Consider This from NPR - Republicans In Michigan Have Replaced Election Officials Who Certified Biden's Win

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Bipartisan members who serve on state and county boards of canvassers in Michigan have an important job: certifying the results of elections, making them official. In 2020, Former President Trump and his allies urged them not to certify as part of his campaign to undermine and overturn the presidential election, even though Joe Biden won Michigan by more than 154,000 votes.Since then, local GOP leaders have replaced many of the Republican canvassers who upheld their oaths and voted to certify the results for Biden.Michelle Voorheis, a Republican canvasser in Genessee County until last year, is one of them. She says she wasn't re-nominated because she pushed back against false allegations of election fraud.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. You could argue it is the most important tradition in our entire democracy. This is America's day. The transfer of power from one president to the next.

Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause. A public demonstration that the United States remains a government of the people, by the people, for the people. At this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed. And this moment in front of the U.S. Capitol when Joe Biden took the oath of office to become president last year, it was able to happen in part because of another moment, one that unfolded in a nondescript conference room in Lansing, Michigan. We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don't have. That is Aaron Van Langeveld.

He's an attorney, and he was one of two Republicans on what's called the Michigan Board of State Canvassers. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election. Now, in normal times, the job of a canvasser is so forgettable, so ministerial, some might even say so boring, that we wouldn't even be doing a story about it on NPR. Canvassers review the vote totals from each county, they add them up, and they certify the election results. But 2020 was not normal times. And after voting stopped that fall, a lot of pressure came down on Republican canvassers from the Michigan State Party, from President Trump, to not certify Joe Biden's victory, even though Biden had won the state by 154,000 votes. As America awaits the outcome of

this presidential election, all eyes are on battleground states, among them Michigan. Trump campaign has filed lawsuits against multiple states, including Michigan, alleging misconduct in the 2020 election. Before 2020, the idea of a board of canvassers not certifying was almost unthinkable. So it wasn't clear exactly what would happen if the state board deadlocked. Likely that would end up in litigation, which would provide opportunity to add more confusion and chaos to an election that Trump and his allies were trying to overturn. But amid all this noise, Aaron Van Lengeveld quietly cast the decisive vote. I will be supporting the motion.

The Michigan Board of State canvassers certified the election results, confirming Joe Biden won the state. And shortly after that, the formal transfer of power from the Trump administration to the Biden administration finally began. It's a big breaking news to tell you about the General Services Administration moments ago saying that President-elect Biden is the apparent winner of an election. In the meantime, Aaron Van Langeveld would soon realize his decision to certify in Michigan came with consequences. You see, when his term as canvasser ended after the 2020 election, his fellow Michigan Republicans replaced him. And he wasn't the only one who met this fate. Consider this. In counties across Michigan, Republicans have replaced election officials who upheld their oath and certified Biden's victory, which might make it easier for some candidate like Trump to undermine a future election. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Wednesday, May 4th.

Support comes from our 2022 lead sponsor of Consider This, Capital One, offering Capital One Shopping, a downloadable browser extension that searches various sites for shoppers. What's in your wallet? More at CapitalOneShopping.com. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Sotva, the comfort company. Sotva luxury mattresses are sold online and priced at about 50% less than mattress stores. Visit s-double-a-t-v-a-dot-com-slash-npr-today and save an additional $200. It's Consider This from NPR. So in Michigan, each county has its own board of canvassers. And just like the state board, each of these county boards is made up of two Democrats

and two Republicans. A Detroit News report found that in eight of Michigan's 11 largest counties, Republicans replaced canvassers who voted to certify Biden's 2020 win. And at least some of the new Republican canvassers have pushed debunked theories about election fraud or have said outright that they would not have certified the 2020 election results. To find out what that could mean for elections in this state, I took a trip out to Clio, Michigan, about 20 miles north of Flint, to meet a woman named Michelle Voorhees. She served, until last year, on the Genesee County Board of Canvassers. We met up with her at her

property management office, and the walls, they were covered with photos that showed all of her family's work in the Republican Party. Of course, George Bush. George Walker Bush? Daddy Bush. He came to Flint to one of our Lincoln Day dinners once and did photo ops. Shaking hands with your husband. I know. That's kind of cool. That was an inauguration picture.

We're in there somewhere. Now, there is no question Voorhees is a really enthusiastic Republican. I mean, the first election I voted in was George, Gerald Ford. Sorry, getting old and your brain doesn't work right. Gerald Ford, and I did vote for him. And so is her husband. My husband got nominated to be a number one Republican. He got nominated to be the number one?

A number one Republican. Every county has a number one Republican. You can tell Voorhees cares deeply about Republicans winning elections in Michigan, but she's also deeply committed to the oath she took to uphold the law as a canvasser. That job, she says, it's pretty straightforward. The board of canvassers is kind of like the bank auditors. You know, we verify that the election results that came in on election night are accurate. Basically what the Board of Canvassers does, it takes each and every poll book, each and every report that comes out of that machine and makes sure that they match. The job is basically like arithmetic.

You compare the number of ballots cast to the number of voters who've been reported as having voted. There's nothing investigatory about this task. You don't get to launch a probe just because you don't like the numbers you see. And when Voorhees decided to certify Biden's win in Genesee County, it felt like a no-brainer. The numbers compelled her to do so, and so did the law. Was there ever a moment of any doubt where you thought, hmm, maybe I shouldn't certify? No, absolutely not. But in the days that followed, she got blowback from her fellow Republicans in a way she had never seen during her entire 13 years as a canvasser. People started coming to me and saying that I shouldn't have certified, you shouldn't have certified. But it didn't become an issue until well after

we certified. How did they articulate their reasons for saying why you shouldn't have certified? Well, it was all of the alleged fraud that was, or the fraud that was being alleged. And people, again, they don't know what the Board of Canvassers does. I mean, we had observers. We had observers from the League of Women Voters, the Democrat Party, the Republican Party, and probably a few more. And they sat there and watched all of the work that we did. And none of them, to my knowledge, went back out in public and said, oh my goodness, you know, this is a hot mess. They shouldn't have certified. And when it came time for the Genesee County Republican Party

to figure out who they wanted to nominate to serve on the board of canvassers, your name, I understand, was not on that list. No, sadly, it was not. And why do you think your name didn't appear on that list? After having served on this board for 13 years. I think that people believed these allegations that were flying around and I, well, just whatever, election fraud. The fact that I wasn't buying into that didn't sit well with people. We reached out to the executive committee of the Genesee County Republican Party

about how all of this went down. They're in charge of nominating Republican canvassers. And Amy Fascinello, the vice chair of the county GOP, told me that Voorhees' decision to certify had nothing to do with why she's not on the board of canvassers now. Everybody on the executive committee is almost all of them new to the whole political process and politics in Genesee County. And she hasn't come to any of our meetings or anything. So when she showed up that night to put her name in to be elected, people didn't know her. So that's probably why she didn't get the votes.

But it's hard to ignore the fact that Voorhees now joins a pretty sizable group of former Republican canvassers who have been replaced after they decided to certify Biden's 2020 victory. I can't get inside someone else's head, but I do know that the meeting I was at where people were nominated, the people who cared to attend the meeting and stood up to introduce themselves and say why they wanted the position, every single one of them said because they wanted to stop election fraud. I can show you the Board of Canvassers manual. It says in a big paragraph that you're not allowed to investigate fraud. She walks over and pulls that manual right out. Okay, the investigation of alleged election law violations is not part of the canvas. Their duties are purely ministerial and clerical. Right there in the manual, ministerial and clerical.

That is it, right there in black and white. So there's no authority to not certify if you've done your job properly, you need to certify. But what if a board of canvassers decides not to certify just because they don't like the results of a particular election? Can these bureaucratic positions inside our election machinery disrupt the process in such a way to defy the will of voters? If you want to know how important these positions are to our elections, all you have to do is look at what happened in 2020. There was a concerted effort from the top to try to overturn the outcome of that election, right? That is Lawrence Norton of the Brennan Center for Justice. He's been working on election security for years. And he says the results

of the 2020 election stood in the end because the people operating the election system spoke up for the truth. If those people had not stood up and told the truth, as bad as the aftermath of the 2020 election was and the insurrection, I think it would have been a lot worse. The system held in large part because the people that were involved in the kind of nuts and bolts job of running our elections refused to bend to the lie and told the truth. Even though Michelle Voorhees is not on the Genesee County Board of Canvassers anymore, she's offered to help train the new members on the board so that they know the rules for the next election. But she says no one has taken her up on that offer. Do you feel like the people who run the county Republican Party here are still giving you the silent treatment? No. I mean, I don't know what they think privately, but we just

avoid the 2020 election topic because it's politics. And I can separate politics from personal. And I know I've seen so many things through the course of my political career, if you will. It's all like a cycle. But honestly, 36 years from now, they're going to be looking back and going, it's pretty much the same. It's politics. It comes and goes. It ebbs and flows. That's what it does. Whether what happened in 2020 was the ebb and flow of politics or some fundamental change to how democracy works, who knows? What we do know, as Larry Norton points out, is that the system held in 2020 because in the end, people like Michelle Voorhees and Aaron Van Langeveld followed the law and did their jobs. And in 2022 and 2024, they won't have those jobs.

Someone else will. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.