The second week of the disbarment trial of Trump attorney and constitutional scholar John Eastman concluded Friday, with testimony from the State Bar of California’s (SBC) expert witnesses Justin Grimmer and Jonathan Brater, director of the Michigan Bureau of Elections (MBE). Grimmer is a political science professor at Stanford.
Much of SBC attorney Duncan Carling’s questions to Grimmer consisted of asking him to debunk claims of election fraud, prompting First Amendment attorney Mark Fitzgibbons to tweet, “Am I wrong, but isn’t this bizarre CA Bar trial of Trump lawyer Dr John Eastman hearing more evidence than all the pre-Jan 6 election litigation challenges combined?” Analyzing election fraud claims did not come up in the 2020 election cases since the judges dismissed them on technicalities without getting to the merits.
Carling asked Grimmer about accusations that signature verification standards were loosened up in Pennsylvania prior to the 2020 election, allowing ballots to be accepted that should not have been. Grimmer claimed that the increase in ballots was due to a 2019 law that went into effect allowing for curing of ballots, but admitted that he had no idea what percentage of ballots were rejected in Pennsylvania due to changing the signature verification standards.
Grimmer dismissed accusations of felons and dead people voting by claiming that they had been misidentified by election investigators. He said those who cited them confused their names and birth dates with eligible voters. However, he provided no numbers or percentages of the ones he’d looked into.
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