I Voted for Trump in 2016 and Again 2020 Coffee Cup
D onald Trump will return to Michigan on Saturday for his offset visit since Nov 2022 when he spent the last hours of his presidential election campaign badly trying to hold on to the state and fend off nationwide defeat to his Democratic rival Joe Biden.
This time his visit will exist motivated by an attempt to forge a path to victory in the 2024 presidential ballot, in which he has hinted he may run over again. If that is his intention, he is going almost information technology in a very irregular mode.
His guest of honor at the rally he is staging in Washington Township will be conduct no resemblance to the local politicians whom former US presidents usually champion. Kristina Karamo is a part-time community college professor who has never held elected office and who up until 18 months ago was relatively lilliputian known outside conservative and religious circles in the Detroit suburb in which she lives.
Karamo, 36, describes herself as a defender of the Christian faith and espouses some arresting beliefs. She opposes teaching evolution and has called public schools "government indoctrination camps"; she argues that many Americans live in poverty because "they just make dumb decisions"; and she contends that the instigators of the Jan half dozen insurrection at the US Capitol were "totally antifa posing equally Trump supporters".
At that place are two clues equally to why Trump is willing to brand the one,200-mile schlepp from his domicile in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, to chilly Michigan on Karamo's behalf. The first is the position for which she is continuing in November's midterm elections – secretary of state.
The post-holder acts as primary elections officer in Michigan, and in that capacity volition take considerable sway over how the presidential election is conducted in 2024. What happens in the state could then in plough have enormous national implications: in both 2022 and 2022 Michigan was pivotal in securing the White House for Trump and Biden respectively.
The second clue to Trump's thinking is the linguistic communication he used when he endorsed her terminal September. "She is potent on crime," he said, "including the massive crime of election fraud".
What initially drew Karamo to Trump'southward attention was the prominent role she played in Michigan in promoting his "big lie", the false conspiracy theory that the 2022 election was stolen from him. From nearly full obscurity, Karamo was thrown into the limelight when she began to weep foul most what she claimed was illegal vote counting in the overwhelmingly African American city of Detroit.
It all began with a bones misunderstanding.
As America held its breath in the days after the election, when it remained uncertain whether Biden or Trump would win, Karamo relocated herself to the TCF Center in downtown Detroit where poll workers were counting 174,000 absentee ballots. Karamo was one of scores of Trump supporters who – without any formal grooming in election procedures or laws – designated themselves as "poll challengers" watching over the politically-charged count.
The convention space was packed to overflowing, with almost 900 poll workers counting ballots, as another 400 or and so media and political observers looked on. Over the next 24 hours, TCF began to resemble, in the description of the Detroit Complimentary Press, a high-stakes sports lucifer "consummate with yelling, taunting, cheering, fists pounding on glass and unruly challengers existence hauled off by cops".
Amid the melee, Karamo claimed that she personally witnessed fraudulent activeness in which ballots were switched illegally from Trump to Biden. A week after the election, by which fourth dimension Biden had been declared winner, she filled out an "incident report" in her neat closely-spaced handwriting.
The three-page document looks similar an official police report, though the minor print at the bottom says: "Paid for by Donald J Trump for President, Inc." In information technology, Karamo gives her account of what she claims to have witnessed.
She was standing at an "adjudication table" where ballots that are incorrectly filled in are scrutinized. She spotted a ballot on the screen in which a voter appeared to accept cast their election along directly-political party lines but for both main parties.
That was conspicuously an error as you can't vote for more than one presidential candidate at a time.
Karamo says in the "incident report" that she watched as a poll worker unilaterally decided to award the election to Biden, no questions asked. When she complained and chosen for a supervisor, she claims she was told not to talk to the election staff.
The supervisor, she wrote, instructed the poll worker "to 'push it through', when the ballot legally should have been rejected. I said I'one thousand challenging the election… but he continued to tell the worker to push information technology through."
That sounds like a blatant abuse of election integrity, taking an effectively spoiled election and counting it for Biden. Karamo was incensed, and on the back of that eruption of acrimony began her meteoric rise as an advocate for Trump'southward big lie that the ballot was rigged.
The problem was that Karamo's estimation of what happened to the wrongly-completed election was based on a uncomplicated misreading of election procedure. Chris Thomas, Michigan's former director of elections who oversaw the state'south vote counts for 36 years under both Republican and Democratic administrations, told the Guardian why.
He explained that when Karamo heard "push button information technology through" she causeless that meant "requite the vote to Biden". But that was a misunderstanding.
In fact, the edict "push button it through" when issued at the adjudication tabular array is in effect an order to discard "overvotes" – ballots similar the one Karamo witnessed where more the maximum number of candidates are selected.
"'Push it through' means you lot are done with it, and the vote is tabulated as a not-count," Thomas said.
In other words, the call to fraudulently count the ballot for Biden which Karamo thought she had heard was in fact an instruction to place the vote in the electronic equivalent of a dustbin where it would exist stored simply discounted.
What did Thomas make of the fact that Karamo made a hue and cry about fraud based on a mistaken interpretation of electoral practices? "This is the problem when people make all these comments when they don't empathise the organisation," he said. "They come across what they desire to run into."
Thomas was present inside the TCF Centre for the duration of the 2-solar day count, working equally a senior consultant and handling disputes. With his almost 4 decades of non-partisan experience of orchestrating elections, how would he rate the way the ballots were handled within the space?
"The count was totally in a higher place lath," he said. "It was accurate and it was fair. The count was adept."
T hat one mistaken merits of fraud propelled Karamo into the dizzy heights of the Trump firmament. Sean Hannity billed her equally a "whistleblower" on his primetime Fox News testify, she was invited past Republicans to show before a legislative committee, she participated in a four-land lawsuit seeking to overturn the presidential election result that went all the fashion upwards to the US supreme court (which promptly rejected it).
Emboldened, her baseless critique of rampant election fraud became more forthright. "I was a poll challenger at TCF Center in Detroit," she told the podcast Coffee and a Mike. "I saw illegal activity and I realized if we don't cure our ballot arrangement nosotros no longer have a republic, we accept a fake country, an illusion of a country, and so I take to do something."
That "something" was to stand for Michigan secretary of state – a position that would potentially allow her to take her discredited views on voter fraud and use them to Trump'south advantage in 2024. And so far, she is doing very well in the race, with a apparent shot at prevailing.
With Trump's enthusiastic backing, she has amassed a entrada war-breast of more than $228,000, more than whatsoever other Republican vying for the secretary of land nomination. As an indication of how much heat the race is generating, Karamo has attracted more 2,000 individual donors – more than all candidates combined in the final secretarial assistant of state contest in 2018.
Michigan's incumbent secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, is running for re-ballot as the Autonomous candidate. She told the Guardian that the steam that has built up around the race this yr is an indication of its high stakes.
"This secretarial assistant of state race is the elevation targeted race in the country, and I am the top targeted incumbent secretarial assistant of state seeking re-election this year. Trump's decision to endorse someone running confronting me, and his rally on Saturday, are a alarm that what is unfolding here should be on everyone's radar – democracy is on the ballot in November," Benson said.
Benson was in charge of the presidential ballot count in Michigan in 2020, which Biden won by 154,188 votes. She believes Karamo was present in the TCF Centre "simply for the purpose of interfering with the counting process, causing chaos and confusion and spreading misinformation".
Asked what would happen if the Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist won in Nov and took her job, Benson replied: "Michigan would have a principal election officer more than than willing to observe those extra votes if the candidate asked them. Information technology would be akin to putting an arsonist in charge of the burn section, or giving the keys to the vault to a banking company robber."
As the secretary of state competition gains momentum, progressive groups are mobilizing to try and stop Karamo. The left-leaning Finish Citizens United/Let America Vote has launched a new "democracy defender program", investing $7m in secretary of state and attorney general races where Trump-endorsed large lie candidates are on the ticket.
"Karamo sought to silence and overturn the will of Michigan voters. Her false and extreme rhetoric is a threat to democracy because it undermines faith in our elections," said a spokesperson for the grouping, Tina Olechowski.
The Guardian reached out to Karamo, but she did not respond.
As the race hots upwards she continues to claim that Trump won the 2022 election and to demand a "forensic audit" of the results – fifty-fifty though "forensic audits" do not exist under Michigan election law. In Oct she spoke at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas where she joined other pro-Trump big lie candidates running for secretary of state positions effectually the land.
"She was 1 of several political candidates appealing to QAnon for political proceeds in means that could have a drastic bear on on future elections," said Alex Kaplan, senior researcher at the watchdog Media Matters for America.
Karamo has said that if she wins in Nov, her office equally secretarial assistant of land volition be "to brand sure elections are secure and that the result represents the will of the people, non those corrupting the system".
That's not how Benson sees it. Karamo, she said, is 1 of several Trump-endorsed secretarial assistant of country candidates around the country who appear willing "to violate their oath, the law and the principles of our democracy in service of their party and their private agenda".
And if that happens, Benson said, "then democracy will take been dealt peradventure its greatest blow since the origins of our state".
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/01/michigan-secretary-of-state-candidate-kristina-karamo
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