WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump says he will take the presidential election to the Supreme Court, but it’s unclear what he means in a country where vote tabulations routinely continue beyond Election Day, and states set largely the rules on when the count should end. .
“We are going to go to the Supreme Court of the United States, we want the voting to stop,” Trump said early Wednesday.
But the vote is over. It only counts what is happening throughout the country. No state will count absentee votes that are postmarked after Election Day.
The campaign of Democratic challenger Joe Biden called Trump’s statement “scandalous, unprecedented and incorrect.”
If the president follows through on his threat to go to court to try to avoid proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams ready to be deployed to resist that effort, “Biden’s campaign manager Jen OMalley Dillon said in a statement. And they will prevail.
Election law expert Richard Hasen wrote in Slate Sunday that “there has never been any basis for claiming that a ballot that arrives on time cannot be counted if officials cannot finish their count on election night.
Ohio State University electoral law professor Edward Foley wrote on Twitter Wednesday: Valid votes will be counted. SCOTUS would be involved only if there were votes of questionable validity that would make a difference, which might not be the case. The rule of law will determine the official winner of the popular vote in each state. Let the rule of law work.
In either case, there is no way to go directly to superior court with a fraud complaint. Trump and his campaign could cite problems with the way votes are counted in individual states, but they would have to begin their legal fight in a lower state or federal court.
There is a Republican appeal pending in the Supreme Court on whether Pennsylvania can count the votes that arrive in the mail Wednesday through Friday, an extension ordered by the state’s superior court despite objection from Republicans. That case does not involve votes already cast and in the possession of election officials, even if they have not yet been counted.
The high court refused before the election to discard those ballots, but conservative judges indicated they could revert to the issue after the election. The Supreme Court also refused to block an extension for the receipt and counting of absentee ballots in North Carolina beyond the three days established by state law.
Even a small number of contested votes could matter if either state determines the winner of the election and the gap between Trump and Biden is so small that a few thousand votes, or even a few hundred, could make a difference.
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