To date, the Trump campaign’s many, many legal attempts to challenge his undeniable electoral loss have been, shall we say, not so successful. Like … at all. (Whether they were ever designed to succeed is a different question altogether). Still, the president and his team continue to push at least a dozen dubious lawsuits intended — at least in theory — to disrupt, or even overturn, vote counts in multiple states whose election results he simply does not like.
Among those lawsuits is one particularly frivolous-seeming case in Michigan, where Trump campaign lawyers filed a traunch of sworn affidavits this week, in which dozens of Republican poll challengers allege a host of electoral shenanigans. However, a huge portion of the claims seem to be less “massive, coordinated voter fraud” and more “I have no idea what I’m doing, but everyone there was kind of mean to me, and also I’m afraid of Black people.”
As many have noted, while the whole of the affidavits doesn’t exactly prove any sort of misconduct, it does contain a few allegations of genuinely inappropriate and unacceptable behavior; one poll challenger was confronted simply for not speaking English as their first language, while another ethnically Chinese observer was accused of not being American. But even these instances, like the bulk of the complaints in the filing, are less focused on actual electoral misconduct than on treatment of the poll challengers themselves. Continue reading.