Michigan’s board of canvassers certified the state’s election results on Monday, throwing another roadblock in President Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to challenge the results of the 2020 election.
Republican member Norman D. Shinkle abstained in the board’s vote to certify the results. But his fellow Republican member Aaron Van Langevelde voted for certification, as did Democrats Jeannette Bradshaw and Julie Matuzak. With the 3-0 vote, the board certified the official results for President-elect Joe Biden on Monday afternoon, delivering him the state’s 16 electoral votes.
“As John Adams once said, ‘We are a government of laws, not men,’” said Van Langevelde before he cast his vote certifying the results. “This board needs to adhere to that principle here today and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”
Several other key swing states that delivered Biden his victory—including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona—are scheduled to certify their counts in the next few weeks, which will further narrow Trump’s path to challenge the election results. Certification works differently in each state, but with the same intention: to conduct an official review of results before sending a slate of electors who will then cast their votes in the Electoral College on Dec. 14.
Pennsylvania is expected to be one of next in line. Each county Board of Elections was required to send its certified results by Monday to Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, who will now certify the results herself. While Boockvar faces no firm deadline, “typically that happens fairly quickly,” says Suzanne Almeida, the elections advisor for the watchdog group Common Cause Pennsylvania.
In Nevada, the state Supreme Court is expected to meet on Tuesday to certify its results, after which the Governor declares the winner. In Arizona, county Board of Supervisors were required to complete their canvass by Monday and send results to Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who must certify the official count by Nov. 30. In Wisconsin, counties have already affirmed their results and sent them to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is required to certify the official count by Dec. 1. (The Trump campaign has requested a partial recount in Wisconsin, but experts don’t expect it to significantly impact Biden’s lead.) Georgia certified its results on Friday, one day after a federal judge rejected a lawsuit from a Trump ally attempting to delay certification.
Trump has repeatedly used the power of his office to claim, without evidence, that the election was stolen from him, and has pressured Republican officials to undermine Biden’s win, including by stalling certification processes. On Friday, the President hosted two senior Republicans in the Michigan state legislature to the White House, raising alarms that he would push them to embrace a far-fetched legal avenue allowing Republican state legislatures in states where Biden won the popular vote to nominate competing slates of Trump-pledged electors.
After the White House meeting, the Republicans—state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and state House Speaker Lee Chatfield—issued a join statement saying that they “have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan” and plan to “follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors.”
Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers, which is made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, met at 1 p.m. ET on Monday to certify the state’s results. Individual counties had already certified their results and sent them to the state Board. (Two Republican members of Wayne County’s Board of Canvassers had initially voted against certifying the results on Nov. 17, but reversed their position hours later.)
“There is no legal basis, whatsoever, for the Michigan Board of State Canvassers to do anything other [than] immediately certify the election results that have been transmitted to them by the county Boards of Canvassers across Michigan,” said Norm Eisen, outside counsel for the nonpartisan Voter Protection Program, before the meeting. The Board of State Canvassers has historically unanimously voted to certify election results, according to the Washington Post.
In Pennsylvania, results are certified by 67 county Board of Elections, which are made up of three members from each county commission: two from the majority party and one from the minority. The partisan split depends on the makeup of the county commission itself. (Philadelphia has three elected City Commissioners, but with a similar two-to-one partisan split.) Of the five largest counties in the state—Philadelphia, Allegheny, Montgomery, Bucks and Delaware—all have Board of Elections with Democratic majorities.
Local radio station WITF reported Monday that at least five Pennsylvania counties will not have certified results by today’s deadline, due to county-level delays, but those hold ups are expected to have a minor impact on the election process. The Secretary of State doesn’t have a firm certification deadline, “so we have plenty of time,” explains Almeida of Common Cause Pennsylvania. “This is just logistically complicated… and sometimes [it] stretches on past the deadline.” It’s not unprecedented to have a handful of counties missing the Nov. 23 deadline, she says, and none are large enough that their results would flip the outcome.
Almeida says it’s also currently unclear if counties involved in pending litigation can certify results, but only Allegheny and Philadelphia County are in that position. Those suits concern a handful of votes that wouldn’t impact Biden’s decisive margin of over 80,000, she adds.
Nearly all of the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to Pennsylvania’s election results have failed so far. On Saturday, a federal judge struck a decisive blow against the campaign’s efforts, dismissing a suit attempting to delay the state’s certification, which the campaign is appealing. In his decision, Judge Matthew Brann wrote the campaign had presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”
“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” Brann continued. “Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.” After the ruling, retiring Republican Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey called on Trump to accept the election results, saying he had “exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania.”
States are expected to finalize their slates of electors by Dec. 8, which is known as the “safe harbor” deadline. On Dec. 14, electors are then expected to meet and cast their ballots in the Electoral College, the results of which Congress will count on Jan. 6.
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