It's two weeks after the 2020 US presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and the Wayne County Board of Canvassers is meeting to certify their county's result.
It's a huge county in the swing state of Michigan, covering most of the city of Detroit.
The set up for this meeting is as 2020 as it gets: it's a Zoom meeting, and the election officials are all sitting socially distanced from each other, each behind a plexiglas screen.
"If you get booted out, try and log back in," one official tells the virtual, gathered crowd.
There are four board members; two Democrats and two Republicans. This even distribution is meant to be a safeguard, to make sure the boards stay neutral politically, if there are mistakes or discrepancies to be resolved.
For the most part, these Board of Canvasser meetings are fairly routine. The election is run and done, and these people are here to check the result and certify it.
But in Wayne County, things are about to get intense. The result in this county is going to become a flashpoint for a national movement denying Joe Biden's election win, and the meeting itself is going to attract the attention of his opponent, Donald Trump.
This meeting, and others like it after the 2020 election, will inform MAGA strategy for the next four years.
Canvassers meet in Wayne County, Michigan
The meeting was civil for the first couple of hours, as the four canvassers — two Republican and two Democrat — asked questions about the results in various precincts.
The Republicans had particular problems with precincts in areas with particularly high Black populations.
If there was a big mistake made while counting votes somewhere in the county, this was a chance to catch it. But in Wayne County Detroit, no big mistakes had occurred.
And then when all the questions had been answered, it came to a vote: should the results of the general election be certified?
The two Democrats voted 'yes'. The two Republicans voted 'no'. A deadlocked vote.
Wayne County Republican officials refuse to sign
Their 'no' vote was based on a discrepancy between the number of voters signing the voter roll, and the number of votes counted.
There were 878,000 ballots cast in the county, across 1,100 precincts. To block certification, you'd want a pretty big discrepancy.
But the discrepancy in this case was less than 500 votes total. That's not in one spot, it's across all 1,100 precincts.
A discrepancy of this scale wasn't unusual, and it usually wouldn't warrant the blocking of certification.
But the meeting was happening amid a larger, national conversation about the legitimacy of the election result, and it was getting more intense as the weeks went on.
The meeting gets heated
After the Republicans voted no the meeting was opened up for public comment, and the public had a lot of comments.
"The idea that there would be a mismatch of one or two votes in many precincts is surprising to absolutely no-one," one observer told the virtually-gathered crowd.
Others got quite personal, hounding the Republicans to change their votes.
"Your nay votes leave a stain on your soul that is unconscionable."
"You're embarrassing our state!" said another, "You're embarrassing our county! Why don't you have any shame? Because you're not smart enough to realise you're in a cult!"
The criticism came from both Democrats and Republicans.
One of Detroit's top local Republican officials, a city clerk, called in to take a few shots. And a Detroit Police Commissioner called in too.
The public comment section of the meeting went on for three hours, into the evening.
The Republican canvassers were worn down.
After being subjected to all that, they agreed to change their votes, as long as an audit was conducted by the state government.
The vote was passed, unanimously, certifying the results in Wayne County for Joe Biden.
But before they could sign the paperwork, the two Republicans left the room.
Monica Palmer was one of them. She explained in a press conference the following day what happened next.
A call from president Donald Trump
Monica Palmer was shaken as she left the Wayne County Board of Canvassers meeting.
"I was walked to my car … with [fellow Republican] member William Hartmann," she told the press the next day.
The meeting had been intense, unexpectedly so. And as she reached her car things got a lot weirder.
"I received a phone call and it said will you accept a president… a call from the president?"
Monica Palmer said yes.
"I got in my car, cause it was cold, Member Hartmann joined me. I received a call from the president."
As a county-level election official, it was extremely unusual to get a call from the president himself.
"He thanked me for my service, asked me how I was doing. There was a genuine concern for my safety."
She said there was nothing else discussed.
"That was the end of the call. Thank you for your service, glad you're safe, have a good night."
Was that the end of the call though?
According to a recording of the call heard by The Detroit News, president Trump told the board members that if they signed the paperwork, officially certifying the results, they would "look terrible".
It reports he promised the board members he'd send lawyers to protect them if they just went home without signing the certificates.
Monica Palmer and William Hartmann did as they were told.
They went home, without signing the certificates. The following day, they said they would not be signing them.
It didn't matter. Officials said their verbal agreement, made before the phone call with Trump, was good enough.
The partially-signed certificates were sent up the chain, and it was official: Joe Biden won Michigan.
The attempt to overturn the result in Michigan failed.
But the way this all shook out in Wayne County and in other key counties in swing states across the country, it's helped rouse support for a MAGA strategy in the four years since.
The MAGA precinct committee strategy
Republican officials in Wayne County were unprepared for the wave of public criticism that faced them when they refused to certify the results there.
But what if they were ready for it? What if they'd joined the board specifically to refuse to certify a result for Donald Trump's opponent?
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, former top Trump adviser turned podcaster Steve Bannon brought a man named Dan Schultz onto his podcast War Room.
Over the course of 2021, Schultz became a regular on the show, and Bannon embraced what Dan Schultz called the "precinct committee strategy".
It's an incredibly boring and totally legal plan, to encourage Trump supporters to take up vacant positions on Republican precinct committees.
"Don't just be a donor to the party," Dan Schultz explained, "become an owner of the party."
He pointed to the hundreds of thousands of local precinct committee slots vacant in the Republican party, available for someone to step up and fill.
"There's about 400,000 precinct committeeman slots in the Republican party now," he told Bannon's audience, "200,000, half, are vacant."
A dull idea finds its moment
Dan Schultz had been pushing this "strategy" for more than a decade, talking about it in lectures and town hall meetings, but it only began to gain traction after the 2020 election.
In the period between election day 2020 and the inauguration of Joe Biden in January 2021, Donald Trump's supporters were told by the president himself and others around him that the election had been stolen from them.
They were told that Donald Trump was the rightful winner, and should therefore remain president.
Dan Schultz's "Precinct Committee Strategy" was pushed by Bannon and others in the Trump-adjacent media as a way to stop an election being stolen in the future.
If you filled as many precinct-level positions with Trump-supporters, the theory went, you could eventually find them overseeing local elections, and eventually sitting in positions like the ones Monica Palmer and William Hartmann held in Wayne County, Michigan.
Where those two Republicans had caved to pressure and certified the election result, even just verbally, MAGA supporters who knew what they were signing up for would stand firm.
They could use their positions to stop the certification of any election that had been 'stolen'.
Could the precinct committee strategy play a role in next week's election?
The "precinct committee strategy" has caught on.
People who think the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump have signed up for vacant precinct committee seats in their thousands.
Dozens of them have managed to find their way onto the election certification boards.
In swing states, the Centre for Media and Democracy estimates 98 election deniers now sit on Canvassing Boards, including taking up both Republican seats in Detroit's Wayne County.
Rolling Stone Magazine reports that since the 2020 election, Republicans have refused to certify results in local and state-level elections at least 25 times.
In the swing state of Georgia, Donald Trump is very pleased with the line-up on the election board. He told a rally in Atlanta in August just how pleased.
"I don't know if you heard, but the Georgia State Election Board is in a very positive way."
"Janis Johnson, Rick Jeffries and Janelle King are all pit-bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory."
These are election board officials, not political figures.
What they might actually be able to achieve is unclear.
If they refuse to certify the election results, it's likely their decision will be overturned in court.
But they will certainly have the ability to slow down and confuse the vote counting process.
The aftermath of the 2020 presidential election is evidence that strategies which slow or confuse the election result can be used to disrupt the smooth transition of power.
