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President Trump’s team launched a series of lawsuits in key states on the battlefield that seemed less about sound legal reasoning and more about stopping Joe Biden from marching above the electoral vote threshold.
At times, lawsuits have challenged double-digit ballots – hundreds, if not thousands, of votes away from potentially changing the outcome of any state.
“Admitting defeat is not a plausible reaction so soon after the election, so they throw a lot of Hail Mary lawsuits against the wall and hope something will stick,” said Ben Ginsberg, longtime Republican election attorney and contributor to CNN. He said these kinds of demands are not indicative of a campaign that feels optimistic and is instead in turmoil.
“I think much of the litigation is unlikely and unlikely to be successful,” said Franita Tolson, professor of law at USC Gould School of Law and a CNN contributor.
It pointed to a lawsuit in Georgia that the Trump campaign announced Wednesday night about a poll worker mixing processed and unprocessed absentee ballots. That could have the potential to affect fewer votes, he said.
“I suspect a big goal of this litigation is, in the short term, to shift the narrative” from a possible Biden victory to a conversation about electoral mismanagement or even fraud, Tolson said.
Another law professor and CNN contributor, Rick Hasen, said the lawsuits appeared to be more public relations than serious litigation. “So far these lawsuits are not addressing any major issues that appear to call into question vote totals,” he said.
Justin Levitt, another election expert and law professor, called some of the lawsuits, like those in Michigan, “laughable.”
“One says you didn’t put people in absent mailboxes, so stop the count. Huh ?!”
Even a Republican-appointed federal judge in Pennsylvania questioned the validity of a Republican lawsuit Wednesday, when they challenged fewer than 100 ballots that absentee voters corrected in a county outside of Philadelphia. At a hearing Wednesday morning, the judge, Timothy Savage, did not rule, however, he suggested that the attorney for the Republican scrutiny observers was trying to deprive the votes. He noted that the lawsuit appeared to have other problems in its arguments.
Some Pennsylvania legal challenges from the Trump campaign were quickly dismissed on Election Day, with Trump touting his appeals of those losses apparently as new cases on Wednesday. For example, a Philadelphia Election Day judge had rejected a Trump campaign case regarding access to ballot processing, writing that “observers are directed only to observe and not audit ballots” and deciding that the the city’s electoral board complied with the law. Another election day challenge from the Trump campaign to the ballot observation process in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, also near Philadelphia, was dismissed by a judge, although Trump is now appealing, according to Pennsylvania court records.
Trump’s campaign attorneys also sued in Nevada on Tuesday, alleging that their observers did not have sufficient access to all aspects of the ballot counting process, from opening ballots to typing and manual signature verification and duplication of ballots. damaged ballots. A Nevada judge denied the Republican challenge to the early voting process in the Democratic-majority county.
“If this last minute lawsuit were to be successful, it would require a major change in the way we [Nevada] processed absent [ballots] to determine if the signature on the ballot matches the voter’s previous signature on file, ”said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University and CNN’s electoral law analyst. “Courts are typically unwilling to allow plaintiffs to walk in the door so late in the day and ask for major changes to a process that’s already underway.
However, a lawsuit, petitioning the United States Supreme Court within Pennsylvania’s voting deadline, can be a more serious litigation challenge. It challenges the validity of several thousand votes cast in good faith by voters, but received by post-election officials through the mail.
For this case to make a difference, Pennsylvania would have to be the decisive state for the elections, and the margin of difference between Trump and Biden would have to be a few tens of thousands of votes.
CNN’s Maeve Reston and Stephen Collinson contributed to this report.
