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- Despite his electoral defeat, Donald Trump is going ahead with a series of lawsuits challenging the result.
- Legal experts say the lawsuits are unlikely to be successful.
- Trump has focused on vote-by-mail ballots.
US President Donald Trump’s campaign said Saturday it had filed a lawsuit in Arizona, its latest legal challenge over the results of the presidential election.
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The campaign suffered losses in Michigan and Georgia courts this week, but Trump vowed Saturday to go ahead with a legal strategy that he hopes will overturn the statewide results that gave Democrat Joe Biden the victory in Tuesday’s vote.
Legal experts said the cases brought by the Trump campaign are limited in scope and unlikely to change the outcome.
Below is a list of cases that will develop in the next few days and possibly weeks. The Trump campaign said Saturday that more litigation would be filed in the coming days.
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Pennsylvania Litigation
Several court battles are pending on the Pennsylvania state battlefield.
Trump’s campaign is fighting Philadelphia election officials over the city’s vote count, which continued on Saturday. A state court on Thursday granted the campaign closer access to proceedings, a ruling that officials have appealed.
The Philadelphia City Board of Elections has said its observation rules were necessary for safety reasons and to maintain social distancing protocols.
The Trump campaign on Wednesday filed a motion to intervene in a pending case before the United States Supreme Court challenging a decision by the state’s highest court that allowed election officials to count mail-in ballots postmarked on Monday. Tuesday’s elections that were delivered through Friday.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered county boards of elections in the state on Friday night to separate mail-in ballots received after 8:00 p.m. EST on Election Day. .
Pennsylvania election officials have said those ballots were already separated.
The judges previously ruled that there was insufficient time to decide the merits of the case before Election Day, but indicated they could re-examine it later.
Alito, along with Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, said in a written opinion that there was a “high probability” that the Pennsylvania court’s decision violated the US Constitution.
Pennsylvania Commonwealth Secretary Kathy Boockvar has said late ballots are a small proportion of the overall vote in the state.
Arizona Challenge
The Trump campaign said Saturday that it had filed a lawsuit in Arizona, alleging that the most populous county in the state incorrectly rejected the votes cast on Election Day by some voters.
The lawsuit, filed in state Superior Court in Maricopa County, said poll workers told some voters to push a button after a machine detected an “overvoting.”
The campaign said the decision ignored voters’ choices in those races, and the lawsuit suggested that those votes could be “determinative” in the outcome of the presidential race.
Loss of Nevada
A voter, a member of the media and two candidate campaigns sued the Nevada secretary of state and other officials to prevent the use of a signature verification system in populated Clark County and to provide public access to the count of votes.
A federal judge rejected the request on Friday, saying there was no evidence the county was doing anything illegal.
Georgia election fight
The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in state court in Chatham County Wednesday alleging late-arriving ballots were improperly mixed with valid ballots, and asked a judge to order that late-arriving ballots be separated and are not counted.
The case was dismissed Thursday.
Michigan’s demand for vote counting
The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Michigan on Wednesday to stop the counting of votes in the state. The lawsuit alleged that election observers for the campaign were denied “meaningful access” to the vote count, in addition to access to surveillance video footage of the polls.
On Thursday, Michigan Claims Court Judge Cynthia Stephens dismissed the case, saying there was no legal basis or evidence to stop voting and grant requests.
US Postal Service Litigation
The US Postal Service said about 1,700 ballots in Pennsylvania had been identified at processing facilities during two raids Thursday and were being turned over to election officials, according to a court file early Friday.
The Postal Service said 1,076 ballots had been found at its Philadelphia Distribution and Processing Center. Approximately 300 were found at the Pittsburgh processing center, 266 at a Lehigh Valley facility, and others at other Pennsylvania processing centers.
Federal District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington is overseeing a lawsuit from Vote Forward, the NAACP, and advocates for the Latino community.
Sullivan ordered twice-daily sweeps Thursday at Postal Service facilities that serve states with extended deadlines for receiving ballots. The judge plans to hold a state conference on Monday.
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