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NEW YORK – President Donald Trump’s bellicose promise to fight the election result in court on Friday clashed with skeptical judges, frightening math at the Electoral College and a lack of evidence for his fraud allegations.
On a day that began with vote counting in Georgia and Pennsylvania leaning in favor of Joe Biden, the Trump campaign declared, “This election is not over,” while the Republican National Committee announced that it had activated “legal contest teams. “in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And Trump’s forces have appointed a new general to lead the effort, veteran conservative political fighter David Bossie. Trump has already reiterated that he will legally challenge the results.
But none of the nearly dozen lawsuits that started in crucial states in the elections appeared to be gaining momentum in the courts. In any event, it didn’t seem likely that either would give Trump the advantage he would need to count the votes in the states that will determine the outcome.
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In an attempt to foster widespread doubt about the legitimacy of the election, Trump and his representatives seemed less focused on substantive legal arguments that could be sustained in court than on supporting the president’s political narrative, unsupported by the facts, that he was somehow be robbed of a second term.
The most visible step of the day came when Pennsylvania Republicans asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and demand that state election officials separate ballots that arrived after Election Day and not yet include them in the total vote in the voting. greatest and most critical of decisive states. On Friday night, Judge Samuel Alito granted the request.
But the move was almost entirely to show: Pennsylvania was already separating these ballots, counting them separately, and not including them in the total votes cast. The secretary of state, despite objections from Republicans and Trump, said votes could be counted if they arrived before 5 p.m. Friday.
A state official said the ballots in question number in the thousands, but not in the tens of thousands.
The lack of success in interrupting the count or presenting a plausible case of large-scale voter fraud has left Trump and his team increasingly dependent on the political salvation of the counts, which seemed likely to occur in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, and Wisconsin, but they rarely result in large fluctuations in the vote count.
Trump’s effort may be getting a boost from the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin state legislatures, which are controlled by Republicans. In Wisconsin, Robin Vos, Speaker of the State Assembly, directed a legislative commission to “use its powers of investigation” to conduct an election review, again raising the specter of voter fraud without offering specific evidence.
In Pennsylvania, the two top Republicans in the legislature asked Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, to conduct an “immediate audit” of the elections. At the same time, the president’s allies have openly suggested an extreme move: using baseless claims of Democratic prevarication to pressure Republican-controlled state legislatures in key states to send pro-Trump voters to the Electoral College, regardless of the results of the vote. popular.
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Biden’s campaign officials said they would respond to all legal disputes started by Trump, but said they were confident that none of the cases they had seen so far seemed capable of keeping Biden on track for the presidency. “The Republican legal actions are totally unfounded and have failed and will continue to fail in court,” said Bob Bauer, a senior advisor to Biden’s campaign.
On Thursday, Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, said on Twitter: “I really hope that @ FBI / @ DOJ [Departamento de Justiça] get involved immediately ”. Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich echoed the president’s son on Fox News, calling for the arrest of election officials and greater involvement from Attorney General William Barr.
But in the days after the election, Barr and the Justice Department remained silent. After initially echoing Trump’s warnings about voter fraud, Barr silenced his remarks and Trump complained to advisers about the department’s lack of action.
An outside advocacy group, True the Vote, one of the most prominent promoters of the false narrative that “voter fraud” is rampant in the United States, sought to help Trump build his narrative. On Friday, the group announced that it had formed a $ 1 million “Whistleblower Defense Fund” to “encourage” whistleblowers to press wrongdoing charges.
No state saw more legal activity than Pennsylvania, where the Trump campaign and local Republicans filed at least a half dozen lawsuits immediately before and after Election Day.
The case that had the potential to affect the most votes was presented to the Supreme Court on Friday, seeking an order that would force Pennsylvania election officials to separate ballots that arrived after Election Day from other ballots sent. In its emergency request, the party acknowledged that the state secretary’s office had already ordered election officials to do so, but claimed it had no way of knowing if they were obeying.
Republicans have fought unsuccessfully against the Secretary of State’s decision to allow election officials in Pennsylvania to count mailed ballots that arrived at their offices on Friday, as long as they have stamps from Election Day or earlier. The Supreme Court twice declined to rule on the dispute, although the case is still technically pending, giving justices an opportunity to weigh in on whether they saw a reason to do so.
But even if the court accepts the case and decides in favor of the Republicans to remove all the ballots in question, the mail-in votes were largely for Biden, that would not affect the current vote totals, which do not include the ballots that came in later. . election day. This Saturday morning, Biden had an advantage of about 28,000 votes in Pennsylvania.
Frustrated supporters of the president, such as radio host Mark Levin, called on Republican-controlled legislatures in states like Pennsylvania to use their constitutional authority to send a delegation of pro-Trump voters to the Electoral College, regardless of the outcome of the vote. popular.
When asked at a press conference Friday if state Republicans would do this, Pennsylvania State Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman responded:
– We want to maintain the tradition that the winner of the popular vote wins the elections.
Even if state Republicans could make such a move legally, the legislature “can’t just ignore the popular vote,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said was an extreme example of how far some Trump supporters seem willing to go. .
In several states, Trump was defying state voting rules, effectively seeking to nullify votes cast according to official guidelines.
Republicans in Nevada asked the Justice Department Thursday night to open an investigation into voter fraud involving 3,000 votes, a move Democrats said was based on “wholly fabricated” allegations.
The Justice Department has refused to address the issue publicly, but its guidelines generally prevent criminal investigations of election-related issues from being launched until the results have been completed.
Local Republicans included the indictment in a lawsuit that was filed in federal court seeking a change in the way Nevada’s Clark County is conducting its count. A judge dismissed the case Friday night, when the vote count showed Biden a 22,000-vote lead.
