Trump and Voter Suppression

by Temi Akinyoade

VOL. 24 — published November 22, 2020 under 2020 Presidential Election

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Despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud, Trump has had a ball throwing lawsuits against Biden-winning states. One of his lawsuits targeted Wayne County in Michigan and demanded that some of Detroit’s votes were not to be counted in the state’s final tally.

It claimed that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (a Democrat) didn’t give Republican poll challengers an appropriate amount of time to observe vote counting, let election workers torment those poll challengers, and allowed “illegal and illegible ballots” to be counted. The lawsuit also claimed software glitches had caused inaccurate reporting of results and they needed to be properly addressed.

Statements from Republican ballot challengers used questionable wording to describe their grievances. A woman wrote that “she did not feel safe (I am a small (5’3” 130lb) pregnant white woman).” Someone else claimed they felt threatened by “another man of intimidating size with a BLM shirt on.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel claimed this lawsuit was an act of racism. Detroit (in Wayne County) is a majority-black city where Biden beat Trump by almost 40%. But Trump had no issue with Oakland or Kent county where Biden did better than Hilary Clinton did in 2016.

Trump’s lawsuit was dropped on Thursday, but on Friday, a group of Michigan voters filed a lawsuit against Trump’s reelection campaign claiming that Trump was attempting mass voter suppression against black voters. It’s an attempt to prevent any extra efforts by Trump to push state officials into cancelling ballots.

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