DETROIT – In an interview with Fox News Sunday morning Republican and Michigan House Speaker, Lee Chatfield, talked about the possibility of a “constitutional crisis” ahead of the Michigan Board of State Canvassers scheduled Monday meeting to certify election results.
“If there were to be a 2-2 split on the State Board of Canvassers, it would then go to the Michigan Supreme Court to determine what their response would be, what their order would be,” said Chatfield on Fox News. “If they didn’t have an order that it be certified, well now we have a constitutional crisis in the state of Michigan. It’s never occurred before.”
Both Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Chatfield were invited to the White House on Friday as part of Trump’s effort to overturn results in the election he lost.
Chatfield debunked circulating rumors that he was asked to intervene in the election process during Friday’s meeting.
“This outrage that the president was going to ask us to break the law and he was gonna ask us to interfere, and that just simply didn’t happen,” he said.
After the meeting both leaders issued a joint letternoting that the meeting with the president was on the state’s fight against COVID-19.
Chatfield also denied claims that the president is trying to disenfranchise voters.
Currently, Black voters are suing the Trump campaign over its effort to invalidate election results.
Chatfield stated that he has no intention on interfering in the Michigan Board of State Canvassers certification process.
“I’m certainly not going to interfere in that process and I have not had a conversation with the Board of State Canvassers,” he said.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and Michigan Republican Party Chairman Laura Cox penned a joint letter dated yesterday to the Michigan Board of State Canvassers asking to delay the certification of election results for two weeks.
The period would allow for a full audit and investigation into potential voter fraud. Since the presidential election Republican leaders have made allegations of voter fraud without substantial evidence.
“This board faces a stark choice: it can either ignore numerical anomalies and credible reports of procedural irregularities, leaving the distrust and sense of procedural disenfranchisement felt by many Michigan voters to fester for years; or it can adjourn for fourteen days to allow for a full audit and investigation into those anomalies and irregularities before certifying the results of the 2020 General Election, allowing all Michiganders to have confidence in the results,” read the letter.
According to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson an audit cannot be completed prior to the certification of results.
Michigan Democratic State Rep. Matt Koleszar responded to Chatfield’s comments on Fox News.
“Mr. Speaker continues to use vague language in his interviews and statements about safeguarding the election. The constitutional crisis has already begun sir. It began the day you and other leaders refused to stand behind our clerks and election process,” said Koleszar in the Tweet.
In a Tweet Shirkey addressed tomorrow’s meeting stating, “Whether the Board of Canvassers certifies our results tomorrow or decides to take the full time allowed by law to perform their duties, it’s inappropriate for anyone to exert pressure on them.”
As I’ve repeatedly said, our election process MUST be free of intimidation and threats. Whether the Board of Canvassers certifies our results tomorrow or decides to take the full time allowed by law to perform their duties, it’s inappropriate for anyone to exert pressure on them.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s confidant former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Sunday that the president should end his legal fights challenging the results of the election and concede to president-elect Joe Biden.
“Listen, I’ve been a supporter of the president, I voted for him twice but elections have consequences and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen,” Christie explained on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
“They allege fraud outside of the courtroom but when they go inside the courtroom they don’t plead fraud and they don’t argue fraud,” Christie said, adding “you have an obligation to present the evidence, the evidence has not been presented.”
Trump has alleged that the U.S. presidential election was riddled with “massive improprieties and fraud” and has therefore rejected the results. Other top administration officials, such as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have publicly insisted that the election is not over. The Trump campaign continues to question the integrity of the election through a series of legal actions across battleground states.
U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said in a statement that the judge’s ruling confirms “Joe Biden won the 2020 election and will become the 46th President of the United States.”
“I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country,” Toomey added.
The Trump campaign and its allies now have lost or withdrawn more than 30 lawsuits that were part of that effort.
Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell listed a slew of allegations of fraud during an interview on Newsmax TV on Saturday. Powell alleged that Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp may have been involved in kickbacks to public officials but gave no details.
“Sidney Powell accusing Governor Brian Kemp of a crime on television yet being on unwilling to go on TV and defend and lay out the evidence that she supposedly has” is “outrageous conduct,” Christie said.
The former governor and federal prosecutor slammed Trump’s legal team as a “national embarrassment.”
Plans call for 20 million Americans to be vaccinated in December and another 30 million each month with some semblance of normalcy returning to the country as soon as May, Operation Warp Speed chief science adviser Dr. Moncef Slaoui said Sunday.
Pfizer submitted an emergency use application for its vaccine to the Food and Drug Administration on Friday. The FDA takes up the application Dec. 10. Slaoui, who made the rounds of the morning news shows Sunday, told NBC’s Meet the Press that vaccines will be shipped to every state within 24 hours of FDA approval of that application.
“On the 11th or on the 12 of December hopefully the first people will be immunized across the United States, across all states,” Slaoui told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Health care workers and highly vulnerable people will be first up, but “it is each state that will decide … who they will vaccinate,” Slaoui said. Operation Warp Speed is the Trump administration’s public–private partnership to accelerate the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.
Moderna is also close to bringing its vaccine to the FDA, and several other candidates are progressing through the pipeline. It was not clear whether Slaoui’s estimate of 30 million per month meant only Pfizer’s vaccine, and the number would rise as more vaccine candidates become available. Slaoui said about 70% of the nation – about 230 million people – would need to be vaccinated for “herd immunity” to become effective.
📈 Today’s numbers: The U.S. has reported more than 12 million cases and more than 256,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The global totals: 58 million cases and almost 1.4 million deaths.
This file will be updated throughout the day. For updates in your inbox, subscribe to The Daily Briefing newsletter.
Georgia Sen. Loeffler tests negative but will continue quarantine
Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Georgia, who was quarantining after receiving mixed results from recent coronavirus tests, tested negative on Sunday, her staff said. Loeffler took two rapid COVID tests on Friday morning that came back negative, her campaign said in a statement Saturday night. She received another test Friday evening and the results came back positive. Loeffler tested again Saturday morning and the results were inconclusive. Sunday’s test came back negative, Loeffler’s campaign said.
Loeffler, facing a Jan. 6 runoff for her seat, had campaigned maskless with Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. David Perdue in recent days.
“Out of an abundance of caution, she will continue to self-isolate and be retested again to hopefully receive consecutive negative test results,” Loeffler campaign spokesperson Stephen Lawson said in a statement. “She will continue to confer with medical experts.”
Hundreds protest, defy California curfew
Hundreds of protesters defied California’s new curfew Saturday night, gathering in Huntington Beach as the mandate to stay home from 10 p.m.-5 a.m. went into effect. The demonstrators, some waving large American flags, crossed the Pacific Coast Highway on foot amid blaring car horns in the Orange County city, about 35 miles south of Los Angeles. Huntington Beach police Lt. Ryan Reilly told the NBC Los Angeles TV station the crowd of about 400 protesters was mostly law abiding, and “some, not all’’ wore masks. Reilly said police did not intend to issue citations for curfew violations.
“We are seeking compliance and trying to educate people,” he said.
– Jorge L. Ortiz
CDC: Avoid cruise ships because risk of infection is ‘very high’
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is advising that “all people” should avoid travel on cruise ships worldwide because “the risk of COVID-19 on cruise ships is very high.” Passengers are at increased risk of person-to-person spread of infectious diseases, including COVID-19, the CDC said on its website. For passengers in high risk groups because of age or medical conditions the warning is “especially” applicable, the CDC said.
“Passengers who decide to go on a cruise should get tested 3-5 days after your trip AND stay home for 7 days after travel,” the CDC said. “Even if you test negative, stay home for the full 7 days.”
– Morgan Hines
Thanksgiving travel surges despite public health warnings
The number of travelers passing through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints has been rising in recent days despite warnings from public health experts that Thanksgiving travel could further spike already-spiraling COVID-19 numbers.
More than 2.9 million flyers passed through TSA security over the three-day period that ended Saturday, including over 1 million on Friday. That marked only the second time the number surpassed 1 million since the start of the pandemic.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told USA TODAY’s Editorial Board last week that “you’ve got to decide, during this interesting period of a lot of infection going on, colder weather, indoors: Do you want to travel and go to a Thanksgiving meal where there may be 12, 15, 20 people?”
The U.S. reported its 12 millionth case of COVID-19 on Saturday, days after the nation surpassed 250,000 deaths from the coronavirus.
Some students feel shortchanged when opting for online learning
Providing an equal education to kids learning in person and to those learning at home is undoubtedly difficult, if not impossible. School officials say they just don’t have the means to do both well without more funding and more teachers. Some families choosing remote learning worry their kids have been neglected as schools respond to politicians and parents clamoring for a return to normal.
Bonnie Owen, a former teacher and stay-at-home mom in Williamson County, Tennessee, has asthma and her daughter has two autoimmune conditions. The local school district welcomed students back to full-time, in-person classrooms this fall, but Owen worried the risk of exposing her family. Now she is dismayed at the online option.
“The online students are basically an after-school activity,” said Owen, who added that teachers were “overworked, overloaded and overwhelmed.” Read more here.
– Bracey Harris and Caroline Preston, The Hechinger Report
Trump adviser dismisses claims that vaccine was delayed for politics
A top COVID-19 adviser to the Trump administration on Sunday dismissed claims by President Donald Trump that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer delayed reporting the successes of its vaccine candidates to hurt his re-election chances.
“I don’t think any specific action has taken place to delay the vaccine,” Operation Warp Speed chief science adviser Dr. Moncef Slaoui said on ABC’s “This Week.” Pfizer submitted an emergency use application for its vaccine to the Food and Drug Administration on Friday. The FDA is scheduled to discuss potential authorization Dec. 10.
Slaoui said he believes that Pfizer asking for 60 days to follow up after completion of immunizations on thousands of volunteers “to ensure that we understand the short term and the predictable long term safety of the vaccine” was an appropriate decision that drove the Pfizer timeline. Pfizer submitted an emergency use application for its vaccine to the Food and Drug Administration on Friday. The FDA is scheduled to discuss potential authorization Dec. 10.
“As cases continue to increase rapidly across the United States, the safest way to celebrate Thanksgiving is to celebrate at home with the people you live with,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counsels. About one-third of Americans live in single-person households, according to Census data. Families now must negotiate over social distancing ground rules, how to share meals and whether the whole thing should be called off.
In Chicago, Taylor Edwards is unsure whether she’ll be eating alone on Thursday. Edwards, 28, has mostly kept away from her parents because of COVID concerns.
“This time next year we could be in a much better place, and I want all my family members to be there,” Edwards said.
– Alan Gomez
Experimental drug cocktail given to Trump gets FDA approval
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted Regeneron Pharmaceutical an Emergency Use Authorization for a drug cocktail to treat COVID-19. President Donald Trump has touted the experimental antibody treatment and took it while he was being treated for the disease.
“In a clinical trial, the investigational therapy was shown to reduce COVID-19-related hospitalization or ER visits in certain patients who are at high risk for progressing to severe,” the FDA tweeted Saturday.
The drug, a pair of monoclonal antibodies, is intended to mimic the natural process of the immune system, providing it with molecules the body normally manufactures to fight off specific diseases. Trump was able to get it under a “compassionate use” exemption, which the company said at the time it has granted to fewer than 10 people, after requests from their doctors and approval by the FDA. A similar monoclonal antibody treatment was also given emergency authorization earlier this month.
– Joel Shannon, Karen Weintraub and Elizabeth Weise
Kansas counties that opted out of mask order saw COVID-19 cases rise
We already know that wearing face masks in public spaces slows the spread of COVID-19. And now the coronavirus situation in Kansas is providing further proof. Gov. Laura Kelly issued a face mask mandate in early July, and the counties that upheld the order saw a decline in cases, while the counties that opted out saw cases rise, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Countywide mask mandates appear to have contributed to the mitigation of COVID-19 transmission in mandated counties,” according to the report, which analyzed county-level data one month before, and after, the governor’s mandate went into effect.
As of mid-August, 24 of Kansas’s 105 counties had abided by the state mandate or adopted their own mask mandate, and 81 counties had opted out, as Kansas law allows. At that time, the number of new daily cases per capita – calculated as a seven-day rolling average – had decreased an average of 6% among counties with a mask mandate and increased by 100% in counties without a mandate. Read more.
Relatives returning home bring higher risk for Thanksgiving gatherings
At a time when Americans are pondering how to celebrate Thanksgiving safely amid the country’s worst surge in coronavirus cases, many families will be faced with yet another complicating factor: the return of students. Colleges and universities have reported 252,000-plus cases since the pandemic began, according to a New York Times tracker. Returning students – whether they lived in dorms or off-campus housing in the fall term – “exponentially increase the risk (of infection),” especially if they take some form of mass transportation to get home.
That’s the assessment of Dr. Teresa Bartlett, senior medical officer for the claims management firm Sedgwick, who advises companies about medical strategies and safety practices. Like other specialists in the field, Bartlett is concerned that holiday gatherings, combined with pandemic fatigue and the need to move indoors as the weather gets colder, will exacerbate what’s already a major national spike in COVID-19 cases. Read more.
Texas National Guard to provide aid to El Paso morgues
“After completing an assessment of the situation on the ground in El Paso County this week, the state has mobilized a team of 36 Texas National Guard personnel to provide mortuary affairs support beginning at 9 o’clock tomorrow (Saturday) morning,” Seth Christensen, spokesperson for the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said.
After the announcement, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego requested additional aid from Gov. Greg Abbott in the form of leeway to impose some restrictions to curb the spread of COVID-19. Samaniego said in a letter to the governor’s office that his previous order that was ended by an appellate court was done so erroneously and the order was not inconsistent with Abbott’s statewide restrictions.
Tips for coping: Every Saturday and Tuesday we’ll be in your inbox, offering you a virtual hug and a little bit of solace in these difficult times. Sign up for Staying Apart, Together.
On Facebook: A lot is still unknown about the coronavirus. But what we do know, we’re sharing with you. Join our Facebook group, Coronavirus Watch, to receive daily updates in your feed and chat with others in the community about COVID-19.
“At the end of the day, this is the president’s party and this will continue to be the president’s party,” said State Senator Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. “He will have an oversized role no matter what happens.”
Mr. Barnett, of Arkansas, said he had relayed his concerns to Ms. McDaniel about the committee not seeming to favor any one potential 2024 contender and had the impression that “she probably agrees with me.”
Ms. McDaniel was more clear about her commitment to independence with four other Republicans, some committee members and some not, according to each of the Republicans, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.
She assured them that she, and not Mr. Trump and his family, would control the party’s finances and that she would resist any pressure the Trumps put on her to mobilize the party against incumbent Republicans who are not pro-Trump. Most strikingly, she told one party leader that if the committee does not rally to her, she will be succeeded by somebody even closer to the president, such as Donald Trump Jr. or his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
“If you have a suburban woman problem, Don is not your answer — nor is Kimberly,” said Ms. Comstock, the former Virginia congresswoman.
Aides to the president’s son and Ms. Guilfoyle have said they are not interested in the job. Some senior Republicans said another Trump ally, David Bossie, is being mentioned as a co-chair.
This “alternative-would-be-worse” theory, along with a deeper apathy about the national party, has prompted a number of Republican lawmakers and strategists to make peace with Ms. McDaniel’s serving another term. Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and Representative Leader Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, have both endorsed her re-election in recent days.
MOSCOW (AP) — President Vladimir Putin says Russia is willing to work with whomever is officially declared the next president of the United States, but that he won’t offer congratulations until the winner is formally decided or a candidate concedes.
Putin’s remarks broadcast Sunday on state television reiterate earlier Kremlin comments on why Putin had not congratulated Joe Biden after major news organizations called him president-elect, as did many other world leaders.
“We are just waiting for the end of the internal political confrontation,” Putin said, referring to Republican challenges to the vote count.
”We will work with any person who will be given the trust of the American people. But who will be given this trust? It must either be indicated by political custom when one of the parties recognizes the victory of the other, or the final results of the elections are summed up in a legitimate, legal way,” he said.
CNN’s Chuck Johnston, Christina Maxouris, Hollie Silverman, Claudia Dominguez, Jamie Gumbrecht, Jacqueline Howard and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed to this report.
President-elect Joe Biden will announce cabinet appointments this Tuesday, incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain confirmed on Sunday.
“You’re going to see the first cabinet picks this Tuesday,” Klain said in an interview with ABC News. “But if you want to know what cabinet agencies they are, who’s going to be in those Cabinet agencies, you’ll have to wait for the president-elect to say that himself on Tuesday.”
Biden also said last week that he’s decided whom he will nominate for Treasury Secretary and will make the announcement around Thanksgiving.
Biden’s move to announce cabinet picks and push forward with the presidential transitions comes as President Donald Trump still refuses to concede to the Nov. 3 election.
Klain said Trump’s claims of voter fraud and litigation over the race are “corrosive” and “harmful,” but emphasized that his actions won’t change the outcome of the election.
Biden’s team still does not have access to government resources typically provided to help with the presidential transition, including intelligence briefings and a distribution plan for a coronavirus vaccine, Klain added.
On Friday, in certifying the state’s electors, Kemp also brought up concerns about signatures. But Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has reiterated confidence in the results, and in a Saturday opinion piece in the Washington Post he said: “Georgia’s voting system has never been more secure or trustworthy.”
The president has repeatedly gone after Kemp, imploring him to intervene to stop what Trump has baselessly claimed are irregularities in the state’s vote count. Trump complained on Twitter that “the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless,” adding: “Where is @BrianKempGA?”
He also retweeted polling showing Kemp’s approval rating taking a hit. “Wow! Governor Kemp will hopefully see the light before it is too late. Must finally take charge!” he wrote.
Then he tagged Kemp in a tweet in which he demanded that Republicans “get tough.”
Trump allies have joined the pile-on. Fox News host Sean Hannity said Kemp is “cowering in fear,” and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz accused the governor of failing to ensure the integrity of the election.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, meanwhile, devoted part of his podcast on Thursday to blasting Kemp.
Trump’s influence in Republican primaries could extend beyond Georgia and Ohio. He has already vowed to campaign against Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a sometimes Trump critic who said in June that she was “struggling” with the question of whether she supported Trump.
“Few people know where they’ll be in two years from now, but I do, in the Great State of Alaska (which I love) campaigning against Senator Lisa Murkowski,” Trump tweeted at the time.
He added: “Get any candidate ready, good or bad, I don’t care, I’m endorsing. If you have a pulse, I’m with you!”
Republicans view Kemp as more vulnerable to a primary challenge than DeWine, noting that the Georgian has seen an erosion in support among conservatives.
He came under fire over his decision to appoint Kelly Loeffler to Georgia’s Senate seat over a Trump favorite, Rep. Doug Collins. And after endorsing Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial contest, Trump has openly clashed with Kemp over his handling of the coronavirus. During an April news conference, the president said he was “not happy with Brian Kemp, I will tell you that.”
Trump allies have already begun to encourage Collins to challenge Kemp in 2022. When Hannity raised the idea during an interview on his radio show, Collins, who is leading Trump’s recount effort in Georgia, chuckled in response.
Kemp has seen his approval rating dip to 37 percent, according to a survey released last week. Republicans worry that a damaging primary could leave him hobbled in a potential general election rematch against former state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, whom he narrowly defeated in 2018.
Kemp on Friday certified the state’s 16 electoral votes for Biden, though he offered an olive branch to the president’s supporters, saying it was “unacceptable” that “thousands of uncounted ballots” were found in a post-election audit.
Trump, meanwhile, has long regarded DeWine as insufficiently loyal. During his 2018 race, the Ohio governor frequently skipped the president’s rallies in the state. It did not go unnoticed at the White House.
While DeWine has high approval ratings, he’s drawn opposition from Trump supporters over coronavirus restrictions he’s implemented. The 73-year-old governor was booed during a September appearance at a Trump rally.
Among the names being mentioned as a potential primary opponent is Max Miller, who’s played key roles in the Trump White House and on the reelection campaign. Miller, who’s from Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, and hails from a prominent Ohio political family, declined to comment.
Rep. Jim Jordan, another staunch Trump loyalist, has also been floated as a potential challenger to DeWine — though many Ohio Republicans think he wants to remain in Congress. Still, the congressman has drawn attention for his pointed criticism of the governor’s coronavirus response.
Former Ohio Rep. Jim Renacci, who aligned himself with Trump during an unsuccessful 2018 Senate bid, said he was open to challenging the incumbent governor. He criticized DeWine for calling Biden president-elect.
“I believe the least he should have done is allow the president to work through the legal process afforded to him under the law and assure all legal votes are counted,” Renacci wrote in a text message.
Trump has shown himself to be a powerful force in GOP primaries. His endorsements of Kemp and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2018 vaulted them to statewide office. The same year, he turned his fire on then-GOP Rep. Mark Sanford, sinking him in his primary contest.
And against the wishes of party leaders, Trump endorsed Kansas Republican Kris Kobach over a sitting Republican governor. Kobach defeated the appointed incumbent in the primary, then lost to Democrat Laura Kelly in the general election.
Trump’s deep base of conservative support virtually ensures that he’ll remain a force once he leaves office. And the fact that many of his backers are convinced the election was stolen from him could intensify their loyalty.
But party strategists worry that could spell trouble in upcoming elections.
“In the short term, President Trump’s attacks on these governors serves his interest in casting doubt on the election results. But if it invites serious primary challengers, it could hurt Republicans in the long run and drain valuable resources that would be used for a general election,” said Jon Thompson, a former top RGA official.
It isn’t the only way Trump could handcuff the GOP. The president’s flirtation with a 2024 comeback bid threatens to freeze out other would-be GOP candidates who’ve begun laying the groundwork for a national campaign.
All of which has heightened GOP fears that Trump’s post-White House political activities will make it impossible for the party to turn the page.
“I’d be thinking in terms of how do you help reelect Republican governors. Donald Trump doesn’t think that way. His worldview starts and stops with his own personal interests at the exact moment he’s typing out a tweet,” said Tucker Martin, who was a top aide to ex-Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.
It’s an open question how involved Trump will get in future Republican primaries. People close to the president say he’s keenly interested in down-ballot races and expect him to play a kingmaker role.
Former Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) was skeptical that Trump would target Kemp. But who knows, he said.
“The president,” Westmoreland said, “is pretty unpredictable.”
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A federal judge issued a scathing order Saturday dismissing the Trump campaign’s futile effort to block the certification of votes in Pennsylvania, shooting down claims of widespread irregularities with mail-in ballots.
The case was always a long shot to stop President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, but it was President Donald Trump’s best hope to affect the election results through the courts, mostly because of the number of electoral votes, 20, at stake in Pennsylvania. His personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, stepped into a courtroom for the first time in decades to argue the case this past week.
U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann wrote in his order that Trump had asked the court to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters.
“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 wrote, so much that the court would have no option but to stop the certification even though it would impact so many people. “That has not happened.”
Even if he’d won the Pennsylvania case, Trump would have needed to win other lawsuits in other states where he’d also asked to delay certification. The campaign peppered battlegrounds states with litigation in the days after the election alleging widespread election fraud without proof, but the majority of those cases have already been dismissed.
The president has taken his effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election beyond the courtroom in recent days, straight to local lawmakers. Some Trump allies have expressed hope that state lawmakers could intervene in selecting Republican electors.
With that in mind Trump invited Michigan legislators to the White House on Friday, hoping that an Oval Office meeting would persuade them to set aside the popular vote favoring Biden by more than 154,000. But the lawmakers issued a statement after the meeting that they would follow the law and “normal process” on electors. Trump was said to be considering extending a similar invitation to lawmakers from Pennsylvania.
Time is running out for Trump and his campaign, as states certify their results one after another showing that Biden won the requisite 270 Electoral College votes to take office.
Brann ruled that Pennsylvania officials can certify election results that currently show Biden winning the state by more than 80,000 votes. He said the Trump campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … 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,” the opinion said. “Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
Trump tweeted after the ruling that he couldn’t understand why Biden was forming a Cabinet when the president’s investigators had found “hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes,” a baseless claim for which Trump has supplied no evidence.
Giuliani and a Trump campaign lawyer said in a statement that they welcomed the dismissal because it would allow them to appeal up to the U.S. Supreme Court faster, where Trump has repeatedly said he feels he has sympathetic justices. But, the justices heard a case from the state before the election, over a three-day extension on mail-in ballots, and allowed the extension over the objections of the GOP.
Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican who had a hand in placing Brann on the bench during the Obama administration, said the ruling showed Trump had exhausted all possible legal avenues in the state and went on to congratulate Biden on his victory. He called Brann “a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist.”
Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and New York mayor, showed his rustiness during the hearing this week by tripping himself up over the meaning of “opacity,” mistaking the judge for a federal judge in a separate district and provoking an opposing lawyer.
Giuliani repeatedly contended in court that it was illegal for counties to help people vote. Opposing lawyer Mark Aronchick suggested Giuliani must not know the Pennsylvania election code.
The Trump-aligned attorneys had argued that the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law was violated when Pennsylvania counties took different approaches to notifying voters before the election about technical problems with their submitted mail-in ballots.
The judge dismissed the argument entirely.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and the seven Biden-majority counties that the campaign sued had argued throwing out the popular vote over isolated allegations of mail-in fraud was far too extreme, particularly after most of them have been tallied.
“There is no justification on any level for the radical disenfranchisement they seek,” Boockvar’s lawyers wrote in a brief filed Thursday.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, tweeted shortly after Brann’s ruling that “another one bites the dust.”
“These claims were meritless from the start and for an audience of one,” Shapiro said in a statement. “The will of the people will prevail. These baseless lawsuits need to end.”
Counties must certify their results to Boockvar by Monday, after which she will make her own certification. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will notify the winning candidate’s electors they should appear to vote in the Capitol on Dec. 14.
Health experts are desperately warning Americans not to fly, train or drive to see family and say that absent changes to Americans’ typical holiday season behavior, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner could lead to thousands more funerals by Christmas.
More than 250,000 Americans have died from the disease since March. Canada had kept the pandemic in check compared with its neighbor to the south, but the new surge has officials there sounding caution as well.
An urgent warning against travel came this week from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after more than a million new Covid cases were recorded over seven days. Some governors and state officials have been even more blunt: stay home.
“What’s at stake is basically the increased chance of one of your loved ones becoming sick and being hospitalized and dying,” said Dr. Henry Walke, the CDC’s Covid-19 incident manager. “And around these holidays, we tend to get people together from multiple generations.”
AAA forecasts Thanksgiving travel to drop at least 10 percent from 2019 — the biggest one-year decline since the 2008 recession — but notes that CDC and state guidance will likely convince even more prospective travelers to stay home. Still, the high end of that forecast is 50 million Americans hopping in cars or onto planes to sit down to tables with all the trimmings.
So while some Americans are planning for Zoomsgiving, Canadians are dealing with a post-Thanksgiving surge. And now, talk about Christmas is dire.
New public health modeling projects that Canada could see up to 60,000 new cases of Covid per day — more than a dozen times current levels — by the end of December if people increase their contacts and celebrate the holidays as normal. Even the status quo for Canadians would translate to more than 20,000 new cases daily, according to the projections, or about five times higher than today. The runaway numbers have been attributed in part to Thanksgiving gatherings.
Trudeau implored Canadians on Friday to stay home and avoid traveling if they can. “In the coming weeks, we need to flatten this curve,” he said.
The comments were a significant change in tone for the prime minister who suggested to Canadians throughout the fall that they had “a shot at Christmas,” provided they hunker down. “We all want to try and have as normal a Christmas as possible even though a normal Christmas is, quite frankly, right out of the question,” Trudeau said Friday.
Provincial premiers have been reluctant to reimpose the stark measures from the spring on their residents for fear of further damaging economies. Still, some have flirted with greater restrictions as cases continue to mount — Ontario just announced new lockdowns in hot spots, and Quebec has a plan to allow gatherings of up to 10 people for four days around Christmas while imploring residents to self-quarantine for a week before and after the events.
Throughout the U.S., governors are increasingly instituting limits on public and private gatherings and testing and quarantine requirements for those who choose to travel out of state.
A bipartisan group of Midwestern governors urged their residents on Tuesday to adhere to public health guidelines when celebrating this week. New Jersey tightened its limit for indoor gatherings to 10 people, akin to New York’s requirements for indoor and outdoor get-togethers. California, the nation’s most populous state, is now imposing a 10 p.m. curfew.
Several states, including Alaska, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont, have instituted quarantine or testing requirements for out-of-state visitors. But the thresholds are hardly uniform, and the requirements themselves are difficult to enforce.
In both countries, the holidays coincide with growing Covid fatigue and colder weather that is moving social gatherings indoors, factors that are surely fueling case spikes. Add to that conflicting messages from government officials about how to approach the holiday season and Canada and the U.S. each have recipes for potential disaster.
The Trump administration’s top health officials implored Americans on Wednesday to adhere to CDC guidelines and to state and local directives. Thesame day, the White House press secretary described state-level travel warnings as “Orwellian” — even though the president has delegated the pandemic response to lower levels of government. Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro on Friday called Democratic governors’ lockdowns “a regressive tax on the poor.”
Even Trudeau’s rhetoric on the holidays and the government’s response to the virus has shifted over time.
Most of Canada shut down in the spring as government and health officials scrambled to learn more about the virus. Now in the country’s second wave, Trudeau has let provinces, which are responsible for providing health care in Canada, take the lead in deciding what restrictions are necessary in their jurisdictions. He’s stopped well short of invoking a law that would give the federal government greater control in locking down the entire country, insisting it’s unnecessary, though he’s begun prodding certain provinces to do more to protect their citizens.
And now, the efforts by Trudeau and Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, to save Christmas are colored by the latest modeling.
Trudeau warned earlier this week that the holiday season “will be different this year” depending on certain factors — “what region of the country you’re in, what people are able to do between now and the holidays in order to flatten the curve, to reduce the number of cases.”
Tam suggested Canadians have “the talk” with family members about expectations they must meet in order to spend Christmas together, such as limiting contact with those outside their households for 14 days before a visit or wearing masks inside the whole time.
“We have every chance to bend the curve,” she said Friday.
With Americans eager to see friends and family,the travel industry this week had to walk a tightrope between promoting air travel as safe and acknowledging the health risks of holiday travel spelled out by the nation’s top doctors.
“The CDC advised that people should reconsider their travel plans. This further underscores the need to be really smart and highly vigilant on health and safety protocols if you’re going to choose to travel,” said Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association.
“I’d rather have a little less travel now to come back more quickly down the road.”
Scientific head of Operation Warp Speed joins ‘Bill Hemmer Reports’ to discuss Moderna’s vaccine
America might reach herd immunity from the coronavirus sometime around May, according to a timeline laid out by Operation Warp Speed‘s top science adviser.
Dr. Moncef Slaoui spoke with Jake Tapper during Sunday’s “State of the Union,” addressing the timeline for delivering vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer – each of which is pending approval.
An advisory panel is meeting Dec. 10 to determine whether or not to approve the vaccines. Should the panel grant approval, Slaoui said that the government will move fast to deliver the vaccines across the country.
Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House, Friday, Nov. 13, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
“Our plan is to be able to ship vaccines to the immunization sites within 24 hours from the approval, so I would expect maybe on day two after approval, on the 11th or 12th of December,” Slaoui said.
When asked how long it may take to reach herd immunity, which would potentially allow for a return to normalcy, Slaoui confirmed that Operation Warp Speed determined it could distribute up to 20 million immunizations a month starting in December.
“Normally, with the level of efficacy we have – 95% – then 70% or so of the population being immunized would allow true herd immunity to take place,” Slaoui said. “That is likely to happen somewhere in the month of May, something like that, based on our plans.”
Operation Warp Speed will take its cues from state health departments to determine where the vaccines should go and who will receive the immunizations first.
Slaoui said the Center for Disease Control and Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice would meet to issue guidance as to who states should prioritize for vaccinations, but the final decision would be up to each state.
“But clearly the highest-risk people, front-line workers, essential workers should be among the first,” Slaoui said.
The key, though, will be to shift public perceptions about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines. A recent Gallup poll found that only about 58% of people trust the vaccine enough to take it.
“I really hope and look forward to seeing the level of negative perception people have about the vaccine decrease and positive perception increase,” Slaoui said. “Most people need to be immunized before we can return to a normal life.”
In subsequent Sunday morning show appearance, Slaoui answered questions regarding the handoff between the Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration, with President-elect Joe Biden set to announce key cabinet appointments this coming week.
On ABC’s “This Week,” Slaoui confirmed that Operation Warp Speed has had no contact yet with anyone on the Biden transition team.
Talking with Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” Slaoui stressed that Operation Warp Speed has been separate from “the political environment,” and hopes that there is no disruption during the transition.
“My personal role, as you know, is that I have volunteered for this on a limited basis,” Slaoui said. “My personal agenda is that when we have two vaccines approved, and two medicines approved, and the rest of the portfolio we have in good hands, I’ll probably move back to my private life.”
“As you know, I’ve been highly supportive of the program, and if it means I’ll work with the new administration, I’ll be very happy to.”
LANSING — For what is believed would be the first time in history, Michigan’s elections board could deadlock Monday on certifying the state’s presidential election results.
By law and by practice, certification by the Board of State Canvassers — comprised of two Democratic appointees and two Republican ones — is supposed to be a routine sign-off. Certification acknowledges that Michigan’s unofficial results match the tabulated vote counts. It follows a two-week period of double-checking in Michigan’s 83 counties, where some inaccuracies in the unofficial numbers, as is normal, were found and corrected.
“This system was set up decades ago, during a time when American politics and Michigan politics were more bipartisan,” said David Kimball, a professor of political science at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. By having a bipartisan board carry out the pro forma function of election certification, “it would signal to everyone that both parties believe the results are fair,” he said.
“What could go wrong?”
The prospect of a deadlock — which is by no means assured at the state level but did occur for a few hours Tuesday at the similarly structured Wayne County Board of Canvassers — has experts questioning whether a four-member board, halved along partisan lines, is still workable in a world where Republicans and Democrats disagree not just on policy, but on facts. Some also ask whether Michigan’s system needs a built-in tiebreaker, as is found in other Midwest states such as Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Still others say it is time to take the politics out of election certification, just as Michigan attempted to do with the contentious issue of drawing political boundaries in 2018, when voters created an independent citizen redistricting commission.
“A better model would attempt to displace partisanship altogether rather than build it into the system,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin.
At the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, Republican board member Norman D. Shinkle said he has many concerns, ranging from election equipment used in Michigan to the absentee voting process, to transparency issues, and he is leaning toward seeking a delay in certification. Shinkle’s wife, Mary, was a Republican poll challenger at the TCF Center in Detroit and signed an affidavit used by the Trump campaign in a federal lawsuit that has since been withdrawn.
It would take Shinkle’s vote plus one other to delay certification. The other Republican member, Aaron Van Langevelde, has not said how he plans to vote. Van Langevelde, an attorney and former assistant prosecutor in Branch County, works for state House Republicans, whose leader, Speaker Lee Chatfield, R-Levering, flew to Washington, D.C., on Friday with a handful of other GOP lawmakers to meet at the White House with Trump.
Chatfield and state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake, said after the meeting with Trump they have not been “made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan,” and intend to follow the normal process.
But on Saturday, Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee and a Michigan resident, and Laura Cox, chair of the Michigan Republican Party, wrote the board asking it to delay certification for 14 days, pending an audit, citing “procedural and accounting irregularities” such as discrepancies between the number of people recorded as having cast ballots at various Detroit precincts and the actual number of ballots counted.
Election officials have said such poll book imbalances are not uncommon in precincts across Michigan and are not evidence of fraud. Instead, they typically are the result of human error, such as a reporting oversight when an absentee ballot envelope arrives and is later found not to have a ballot inside.
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson says postelection audits are planned, including a performance audit in Wayne County, but under Michigan law such audits can only be conducted after results are certified.
If the board does not vote Monday to certify Michigan’s election results, legal experts don’t expect it will pose a serious threat to appointing the state’s presidential electors.
If the board showed no signs of acting to certify, someone would almost certainly sue in the Michigan Court of Appeals, seeking an order requiring the board to do so. Such an order could then be appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court. Once court proceedings are concluded, preferably before the Dec. 8 “safe harbor” date by which Congress is required to accept Michigan’s electoral votes, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would certify the state’s 16 presidential electors ahead of the Dec. 14 convening of the Electoral College.
A costly battle
The delays and costs of a possible court battle point to a weakness in Michigan’s system — the lack of a nonlitigious mechanism to break a 2-2 deadlock, said John Fortier, director of governmental studies for the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
“Probably it is better to have a tiebreaker earlier in the system than go to court,” Fortier said.
But in the Midwest, most officials who serve as tiebreakers are not necessarily nonpartisan or neutral. That’s not ideal, either.
In Ohio, the secretary of state, who is an elected party official, breaks a tie and that decision is final.
In Wisconsin, the six-member commission is equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, but it is the statutory role of the commission chair — which rotates between the two parties — to certify election results.
In Minnesota, a deadlock is not possible, because the State Canvassing Board has five members. The elected secretary of state serves as board chair and fills out the board by appointing two members of the state Supreme Court and two judges from a district court.
At one time, Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers could not have a tie vote, either. One political party or the other used to have a majority on the board. Contentious recounts in the 1950s led to a constitutional amendment intended to prevent partisanship from interfering with the certification, according to attorney and former Michigan Democratic Party chair Mark Brewer.
Fortier said the idea of policing elections by having the two major political parties watch each other has been central to the U.S. system for more than a century. It goes beyond the certification process to include poll watchers and the fact that in some jurisdictions two keys — one held by a Republican and one by a Democrat — are required to open doors to some rooms where ballots are counted or stored.
It’s not common in administering elections in the rest of the world, but in the U.S., “not having some neutral body that we trust, we actually put the parties there to kind of watch each other,” he said.
“I do think it’s very baked into the system and it would be very hard to change.”
Partisan gridlock
In Michigan, althoughthe prospect of the Board of State Canvassers failing to certify a presidential vote is new, the board being paralyzed by 2-2 partisan deadlocks is not.
The board has repeatedly split along partisan lines about certifying ballot proposals before the Michigan Court of Appeals has had to step in. Board members’ concerns about the quality of the signatures collected for certain petitions have consistently aligned with their partisan views about the proposals themselves.
In 2004, Democratic board members would not vote to certify a proposal defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman, or to place Ralph Nader on the ballot as an independent presidential candidate, where he would be more likely to draw votes from the Democratic nominee than the Republican one.
In 2001, Republican members refused to certify a question that would put Michigan’s concealed weapons law at risk, and, in 2002, the GOP board members forced a deadlock over a proposal to let voters decide whether to spend most of the state’s tobacco settlement money on health care and antismoking programs.
There have also been board of canvassers fights over election results, though not a presidential race.
In 2013, the Michigan Court of Appeals and the Board of State Canvassers both got involved in a dispute over how the Wayne County Board of Canvassers counted write-in ballots when Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan sought the office he now holds for the first time.
During the primary election, in which Duggan entered the race late as a write-in candidate but ultimately placed first, the Wayne County Board of Canvassers initially refused to count more than 20,000 write-in votes for Duggan because of a technical rule violation. Election workers had tallied up and recorded the ballot counts using numerical symbols, instead of the hashtags that were supposed to be used for write-in votes.
And way back in 1963, the two Democratic members of the Board of State Canvassers walked out of a meeting held to certify statewide election results, temporarily delaying certification of Michigan’s new constitution, over objections to the way the vote was conducted. The major objection voiced by Democrats was that the proposal related to the new constitution should have been, but was not, presented to voters on a separate ballot from the one on which partisan candidates were listed, according to a report in the Lansing State Journal at the time.
But generally, Kimball said, partisan gridlock on such boards is mostly a new and growing phenomenon, also seen on similarly structured federal bodies, such as the Federal Election Commission.
“It really speaks to the politics that we’re currently in — it’s crazy,” Kimball said.
Asked to point to a better model, both Burden and Kimball pointed to one that no longer exists — in Wisconsin.
That state’s Government Accountability Board, created in 2008 after a legislative scandal involving lawmakers enlisting state employees to work on political campaigns, was composed of six retired judges and counted election certification among its duties.
Seen as a uniquely nonpartisan institution, the board was abolished in 2015 “by Republican lawmakers furious over its role in investigating former Gov. Scott Walker’s 2012 campaign after he was recalled,” the Wisconsin State Journal reported.
Burden said certification could be assigned to bodies similar to the redistricting commissions already in existence in California and now being developed in Michigan, which have a certain number of members from each party as well as members not affiliated with either party.
But Fortier said such bodies can also be controversial, as Republicans in particular are suspicious of purportedly nonpartisan bodies that they do not view as acting that way. “These neutral tiebreakers often take a lot of heat, too,” he said.
Checks and balances
Martha Kropf, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, said bipartisan boards can be a problem, but having both parties involved can also be a helpful check because each makes sure the other does not cheat.
She is not sure Michigan’s system, in which the courts essentially act as a tiebreaker, is any worse than other systems that are out there.
“Courts also exist as a check of our system,” she said.
Courts can act quickly when they want to, said Kropf, noting the speed with which the U.S. Supreme Court acted during the dispute over the Florida results in the 2000 presidential election.
At least one Midwest jurisdiction — Kentucky — moved recently from a set-up in which it had a built-in tiebreaker to resolve deadlocks to a set-up in which it does not, said Jared Dearing, executive director of that state’s Board of Elections.
Of the board’s 10 members, two are nonvoting, and the other eight are evenly split between the two parties, Dearing said. The elected secretary of state used to have a tiebreaking vote, but that changed about 18 months ago, he said.
According to ProPublica, the GOP-controlled Legislature removed Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat, of her authority over the State Board of Elections and took away her vote on the board after reports that her office used the state’s voter registration system to look up information on political rivals, in addition to other alleged abuses.
There have been no deadlocks since the tiebreaking vote was removed, and the need for a tiebreaker was infrequent before that, Dearing said.
“When someone is appointed to the Kentucky Board of Elections, it tends to round off their political edges,” he said. “They represent their party, but they also serve a higher purpose. They serve the state and they serve all voters.”
President Donald Trump’s tweets about voter fraud following a Friday meeting with two Michigan Republican leaders seem to contradict their joint statement.
They did so and, following the meeting, issued a statement later Friday that suggested a significant part of the meeting was focused on getting more federal funds targeted at Michigan for coronavirus aid.
They went on to say that “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election.”
But Trump, in two tweets Saturday, Nov. 21, re-posted the joint statement from Shirkey and Chatfield and added his own comments.
“This is true, but much different than reported by the media. We will show massive and unprecedented fraud!” he wrote in one tweet.
In the next, he said “Massive voter fraud will be shown!”
“Michigan’s certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and intimidation. Allegations of fraudulent behavior should be taken seriously, thoroughly investigated, and if proven, prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And the candidates who win the most votes win elections and Michigan’s electoral votes. These are simple truths that should provide confidence in our elections.”
For many, there was widespread speculation the state’s Republican leaders would discuss with the president intervening in the process of selecting electors. They have no role in that process under Michigan law.
Other than the description in the joint statement, the exact details of Friday’s discussion are not known.
President Donald Trump’s legal team said Saturday that his campaign has requested a recount of votes in the Georgia presidential race after results showed Democrat Joe Biden winning the state.
Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Friday certified the state’s election results, which had Biden beating Trump by 12,670 votes out of about 5 million cast, or 0.25%. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp then certified the state’s slate of 16 presidential electors.
The statement from Trump’s legal team said: “Today, the Trump campaign filed a petition for recount in Georgia. We are focused on ensuring that every aspect of Georgia State Law and the U.S. Constitution are followed so that every legal vote is counted. President Trump and his campaign continue to insist on an honest recount in Georgia, which has to include signature matching and other vital safeguards.”
On Friday, in certifying the results, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp also brought up concerns about signatures. But Raffensperger has reiterated confidence in the results, and in a Saturday opinion piece in the Washington Post he said: “Georgia’s voting system has never been more secure or trustworthy.”
And in fact, the signatures on absentee ballot applications and envelopes are required to be checked when they are received.
Georgia law allows a candidate to request a recount if the margin is less than 0.5%. The recount would be done using scanners that read and tabulate the votes. County election workers have already done a complete hand recount of all the votes cast in the presidential race. But that stemmed from a mandatory audit requirement and isn’t considered an official recount under the law.
State law requires that one race be audited by hand to ensure that the machines counted the ballots accurately, and Raffensperger selected the presidential race. Because of the tight margin in that race, a full hand count of ballots was necessary to complete the audit, he said.
Video: Georgia governor certifies electors for Biden
Trump has criticized the audit, calling it a “joke” in a tweet that claimed without evidence that “thousands of fraudulent votes have been found.” Twitter has flagged the post as containing disputed information.
Votes that hadn’t previously been counted were found in several counties during the audit, which required recertification of the election results in those counties before state certification of the results.
Another round of distressing case numbers has Los Angeles teetering on the brink of further restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus — including the likely shutdown of outdoor restaurant dining.
County data released Saturday evening revealed 4,522 new cases; the average daily count over the last four days is 4,442. If the average remains higher than 4,000 on Sunday — which seems all but certain — the outdoor dining restriction is set to be reinstated for the first time since May.
And Los Angeles public health officials have set another threshold if the five-day average reaches 4,500: It will trigger a new stay-at-home order that would generally allow only essential workers and people securing essential services to leave their homes.
Hospitalizations for COVID-19 also continued to climb Saturday, with 1,391 people admitted at facilities around the county, nearly double the average daily number in early October. About a quarter of those COVID-19 patients are in intensive care units.
Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer renewed her call for the county’s 10 million residents to remain home as much as possible, maintain social distancing and follow other safety protocols.
“We have to change the alarming increases in cases and hospitalizations,” Ferrer said in a statement, “and get back to slowing the spread to avoid overwhelming our hospitals and save lives.”
The county health chief also acknowledged the fatigue people are feeling, as restrictions on businesses and public gatherings stretch into a ninth month.
“Although this pandemic seems like it will never end, I assure you that it will,” she said, thanking the public for staying the course.
The latest COVID numbers confirmed another grim trend: Young people are driving the increased community transmission across the sprawling county, and older people are dying at much higher rates.
More than 72% of the new cases reported Saturday were in people under 50, while 91% of the deaths were those older than 50. Of the 34 county residents who died of COVID-19 on Saturday, 15 were over 80, according to the new report.
The rest of California mirrored the unhappy trajectory, with an unprecedented increase in new coronavirus cases. For the first time, the state saw three days over the last week with more than 13,000 new daily infections. Hospitalizations statewide also spiraled upward.
Los Angeles County reported nearly 5,000 new coronavirus cases Thursday, the highest single-day count so far. A look at what could be next.
The uptick prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to issue a modified stay-at-home order that prohibits most nonessential activity outside the home from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. in counties that are in the most restrictive, purple, tier of the state’s four-phase reopening plan.
Roughly 94% of the state’s population lives in purple counties, including all of Southern California. The governor’s order was slated to take effect Saturday at 10 p.m. and remain in place through Dec. 21.
A protest against the restrictions was set to take place Saturday at 10:01 p.m. at Huntington Beach Pier. The day before, Orange County reported 1,169 new coronavirus cases — its highest one-day total since the start of the pandemic.
On Saturday, Orange County reported 806 new cases and 11 related deaths, bringing its total to 69,142 cases and 1,551 deaths. Officials cautioned that lower case counts over the weekend could reflect maintenance of the state’s reporting system, not a true decline.
There were 365 confirmed coronavirus patients in Orange County hospitals on Friday. The three-day average number of hospitalized patients is up 54.1%, the county said.
Trump’s comment came after a string of legal defeats, including a rejection by a federal judge in Pennsylvania Saturday who said the Trump team presented no evidence of election fraud or misconduct, despite seeking to invalidate millions of votes. Trump’s lead lawyer in the case, Rudy Giuliani, said he intends to appeal the case to the Third Circuit and, if necessary, the Supreme Court.
But with few cases pending in courts, Trump’s options have narrowed and he is becoming increasingly reliant on longshot scenarios where election results are not certified and Republican-controlled statehouses in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia intervene to declare him the winner.
GOP legislative leaders in those states have not endorsed this approach. Trump summoned Michigan legislative leaders to the White House on Friday, but they later issued a statement indicating they had not seen any reason to intervene on Trump’s behalf.
To succeed, Trump’s plan would require several unprecedented legal steps. First, Republican-led legislatures in states Biden won would need to move to overturn their state’s popular vote and appoint a slate of Trump electors when the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14. In Pennsylvania and Michigan, such maneuvers would be certain to meet vetoes from Democratic governors, so the lawmakers would also need to secure a legal determination that they hold the sole power to appoint electors — a disputed legal premise that has never been tested.
Trump’s call for lawmakers to hand him the election is the most overt call he’s made yet for state lawmakers to overturn the election results. But it also underscores his dwindling options: Michigan is due to certify its vote totals on Monday, as are Pennsylvania counties, which would hand the statewide certification duty to Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat. On Friday, Georgia certified Biden’s victory.
As of Friday evening, Pennsylvania’s GOP leaders said they had not received an invitation to meet Trump at the White House, but last month, they said they would not step in to alter the election results.
GOP Congressman Mike Kelly is leading a new lawsuit filed Saturday morning in Pennsylvania asking a state court to determine that the entire vote-by-mail system violates the state’s constitution, and claims that certifying the election results—which shows President-elect Joe Biden won by more than 80,000 votes—should be prohibited.
The lawsuit is a challenge to Act 77, which was signed by Governor Tom Wolf last year and passed through a GOP-controlled legislature (the Associated Press reported that only two “no” votes were from Republican members). The legislation provided Pennsylvanians the option to vote by mail up to 50 days before an election without providing an excuse, as was previously required for voters using absentee ballots. It also eliminated straight-party ticket voting and moved voter registration dates closer to Election Day.
However, Kelly argued that the universal mail-in ballot provisions under Act 77 are “unconstitutional” and requested an injunction prohibiting the certification of the election results.
“Act 77 is the most expansive and fundamental change to the Pennsylvania voting code, implemented illegally, to date,” the court filing read.
“As with prior historical attempts to illegally expand mail-in voting by statute, which have been struck down going as far back as the Military Absentee Ballot Act of 1839, Act 77 is another illegal attempt to override the limitations on absentee voting prescribed in the Pennsylvania Constitution, without first following the necessary procedure to amend the constitution to allow for the expansion.”
The plaintiffs, which include Kelly and seven other Pennsylvania Republicans, argued that the attempt to override absentee voting limitations through the passing of Act 77 was illegitimate since it didn’t go through a full constitutional amendment process. Thus, according to the lawsuit, the millions of mail-in ballots cast for the election are “illegal” and shouldn’t be counted in the total.
“A proposed constitutional amendment must be approved by a majority vote of the members of both the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and Senate in two consecutive legislative sessions, then the proposed amendment must be published for three months ahead of the next general election in two newspapers in each county, and finally it must be submitted to the qualified electors as a ballot question in the next general election and approved by a majority of those voting on the amendment,” the filing read.
Kelly argued that the more than 2.5 million mail-in ballots cast are invalid and that the state legislature should choose the winner of Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes.
Dozens of people calling for stopping the vote count in Pennsylvania due to alleged fraud against President Donald Trump gather on the steps of the State Capital on November 5 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Spencer Platt/Getty
The lawsuit stated: “Should the Commonwealth fail to make a choice for presidential and vice-presidential electors at the General Elections, the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such manner as the Pennsylvania General Assembly may direct.”
“Plaintiffs respectfully request […] an order, declaration, and/or injunction that prohibits Defendants from certifying the results of the General Elections which include mail-in ballots which Defendants improperly permitted on a statewide basis; prohibits Defendants from certifying the results of the General Elections which include the tabulation of unauthorized votes, including mail-in ballots which did not meet the Constitutional requirements and, instead, compels Defendants to certify the results of the election based solely on the legal votes,” the filing said.
“[O]r alternatively,” the filing continued, “directs that the Pennsylvania General Assembly choose Pennsylvania’s electors.”
Kelly won his race for Pennsylvania’s 16th congressional district against Democratic challenger Kristy Gnibus during this recent election. The congressman is one of the state’s biggest boosters for President Donald Trump, who has not yet conceded the presidential election to Biden.
Sean Parnell, a Republican who is one of the plaintiffs on the lawsuit—and narrowly lost his congressional race against Democratic incumbent Conor Lamb by 10,000 votes in Pennsylvania’s 17th district—previously tweeted his support of the state’s mail-in voting process in April.
“Voting IS a cornerstone of our republic. That’s why we must protect the sanctity of the process,” Parnell wrote. “Moreover, PA already has a bipartisan system in place for early & mail in voting that can safeguard public health & protect the voting process. Use it!”
Newsweek reached out to Kelly’s office Saturday afternoon for additional comment about the lawsuit.
Despite a major surge in coronavirus cases, many Southern California policing agencies say they’re taking an education-first approach to the new curfew that takes effect for much of the state Saturday rather than aggressive enforcement.
The limited stay-at-home order, which officials hope will help stem an unprecedented surge in new coronavirus cases, will prohibit most nonessential activity outside the home from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. in counties in the strictest purple tier of the state’s four-phase color-coded reopening plan. Roughly 94% of Californians live in these counties, including Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego.
L.A. County also has a separate business curfew that requires restaurants and nonessential stores to close their doors to the public at 10 p.m., although takeout and delivery services can continue after that time.
Restaurants and nonessential stores must close at 10 p.m. and outdoor gatherings are capped at 15 people, as COVID-19 spreads at a rapid rate.
The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department is hoping people will comply with the new rules voluntarily and will turn to criminal enforcement measures only as “an extreme last resort,” a policy it has observed since the first stay-at-home orders were issued in March, Sheriff Alex Villanueva said Thursday in a statement.
“We trust in the community and rely on people to assess risk and take precautions as appropriate,” he said.
“If we get a complaint, we will obviously investigate, we’ll respond to the location, we’ll contact the owner and ask them to comply and then, if they don’t, we have the option then of doing a citation,” Villanueva said. “We can also prepare a criminal report for violating a health order, and we’ll turn it over to the Department of Public Health and let them decide what to do with it.”
Similarly, Los Angeles Police Department officers will help check whether businesses are complying with public health rules, including the curfew, the department said.
The city attorney’s and mayor’s offices will work to identify businesses that aren’t following regulations, and disaster service workers will observe the establishments during business hours and open complaints if necessary, Capt. Stacy Spell, an LAPD spokesman, said in a statement.
“During off-hours, that list of locations will be provided to the department, and a call for service will be generated by [the] communications division directing a patrol unit and a supervisor to respond and determine if there is compliance,” Spell said. “If the business is found to be noncompliant, a complaint application will be created.”
As of Friday morning, LAPD was still awaiting directions from command staff on exactly how to enforce the broader curfew. Spell said the department would provide guidance to officers before the curfew takes effect.
“However, it is our shared responsibility to slow the spread of COVID, and we encourage all Angelenos to follow public health guidelines, which include wearing masks in public, social distancing, washing hands and adhering to commercial business guidelines,” he said.
Los Angeles County reported nearly 5,000 new coronavirus cases Thursday, the highest single-day count so far. A look at what could be next.
Law enforcement agencies in neighboring counties also emphasized that message of personal culpability. Some went a step further and said they wouldn’t respond to calls for service alleging people aren’t complying with public health rules, including the new curfew.
“Let me be clear — this is a matter of personal responsibility and not a matter of law enforcement,” Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes said in a statement. “Orange County sheriff’s deputies will not be dispatched to, or respond to, calls for service to enforce compliance with face coverings, social gatherings or stay-at-home orders only.”
Deputies will still respond to calls alleging criminal behavior or threats to life or property, he said.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said it would continue to refer people who report violations of public health orders to the county’s joint information center so complaints can be triaged and assigned to the appropriate department.
“It is not our intent to utilize patrol personnel to respond to these allegations,” the department said in a statement. “We trust that members of the communities we serve will act responsibly and demonstrate good judgment to do their part to slow the spread of the virus.”
“To ensure constitutional rights are not violated and to limit potential negative interactions and exposure to our deputies, we will not be responding to calls for service based solely on noncompliance with the new order or social distancing and mask guidelines,” Bianco said in a statement.
“When we can’t mitigate the situation that we’re dealing with, that’s when the deputy sheriffs are there to take enforcement action, either through citations or writing case reports to go to the district attorney or in the city of San Diego, the city attorney there,” Gore said Thursday.
The sheriff said his department has already obtained cooperation with police departments in cities that do not contract with the county for law enforcement services. Oceanside, Carlsbad, San Diego, Chula Vista and Coronado have, he said, signaled their willingness to cooperate with the county enforcing health rules within their jurisdictions.
San Diego Union-Tribune staff writer Paul Sisson contributed to this report.
This is a widget area - If you go to "Appearance" in your WP-Admin you can change the content of this box in "Widgets", or you can remove this box completely under "Theme Options"
