[ad_1]
US President Donald Trump said his campaign will go to court on Monday to “ensure that election laws are fully enforced and that the rightful winner is seated.”
United States President Donald Trump speaks in the White House meeting room on November 5, 2020 in Washington, DC. Image: AFP
WASHINGTON – Minutes after the US media declared Democrat Joe Biden the winner in the close race for the US presidency on Saturday, President Donald Trump rejected that conclusion, saying he will prove in court that he was the winner.
“The simple fact is that this election is far from over,” Trump said in a statement.
“Legal votes decide who is president, not the media.”
But experts say Trump has little chance of reversing Biden’s victory, without having provided the evidence of widespread voter fraud necessary to overturn the results in several states.
• READ: Joe Biden elected US President.
“Trump’s litigation strategy is going nowhere. It will not make a difference in the outcome of the election,” said Richard Hasen, an electoral law expert at the University of California, Irvine.
Trump said his campaign will go to court on Monday to “ensure that electoral laws are fully respected and that the rightful winner is seated.”
He pointed to the expected counts in states where Biden has only a few thousand votes ahead.
And he referred to Pennsylvania, where Republicans allege fraud and say thousands of late-arriving mail ballots were illegally counted.
“Networks cannot decide elections. Courts can. Courts annul elections when they are illegal,” Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Saturday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city.
ECHOES OF FLORIDA?
Trump is right: The election will not really end until each state formally certifies its vote, which will take place in the next few weeks.
But with nearly all of the more than 150 million votes counted, he simply doesn’t have enough votes in the Electoral College that formally elects the president, US media collectively concluded Saturday.
There is a precedent for a turn to the courts. In 2000, when the electoral battle between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore hinged on the outcome in Florida, where Bush led with just over 500 votes, the two sides fought all the way to the Supreme Court for a statewide recount. .
The high court narrowly rejected a recount and handed the election over to Bush.
In Trump’s case, not only does he have to overcome a deficit of nearly 40,000 votes in Pennsylvania, but he has also lost many thousands of votes in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.
It is highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will take action to overturn election results from those margins in various states.
VOTE COUNT
Counts are expected in Wisconsin and Georgia, and possible in other states.
But stories rarely reverse verdicts. A 2016 recount in Wisconsin garnered 131 votes for Trump’s lead over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
“In modern American elections, the recount almost never changed the results by more than a couple hundred votes,” said Steven Huefner, an expert on electoral law at Ohio State University.
The Trump campaign’s greatest hope has been to reverse a months-old Pennsylvania decision to accept mailed ballots received up to three days after Election Day.
Republicans appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in October, which split into four, leaving it in place, but saying it could review the issue after the election.
He now has a full bench of nine justices after Trump appointed conservative Amy Coney Barrett, and Republicans are seeking a new audience.
But Pennsylvania officials say the number of late ballots at risk of being disqualified is only in the thousands, far less than needed to overcome Biden’s lead.
It is “difficult to see how the ballots in question will have any relevance to the electoral outcome,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said in a Supreme Court presentation Saturday.
FRAUD?
Trump also alleges fraud. Again, to overcome Biden’s leadership, that would have to be tested in multiple states and cancel tens of thousands of votes for his rival.
So far they have not delivered the evidence.
Giuliani said Saturday that the majority Democratic-leaning city of Philadelphia “has a sad history of voter fraud,” claiming that the dead cast their ballots.
“There is certainly enough evidence to disqualify a certain number of ballots,” he said. “And that could affect the elections.”
But Republican claims remain “vague,” Huefner said.
“You have to have facts to support what you are claiming,” he said.
And even with evidence, he added, Republicans must show that it was enough to change the results.
Download the EWN app on your iOS or Android device.
[ad_2]
