surprise Went Bust, by Murray Waas, Intelligencer, Nov 2, 2020

In a press conference Thursday, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, claimed to have evidence of voter fraud in Michigan based on sworn affidavits from four individuals. According to Giuliani, those four affiants reported seeing "thousands and thousands" of Biden ballots in what appeared to be a food truck hauled into the Detroit, Michigan polling center at 4:30 a.m after all Republican inspectors had left the site.

"What they swear to is that at 4:30 in the morning a truck pulled up to the Detroit center where they were counting ballots. The people thought it was food so they all ran to the truck. Wasn't food. It was thousands and thousands of ballots," Giuliani said.

In a ruling on November 13, Judge Timothy Kenny of the Third Judicial Circuit Court of Michigan invalidated the affidavits Giuliani mentioned. The judge ruled that the claims regarding the nature and quantity of the ballots were speculations at best and sinister at worst.

Republican challenger Andrew Sitto implied the "tens of thousands of ballots" he saw cast for former vice president Joe Biden were proof of fraud, but the judge considered those ballots "not surprising."

"It is not surprising that many of the votes being observed by Mr. Sitto were votes cast for Mr. Biden in light of the fact that former Vice President Biden received approximately 220,000 more votes than President Trump," Judge Kenny wrote in his ruling.

Sitto also suggested that the batch of ballots referenced previously were somehow different because they were brought in through the back from vehicles with out-of-state license plates.

State Elections Director Christopher Thomas, who was present at the TCF Center in Detroit where ballots were being counted, refuted the allegations in an affidavit submitted to the judge and cited in the ruling. According to the judge’s ruling, Thomas stated that all ballots delivered to the center were brought in through the back and that Detroit employed out-of-state rental trucks to deliver them.

-- Fact-checking Giuliani’s claims that food trucks hauled fraudulent Biden ballots in Detroit, by CNN's Hyeyoon Alyssa Choi and Tara Subramaniam, 11/20/20

The Secret Service filed charges against a Maryland man after he threatened to kidnap and kill Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

A criminal complaint filed by the agency Wednesday said a man identified as James Dale Reed on Oct. 4 approached a house in his hometown of Frederick that had Biden-Harris lawn signs posted and left a handwritten note detailing graphic threats against the candidates and their supporters.

The man was identified after the resident’s video doorbell captured Reed allegedly leaving the note at the home’s doorstep, according to the complaint.

Reed allegedly threatens in the letter to “severely beat” Biden to “the point of death” and shoot Harris in the head with a Glock 17 pistol. The letter also includes a graphic threat of sexual assault against Harris.

The letter says Biden-Harris supporters would also be “targeted.”

“We have a list of homes and addresses by your election signs,” the letter reads, without clarifying who constitutes “we.” “We are the ones with these scary guns, we are the ones your children have nightmares about.”

The Secret Service’s criminal complaint did not detail any steps Reed or anyone else took to fulfill the alleged threat.

The agency said it focused on Reed following an anonymous tip. He first denied writing the threatening letter when he was first interviewed on Oct. 13, but later admitted to authoring it after providing elimination palm prints and a handwriting sample on Oct. 15.

He later told authorities “this will happen,” referring to threatening comments, citing the tense political climate.

Reed is charged with the federal offense of threatening a major candidate, which can be punished by up to five years in prison. He’s also facing state charges of threatening mass violence and voter intimidation.

The Maryland resident had come to the Secret Service’s attention in 2014 after making a threat then against a person under its protection.

The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill.

-- Secret Service charges man with threat to kidnap and kill Biden and Harris, by Tal Axelrod, 10/21/20 02:24 PM EDT

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — As they frantically searched for ways to salvage President Donald Trump’s failed reelection bid, his campaign pursued a dizzying game of legal hopscotch across six states that centered on the biggest prize of all: Pennsylvania.

The strategy may have played well in front of television cameras and on talk radio to Trump’s supporters. But it has proved a disaster in court, where judges uniformly rejected their claims of vote fraud and found the campaign’s legal work amateurish.

In a scathing ruling late Saturday, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann — a Republican and Federalist Society member in central Pennsylvania — compared the campaign’s legal arguments to “Frankenstein’s Monster,” concluding that Trump’s team offered only “speculative accusations,” not proof of rampant corruption.

The campaign on Sunday filed notice it would appeal the decision to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a day before the state’s 67 counties are set to certify their results and send them to state officials. And they asked Sunday night for an expedited hearing Wednesday as they seek to amend the Pennsylvania lawsuit that Brann dismissed.

Trump’s efforts in Pennsylvania show how far he is willing to push baseless theories of widespread voter fraud, even as the legal doors close on his attempts to have courts do what voters would not do on Election Day and deliver him a second term.

The effort is being led by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, who descended on the state the Saturday after the Nov. 3 election as the count dragged on and the president played golf. Summoning reporters to a scruffy, far-flung corner of Philadelphia on Nov. 7, he held forth at a site that would soon become legendary: Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

The 11:30 a.m. news conference was doomed from the start.

Only minutes earlier, news outlets had started calling the presidential contest for Democrat Joe Biden. The race was over.

Just heating up was Trump’s plan to subvert the election through litigation and howls of fraud — the same tactic he had used to stave off losses in the business world. And it would soon spread far beyond Pennsylvania.

“Some of the ballots looked suspicious,” Giuliani, 76, said of the vote count in Philadelphia as he stood behind a chain link fence, next to a sex shop. He maligned the city as being run by a “decrepit Democratic machine.”

“Those mail-in ballots could have been written the day before, by the Democratic Party hacks that were all over the convention center,” Giuliani said. He promised to file a new round of lawsuits. He rambled.

“This is a very, very strong case,” he asserted.

Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who specializes in election law, called the Trump lawsuits dangerous.

“It is a sideshow, but it’s a harmful sideshow,” Levitt said. “It’s a toxic sideshow. The continuing baseless, evidence-free claims of alternative facts are actually having an effect on a substantial number of Americans. They are creating the conditions for elections not to work in the future.”

Not a single court has found merit in the core legal claims, but that did not stop Trump’s team from firing off nearly two dozen legal challenges to Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania, including an early morning suit on Election Day filed by a once-imprisoned lawyer.

The president’s lawyers fought the three-day grace period for mail-in ballots to arrive. They complained they weren’t being let in to observe the vote count. They said Democratic counties unfairly let voters fix mistakes on their ballot envelopes. Everywhere they turned, they said, they sniffed fraud.

“I felt insidious fraud going on,” Philadelphia poll watcher Lisette Tarragano said when Giuliani called her to the microphone at the landscaping company.

In fact, a Republican runs the city’s election board, and has said his office got death threats as Trump’s rants about the election intensified. No judges ever found any evidence of election fraud in Pennsylvania or any other state where the campaign sued — not in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada or Georgia.

Instead, Trump lawyers found themselves backpedaling when pressed in court for admissible evidence, or dropping out when they were accused of helping derail the democratic process.

“I am asking you as a member of the bar of this court, are people representing the Donald J. Trump for president (campaign) … in that room?” U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond asked at an after-hours hearing on Nov. 5, when Republicans asked him to stop the vote count in Philadelphia over their alleged banishment.

“There’s a nonzero number of people in the room,” lawyer Jerome Marcus replied.

The count continued in Philadelphia. The Trump losses kept coming. By Friday, Nov. 6, when a state appeals court rejected a Republican complaint over provisional ballots and a Philadelphia judge refused to throw out 8,300 mail-in ballots they challenged, Biden was up by about 27,000 votes.

Nationally, the race had not yet been called. But it was becoming clear that a Biden win in Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, was imminent.

When it came, Trump quickly pivoted to litigation. It did not go well.

A U.S. appeals court found Pennsylvania’s three-day extension for mail-in ballots laudatory, given the disruption and mail delays cause by the pandemic. Judges in Michigan and Arizona, finding no evidence of fraud, refused to block the certification of county vote tallies. Law firms representing the campaign started to come under fire and withdrew.

That left Giuliani, who had not argued a case in court for three decades, in charge of the effort to overturn the election.

“You can say a lot at a driveway (news conference). ... When you go to court, you can’t,” said lawyer Mark Aronchick, who represented election officials in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and elsewhere in several of the Pennsylvania suits. “I don’t really pay attention to the chatter until I see a legal brief.”

On Tuesday, Giuliani stepped into the courtroom. He was a late addition to the docket after election lawyers from Porter Wright Morris & Arthur had bowed out over the previous weekend. He had an entourage in tow, a show of force that had everything but a compelling legal argument.

Giuliani asked Brann to hold up the certification of the state’s 6.8 million ballots over two Republican voters whose mail-in ballots were tossed over technical errors.

“I sat dumbfounded listening,” said Aronchick, a seasoned trial lawyer.

“We were ready to argue the one count. Instead, he treated us to an even more expanded version of his Total Landscaping press conference,” Aronchick said. “It didn’t bear any relationship to the actual case.”

Giuliani, admired by some for his tough talk as Manhattan’s top prosecutor and his leadership as New York City’s mayor during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, struggled to answer even basic legal questions.

But he waxed on about a supposed conspiracy to rig the state election.

“The best description of this situation is widespread, nationwide voter fraud,” Giuliani argued. Under questioning, though, he acknowledged their complaint no longer included a fraud claim.

And then, just as it had at Four Seasons, reality came crashing down on him, when news broke in the courtroom that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had rejected the campaign’s appeal over observer access in Philadelphia. It was one of the campaign’s last remaining claims.

Even the dissent was crushing.

“The notion that presumptively valid ballots cast by the Pennsylvania electorate would be disregarded based on isolated procedural irregularities that have been redressed ... is misguided,” Chief Justice Thomas G. Saylor wrote for the minority in the 5-2 decision.

Brann, who sits in Williamsport, let the federal court hearing drag on past the dinner hour, and gave both sides time to file additional motions. The campaign filings were replete with typos, spelling mistakes and even an errant reference to a “Second Amendment Complaint” instead of a second amended complaint.

The campaign took the opportunity to answer one of the more puzzling questions that its election challenge raised: [It only wanted the presidential election results set aside, not votes on the same ballots for other offices. The briefs were filed by Giuliani and co-counsel Marc Scaringi, a local conservative talk radio host who, before he was hired, had questioned the point of the Trump litigation, saying “it will not reverse this election.”

Aronchick balked at the campaign’s core premise that local election workers — perhaps working for the Mafia, as Giuliani suggested — had plotted to spoil Trump’s win.

“You’re going to suggest part of them are in a conspiracy? How does that work?” Aronchick asked. “Who? Where? When? How?”

Brann, in his ruling, said he expected the campaign to present formidable evidence of rampant corruption as it sought to nullify millions of votes. Instead, he said, the campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.”

The 3rd Circuit, based in Philadelphia, may have already tipped its hand. In its Nov. 13 ruling, the appeals court called it “indisputable in our democratic process: that the lawfully cast vote of every citizen must count.”

Biden’s lead in the state has expanded to more than 80,000 votes.

“Our system depends on the possibility that you might lose a fair contest. If that possibility doesn’t exist, you don’t have a democracy,” said Levitt, the law school professor. “There are countries that run like that. It just doesn’t describe America.”

-- Trump’s legal team cried vote fraud, but courts found none, By MARYCLAIRE DALE, November 22, 2020

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — President Donald Trump’s legal team suffered yet another defeat in court Friday as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.

Trump’s lawyers vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court despite the judges’ assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit.”

“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” 3rd Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, wrote for the three-judge panel, all appointed by Republican presidents.

The case had been argued last week in a lower court by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who insisted during five hours of oral arguments that the 2020 presidential election had been marred by widespread fraud in Pennsylvania. However, Giuliani failed to offer any tangible proof of that in court.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann, another Republican, had said the campaign’s error-filled complaint, “like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together” and denied Giuliani the right to amend it for a second time.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called any revisions “futile.” Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith and Judge Michael Chagares were on the panel with Bibas, a former University of Pennsylvania law professor. Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, sat on the court for 20 years, retiring in 2019.

“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections,” Bibas said in the opinion, which also denied the campaign’s request to stop the state from certifying its results, a demand he called “breathtaking.”

In fact, Pennsylvania officials had announced Tuesday that they had certified their vote count for President-elect Joe Biden, who defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in the state. Nationally, Biden and running mate Kamala Harris garnered nearly 80 million votes, a record in U.S. presidential elections.

Trump has said he hopes the Supreme Court will intervene in the race as it did in 2000, when its decision to stop the recount in Florida gave the election to Republican George W. Bush. On Nov. 5, as the vote count continued, Trump posted a tweet saying the “U.S. Supreme Court should decide!”

Ever since, Trump and his surrogates have attacked the election as flawed and filed a flurry of lawsuits to try to block the results in six battleground states. But they’ve found little sympathy from judges, nearly all of whom dismissed their complaints about the security of mail-in ballots, which millions of people used to vote from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump perhaps hopes a Supreme Court he helped steer toward a conservative 6-3 majority would be more open to his pleas, especially since the high court upheld Pennsylvania’s decision to accept mail-in ballots through Nov. 6 by only a 4-4 vote last month. Since then, Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett has joined the court.

“The activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the allegations of massive fraud,” Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis tweeted after Friday’s ruling. “On to SCOTUS!”

In the case at hand, the Trump campaign asked to disenfranchise the state’s 6.8 million voters or at least “cherry-pick” the 1.5 million who voted by mail in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other Democratic-leaning areas, the appeals court said.

“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, wrote in his scathing ruling on Nov. 21. “That has not happened.”

A separate Republican challenge that reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court this week seeks to stop the state from further certifying any races on the ballot. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration is fighting that effort, saying it would prevent the state’s legislature and congressional delegation from being seated in the coming weeks.

On Thursday, Trump said the Nov. 3 election was still far from over. Yet he said for the first time he would leave the White House on Jan. 20 if the Electoral College formalizes Biden’s win.

“Certainly I will. But you know that,” Trump said at the White House, taking questions from reporters for the first time since Election Day.

On Twitter Friday, however, he continued to baselessly attack Detroit, Atlanta and other Democratic cities with large Black populations as the source of “massive voter fraud.” And he claimed, without evidence, that a Pennsylvania poll watcher had uncovered computer memory drives that “gave Biden 50,000 votes” apiece.

All 50 states must certify their results before the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14, and any challenge to the results must be resolved by Dec. 8. Biden won both the Electoral College and popular vote by wide margins.

Election 2020 legal challenges

President Donald Trump's campaign and Republicans have mounted legal challenges in several states, although most are small-scale lawsuits that do not appear to affect many votes. This table updates daily.

STATE / COURT / WHAT THEY'RE SEEKING / DECISION

Arizona / Superior Court; Maricopa County / Lawsuit seeking an order allowing one voter to recast her ballot because she said a tabulator rejected it on Election Day and poll workers denied her request for another ballot. It also asked that certain voter-counting locations be made open to public inspection in future elections. / A judge dismissed the case on Nov. 20

Arizona / Superior Court; Maricopa County / The Arizona Republican Party asked a judge to bar the state’s most populous county from certifying the Nov. 3 election results until the court decides its lawsuit that seeks a new hand-count of a sampling of ballots. / A judge on Thursday rejected Republicans' bid to postpone the certification of election results and dismissed the party’s legal challenge that sought a new audit of a sampling of ballots.

Arizona / Superior Court; Maricopa County / A woman in the Phoenix area alleged vote tabulation equipment was unable to record her ballot because she completed it with a county-issued Sharpie pen. She asked the court to order that all Maricopa County voters whose ballots were rejected as a result of using a Sharpie be given a chance to fix them. / Plantiffs agreed to dismiss the case.

Arizona / Superior Court; Maricopa County / Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward filed a lawsuit seeking an inspection of both mail-in ballot signatures and duplicated ballots in metro Phoenix, alleging officials didn’t give enough legal observers enough access to ballot processing. / --

Arizona / Superior Court; Maricopa County / Trump's campaign and the Republican National Committee sought the manual inspection of in-person Election Day ballots in metro Phoenix they allege were mishandled by poll workers and resulted in some ballot selections to be disregarded. They asked to delay the certification of election results in Maricopa County until the manual inspection it requested is completed. / A judge dismissed the case on Nov. 13 after the campaign’s lawyers acknowledged the small number of ballots at issue wouldn’t change the outcome of how Arizona voted for president.

Georgia / Federal Court / Lawsuit filed on behalf of four voters seeking to exclude ballots from certain counties. / Plaintiffs voluntarily dropped their case on Nov. 16.

Georgia / Federal Court / Lawsuit filed by lawyer L. Lin Wood Jr. seeking to block the certification of election results in Georgia. / A judge on Nov. 19 denied Wood's request for a temporary restraining order to halt certification. Wood has appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Georgia / Superior Court of Chatham County / The Georgia Republican Party and Trump's campaign challenged 53 absentee ballots they alleged may have been received after the Election Day deadline. / A judge dismissed the lawsuit after local officials testified that all 53 ballots had all been received on time.

Michigan / Federal Court / Lawsuit filed on behalf of two poll challengers that sought to block certification of election results until an independent audit to "ensure the accuracy and integrity of the election" is done. / Plantiffs voluntarily dismissed their case on Nov. 18 without explanation.

Michigan / Federal Court / Lawsuit filed on behalf of four voters seeking an order blocking the counting of presidential results from Ingham, Wayne and Washtenaw, alleging voting irregularities. / Plaintiffs voluntarily dropped their case on Nov. 16.

Michigan / Federal Court / Trump campaign case seeking to block the certification of election results in the state, alleging that election officials "allowed fraud and incompetence to corrupt the conduct of the 2020 general election." / Trump's campaign withdrew their lawsuit on Nov. 19.

Michigan / Wayne County Circuit Court / An election challenger and group called the Election Integrity Fund sought to stop the Wayne County Board of Canvassers from certifying or delivering election results to the Secretary of State or State Board of Canvassers. / A judge denied the request, saying they have "offered no evidence to support their assertions"

Michigan / Wayne County Circuit Court / Lawsuit filed on behalf of GOP poll challengers seeking to stop the certification of Detroit-area election results. / A judge denied the bid on Nov. 13, rejecting arguments that the city's handling of absentee ballots spoiled the count.

Michigan / Court of Claims / Trump's campaign case to stop the counting of absentee ballots, accusing election officials of failing to ensure that challengers and bipartisan observers could properly watch the process. / A judge denied the request, noting that votes had largely been counted by the time the lawsuit was filed. Trump's campaign has appealed.

Minnesota / Minnesota Supreme Court / Republican lawmakers, candidates and several voters sought a temporary restraining order to delay the canvassing board’s certification vote, alleging a variety of problems with the election. / The court deferred any action on the petition on Nov. 24, saying the plaintiffs provided no evidence that they had properly served it on all parties.

Nevada / Carson City District Court / Trump’s campaign, through Republican contestants in Nevada, are asking a judge to declare Trump the winner or to invalidate the presidential vote results, alleging voter fraud and irregularities during the election. / --

Nevada / Clark County District Court / A Republican congressional candidate who lost by nearly 3% to an incumbent Democrat in a district that covers Clark County sought a new election, alleging misconduct by election officials, an inability to track mailed ballots and that the use of an optical scanning machine to validate voter signatures was improper. / Dismissed by the judge.

Nevada / Clark County District Court / A Republican state Senate candidate who lost by less than 1% to a Democratic incumbent sought a new election, alleging misconduct by election officials, an inability to track mailed ballots and that the use of an optical scanning machine to validate voter signatures was improper. / A state judge rejected request on procedural grounds and dismissed, saying it could be refiled as a contest-of-election claim.

Nevada / Clark County District Court / A Republican congressional candidate who lost by nearly 5% to an incumbent Democrat is seeking a new election, alleging misconduct by election officials, an inability to track mailed ballots and that the use of an optical scanning machine to validate voter signatures was improper. / A state judge denied an immediate injunction.

Nevada / Clark County District Court / A voting watchdog group led by a conservative activist and former state lawmaker asked a judge to block statewide certification of the election. / A state judge denied the request for an injunction

Nevada / Nevada Supreme Court / Trump's campaign and Republicans sought to stop the vote count in the Las Vegas area, saying campaign-enlisted count-watchers should be allowed wider range to see operations. / Dismissed at the request of the Trump campaign.

Nevada / Federal court / A voter, a count-watcher and two Republican congressional candidates alleged more than 3,000 ineligible voters cast ballots and sought to stop the Clark County Registrar of Voters from using an optical scanning machine to process ballots and validate voter signatures. / A judge denied an immediate injunction to stop the vote count. The plaintiffs then moved to dismiss the case.

Pennsylvania / Federal Court / Lawsuit filed on behalf of four voters seeking an order blocking the counting of presidential results from certain counties. / Plaintiffs voluntarily withdrew their case on Nov. 16.

Pennsylvania / U.S. Supreme Court / The state Republican party is asking the US Supreme Court to reverse a decision extending the deadline to collect mailed in ballots by three days. Trump's campaign has asked to intervene in the case. / --

Pennsylvania / Federal Court / A Republican congressional candidate filed a lawsuit alleging officials in Montgomery County unfairly gave voters a chance to fix technical mistakes on their mail-in ballots before Election Day. The case involved 93 mail-in ballots. / Plaintiffs withdrew their case.

Pennsylvania / Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas / Trump's campaign challenged nearly 600 ballots it claimed were "defective." / Judge rejected the case on Nov. 13 and ordered that the votes be counted.

Pennsylvania / Bucks County Court of Common Pleas / Trump's campaign is challenging more than 2,000 ballots it claims are "defective." / A judge on Nov. 19 denied Trump's bid to invalidate the ballots.

Pennsylvania / Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas / Republican state senate candidate is challenging more than 2,000 undated mail-in ballots. / An appeals court ruled on Nov. 19 that the ballots cannot be counted in the western Pennsylvania state Senate race, saying handwritten dates "provide a measure of security." The state Supreme Court on Nov. 23 overturned that decision and said the votes should be counted.

Pennsylvania / Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas / Five Trump campaign cases challenging more than 8,000 mail-in ballots over alleged voter mistakes, typically where or if they put the signature, date and address. / A judge on Nov. 13 refused to reject the ballots, saying no fraud was found.

Pennsylvania / Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania / Republicans are challenging guidance from the Secretary of State that directed counties to allow voters whose mail-in or absentee ballot was rejected to still vote in person by a provisional ballot. / --

Pennsylvania / Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania / Trump's campaign challenged a decision to move the deadline to provide missing proof of identification for absentee and mail-in ballots. / A judge on Nov. 12 ordered counties not to count mail-in or absentee ballots for which the voter didn't submit valid identification within six days after the election. The injunction deals with an as-yet unknown number of ballots that may number a few thousand, or less.

Pennsylvania / Federal Court / Trump's campaign sought to block certification of election results in the state, alleging among other things that their observers weren't given meaningful access to review the processing of mail-in ballots. / A judge dismissed the case on Nov. 21, writing that the campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations ... unsupported by evidence." The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judge's ruling.

Pennsylvania / 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals / A Republican congressional candidate and others appealed a federal court decision rejecting a challenge to the deadline extension for collecting mail-in ballots. / On Nov. 13, the federal appeals court upheld the three-day extension.

Pennsylvania / Federal Court / The Public Interest Legal Foundation alleges 21,000 supposedly dead residents were on the state's voter rolls. It is seeking a court order to remove dead people from the rolls. / --

Pennsylvania / Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania / Trump's campaign asked that its observers be allowed closer access to the canvassing of ballots. / A judge ordered on Nov. 5 that party and candidate observers be allowed to get closer — 6 feet (2 meters) away — to election workers processing mail-in ballots in Philadelphia. But the state's supreme court ruled on Nov. 17 that the city had given observers sufficient access from the start.

Wisconsin / Federal Court / Three voters in northeastern Wisconsin are seeking to exclude ballots in Milwaukee, Dane and Menominee counties, alleging without evidence that absentee voting is rife with widespread fraud. / Plantiffs voluntarily dropped their case on Nov. 16.

Wisconsin / Wisconsin Supreme Court / A conservative group is seeking to block certification of the presidential election results. / --

-- Appeals court rejects Trump challenge of Pennsylvania race, By MARYCLAIRE DALE, November 27, 2020

A lawyer spearheading the efforts by President Donald Trump’s campaign to dispute the election results in Pennsylvania complained to a federal court Sunday that she received an abusive telephone message from an attorney at the elite law firm representing the state, Kirkland & Ellis.

The Trump campaign lawyer, Linda Kerns of Philadelphia, said she received the one-minute-long voicemail Saturday morning from an associate — a very junior attorney — based in Kirkland’s Washington, D.C. office.

Kerns did not identify the Kirkland attorney by name or provide other details about the message, but said the communication “by any measure falls afoul of standards of professional conduct.”

Kerns’ filing said a Kirkland attorney working on the Pennsylvania suit told her that the lawyer who made the call was not involved in the case. Kerns said the attorney she contacted admitted the call was “discourteous” and apologized for wasting her time.

In a response filed with the court Monday morning, Daniel Donovan, Kirkland's lead attorney on the Pennsylvania-focused election suit, confirmed that he viewed the call as “discourteous and not appropriate,” but said he disagreed with Kerns’ characterization of it.

“That associate was acting unilaterally, in his personal capacity, without the knowledge or authorization of undersigned counsel or the Firm,” Donovan wrote.

“The associate provided a personal email and had a baby babbling in the background during the voicemail….The Firm expects that every lawyer will conduct themselves with the highest standards of professional conduct, including being respectful of and courteous to other members of the bar.”

Donovan said the unnamed associate was not aware of the firm’s role in the case and that no action by the judge was required.

Kerns’ complaint came as law firms working on Trump’s flurry of legal challenges in states across the country have faced public pressure from Trump’s political opponents to drop the litigation, which many legal experts view as fruitless and based on little or no evidence of actual fraud.

Some of the most prominent figures urging law firms to back out of Trump’s legal defense are associated with the Lincoln Project, a group of current and former Republican political consultants and activists who ran ads against Trump during the campaign and promised a similar media fusillade against the firms.

The torrent of criticism appeared to have an effect, as two firms working on the Trump cases — Arizona-based Snell and Wilmer and Ohio-based Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur — withdrew, leaving the work to small firms and solo practitioners. The Trump campaign turned on its lawyers as they exited last week, saying in a statement that the attorneys had “buckled” to “leftist mobs.”

Trump opponents have also put pressure on a prominent law firm with extensive ties to the Trump administration, Jones Day. But that firm has said it isn’t involved in any suits initiated after the election, although it does represent the Pennsylvania Republican Party in litigation related to an extension of ballot-receipt deadlines in that state.

Kerns said in her filing submitted just before midnight Sunday that the call from the Kirkland associate was just one part of a stream of harassment and invective Trump attorneys have faced in recent weeks.

“Since this case was filed, undersigned counsel has been subjected to continuous harassment in the form of abusive e-mails, phone calls, physical and economic threats, and even accusations of treason — all for representing the President of the United States’ campaign in this litigation,” she wrote.

Kerns, who did not immediately respond to messages from POLITICO seeking more details, said some of the communications may have violated state or federal law.

However, she told U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann that the message from the Kirkland lawyer was troubling as a breach of professional norms.

Kerns said the voicemail message violated court and state bar rules, but added: “If there needs to be a rule saying that Kirkland & Ellis associates should not call opposing counsel and leave an abusive voicemail then all hope is lost.”

-- Trump lawyer complains of harassing call from attorney at opposing firm. The Trump campaign lawyer said she received the one-minute-long voicemail from an associate based in Kirkland & Ellis' D.C. office. By JOSH GERSTEIN, 11/16/2020 09:52 AM EST, Updated: 11/16/2020 10:06 AM EST

An affidavit filed by President Trump’s legal team intended to prove voter fraud in Michigan apparently used data taken from counties in Minnesota, the latest in a series of embarrassing missteps that have made Mr. Trump’s uphill legal fight even steeper.

As part of the Trump campaign’s effort to discredit the results in battleground states, the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell have made a series of unsubstantiated and outlandish claims that Dominion Voting Systems, which sells voting software to states, electronically erased millions of Trump votes at the secret behest of liberal operatives.

To bolster that claim, they have pointed to areas that had abnormally high turnout rates compared to prior elections, most recently as part of a case filed in Georgia intended to show a nationwide pattern of fraud.

On Wednesday, L. Lin Wood, an Atlanta lawyer working with the team, filed an analysis from Russell Ramsland, a failed Republican congressional candidate and self-proclaimed election fraud expert, purporting to show suspiciously high turnout in blue areas of Michigan.

When the editors of Powerline, a conservative legal website whose contributors hail from Minnesota and other parts of the Upper Midwest, reviewed the nine-page document, they discovered a major problem: Many municipalities cited in the Michigan document — Monticello, Albertville, Lake Lillian, Houston, Brownsville, Runeberg, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee, Kandiyohi — are located in an entirely different “M” state, Minnesota.

“This is a catastrophic error, the kind of thing that causes a legal position to crash and burn,” wrote John H. Hinderaker, a veteran litigator who believes any incidences of fraud are not on the scale Mr. Trump’s team is claiming.

Mr. Hinderaker surmised the error was the result of mixing up the abbreviations for the two states, “MI” for “MN.”

On Thursday, a federal judge in Georgia rejected Mr. Wood’s attempt to halt certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in the state. On Thursday, Mr. Giuliani said Mr. Trump’s team planned to plow on with its legal challenges in Georgia, even as it withdrew from cases in Michigan and Arizona.

Mr. Wood, Mr. Ramsland and Ms. Powell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

-- Minnesota or Michigan? Trump lawyers mix up ‘M’ states in an affidavit intended to prove vote fraud, by Joshua Rashaad McFadden for the New York Times, 1/20/20

An affidavit President Donald Trump’s legal team has hailed as proving fraud in the 2020 presidential election has a problem—the fraud it claims to show in Michigan used precinct listings that were actually in the state of Minnesota, in the latest legal gaffe involving the continually failing effort by Trump and his allies to show rampant voter fraud in the presidential election.

KEY FACTS

• The affidavit claimed to use data from the Michigan Secretary of State to show “a statistical anomaly so far outside of every statistical norm as to be virtually impossible.”
• Directly below that claim came statistics showing that the Benville Township precinct had a 350% turnout compared with the number of registered voters.
• But Benville Township is not in Michigan—it is in Minnesota, and only has an estimated population of 82 people, meaning that if even a handful of voters registered on Election Day itself, which is allowed in Minnesota, that could easily result in a much higher turnout than what was previously on the voter rolls.
• The affidavit goes on to list several other tiny townships in Minnesota, some even smaller than Benville.
• Trump’s legal team, particularly Sidney Powell, had promoted the affidavit as showing major evidence of voter fraud.
• Details of the document were first widely reported Friday by the pro-Trump Powerline Blog, which called the mix-up a “catastrophic error.”

KEY BACKGROUND

The affidavit was filed as part of a lawsuit that was neither in Minnesota nor Michigan, but in federal court in Georgia. That suit, brought by pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood, sought to discredit the state’s election results by claiming there were problems with the voting system. Like Michigan, Georgia uses the private company Dominion Voting Systems to tabulate election results—a system Trump and his supporters have continued to baselessly claim led to widespread fraud. The affidavit was filed Tuesday, and a judge threw out the case on Thursday, saying that the challenge came too late and “does not have merit.” Georgia also completed a hand recount and audit of its votes on Thursday, confirming President-elect Joe Biden won the state.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

Efforts challenging election results have been plagued by what seem to be sloppy errors. Wood’s lawsuit, for example, mentioned voting problems in Mercer County, Georgia, which does not exist. Another suit challenging vote counts in Wayne County, Michigan, was filed in a court that had no jurisdiction over the matter. Meanwhile, Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has continued to go off on rants in front of the press, making unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, and seeming to forget basic legal concepts during a Pennsylvania hearing.

-- Trump Ally Confuses Michigan And Minnesota In Affidavit Claiming Voter Fraud, by Nicholas Reimann, Forbes Staff, 11/20/20

WASHINGTON – An affidavit from President Donald Trump’s legal team that claimed to prove widespread voter fraud confused two "M" states: Michigan and Minnesota.

The affidavit was as part of a larger lawsuit actually filed in Georgia by pro-Trump and conservative attorney L. Lin Wood that sought to discredit that state's election results by pointing to alleged discrepancies and problems with Dominion Voting Systems.

Trump, his legal team, and his supporters have continued to tout unsubstantiated claims that Dominion Voting Systems has led to widespread fraud in several states.

To point out the supposed problems with Dominion Voting Systems in Georgia, the affidavit, filed as analysis from Texas resident and cybersecurity expert Russell Ramsland, was intended to show supposed errors in Michigan, as both states use Dominion Voting Systems to tabulate election results.

However, the Ramsland affidavit appeared to confuse townships in Minnesota for Michigan.

Ramsland highlighted a number of "statistical anomalies and red flags" he claimed proved "that election results have been manipulated within the Dominion/Premier system in Michigan."

He specifically highlighted several precincts in Michigan where the number of votes cast appeared to exceed the number of registered voters in the county.

Many of the municipalities cited in the Michigan (MI) document, such as Albertville, Houston, Monticello, Runeberg, Lake Lillian, Brownsville, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee, and Kandiyohi, are located in Minnesota (MN).

The affidavit was filed Tuesday. A federal judge dismissed Wood's lawsuit on Thursday, which sought to halt the certification of Georgia's election, saying it came too late and lacked merit.

Georgia completed a hand recount and audit of votes on Thursday, confirming President-elect Joe Biden won the state.

The "risk-limiting audit" found Biden won Georgia by 12,284 votes, a narrower margin than the 14,196-vote lead he held immediately following the election. Local election administrators identified uncounted ballots in four counties. Each was the result of human error.

On Friday, saying "numbers don't lie," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger certified those election results.

Trump’s legal team had promoted the affidavit as proof of widespread evidence of voter fraud.

Ramsland had claimed in the affidavit that "excess ballots" were allegedly processed, but it is unclear where the data listed came from.

According to actual data from the Minnesota Secretary of State, there were 4,202 registered voters in Monticello P-2, but only 3,776 votes were cast in the presidential election.

USA TODAY has reached out to Wood for comment.

This Georgia lawsuit that mixed-up Michigan and Minnesota is just one of several filed by Trump's legal team that have been dismissed.

-- Trump lawsuit confuses Michigan and Minnesota locations in affidavit claiming voter fraud, by Savannah Behrmann, USA TODAY, 11/20/20

Steve Skrovan: Yeah, before we get to the body of that show, we're going to start off today with some commentary about the news about Pfizer and Moderna, how their highly successful COVID19 vaccine tests came in. And this seems like very positive news. But let's pause for a moment and take a closer look. What do you think, Ralph?

Ralph Nader: Well, it was a press release by the two drug companies puffing up their vaccine without releasing any data. And it pushed up Pfizer's stock a little bit and then it fell back. But the physicians at the Health Research Group [HRG] of Public Citizen criticized it on their website. You can go see it; it's pretty brief [at] citizen.org. And they criticized it, not only because there wasn't any data behind a puffing 95% assertion, but they didn't distinguish between moderate cases, serious cases, and how much actually it prevented hospitalization and fatalities. So, take that 95% with a grain of salt as just advertising puffing by two drug companies.

It's unfortunate that most of the media, Steve and David, just swallowed it whole and kept repeating it and repeating it, repeating it uncritically even though Public Citizen sent their statement out [to] everybody in the media and it didn't make much difference except it was pointed out in the Wall Street Journal and a couple other publications.

-- Ralph Nader Radio Hour EP 350 Transcript, Nov. 21, 2020

[Chelsea Handler] Back to women I despise: Congress Monster Lauren Boebert of Colorado won her primary last night. I believe Boebert is one of the biggest Maga morons ever elected to public office, and it's because of comments like this:

"The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our founding fathers intended it. And I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk. It's not in the Constitution, it was in a stinking letter. And it means nothing like what they say it does."

Okay, well let's think about that, you dumb bitch. Because I tend to be skeptical about getting Constitutional law advice from a human tramp stamp. They frequently tend to skip right to the Second Amendment. And if you bothered to read the First Amendment, the very first words are:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

So it seems pretty clear that the government wants nothing to do with religion.

Secondly, if you're so keen on what the founding fathers thought, one thing they definitely thought is that women should shut the fuck up in public. And not vote. And not be elected to Congress. Your buddy, Thomas Jefferson, wrote,

"Governments are instituted among men."

So unless you have a dick, the founding fathers don't care what you have to say. But Lauren, I don't think you do have a dick, do you? I know your husband does, because he allegedly showed it to some young ladies in a bowling alley, just like Jesus told him to. And let's all take a moment to remember that the founding fathers were a bunch of toothless dudes who took shidoobies [poop, shit, doodie, massive dump, poo; usually the result of eating Mexican food or dairy products] in their backyard, thought that their wives were property, and wanted to protect guns that fired marbles and took 11 minutes to reload. And since we're paraphrasing Jefferson's letters, he said:

"Nothing is so disgusting as a woman who isn't clean."

Google it. And while you're there, google "Lauren Boebert diarrhea," and you will learn that this dumbass owned a restaurant that served uncooked pork sliders at a rodeo which gave dozens of people diarrhea. That's how Lauren forces people to pray. They cry out, "Please God, stop me from making explosive diarrhea poo poo in this rodeo porta potty.