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The Michigan State Board of Canvassers voted Monday to certify the state’s election results, formally granting President-elect Joe Biden the state’s 16 electoral votes.
The certification all but erases President Donald Trump’s pathway to try to overturn the election results through legal challenges that have been dismissed in key states.
One of the two Republican members of the Michigan state canvassing board, Aaron Van Langevelde, joined the two Democrats to vote to certify the election results, after it was unclear how he would vote prior to the meeting.
At Monday’s meeting, Van Langevelde signaled that he believed he was required to certify the vote under state law, regardless of whether he believed there should be an audit of Wayne County’s election results. He said he supported an audit, but that did not mean the board should wait to certify the election first.
We must not attempt to exercise power we don’t have,” he said.
The other Republican on the board, Norman Shinkle, abstained. He argued that the board should not certify the election results until an investigation into voting in Wayne County — the state’s largest, which includes Detroit — was completed. Shinkle asked the Republican-led Michigan legislature to conduct a review of the 2020 election.