Michigan group sues Trump campaign for alleged mass voter suppression

BY SARAH POLUS - 11/21/20

Three Black Michigan voters and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization filed a lawsuit Friday against President Trump and his campaign claiming the president and his team have disenfranchised Black voters with their attempts to challenge the outcome of the presidential election.

After engaging in a slew of legal challenges over election results in various battleground states, the campaign is now pressing state and local authorities not to certify the results of their elections, therefore “compromising the integrity of the election process” and “unlawfully interfering with will of the voters,” the case document, obtained by Politico, alleges.

The lawsuit, filed a day after Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed during a press conference that the president’s campaign had uncovered 300,000 “illegitimate ballots” cast primarily in Detroit, specifically targets Wayne County, where Detroit is located. The residents of the county, which has a large Black population, are facing an echo of “the worst abuses in our nation’s history” at the hands of the Trump administration, the plaintiffs claim.

President-elect Joe Biden won Wayne County with 597,170 votes, while Trump received 264,553 votes — including a margin of more than 200,000 votes in Detroit.

“Central to this strategy is disenfranchising voters in predominately Black cities, including Detroit, by blocking certification of election results from those cities or counties where they are located,” the lawsuit reads, stating that Trump and his campaign have repeatedly raised claims of “widespread fraud in Detroit and other cities with large Black populations, including Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, in an effort to suggest votes from those cities should not be counted.”

The president’s press office did not immediately return The Hill’s request for comment.

[thehill.com]