US elections: Donald Trump faces uphill battle to reach Supreme Court

Donald Trump continues to publicly insist that the outcome of the US election is premature and has repeatedly said that he will fight in court. And according to four Trump advisers, the president and his team have already laid out their plan of attack.

Speaking to Axios, Trump’s campaign team said it plans to “brandish obituaries” of people who are dead but allegedly voted. The obituaries of those who apparently voted for Joe Biden will be part of “specific pieces of evidence” in Trump’s court battle to delegitimize the election results. Trump’s team has yet to provide any evidence of election fraud and corruption related to the US elections, and their claims are unsubstantiated.

The president’s possible fight on the Supreme Court to dispute Biden’s victory in the presidential election is shaping up to be a brutal battle, but two sources have told Fox News that Trump would grant and execute a peaceful transfer of power if legal challenges fail. they can change the situation. election result.

Minutes after the US media declared Biden the winner, the president rejected his conclusion and said he would 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.”

The president and his supporters believe they have a chance with their legal battles mainly because of the electoral battle between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000, which was based on a recount in one state: Florida. With Bush leading by just 537 votes in Sunshine State, and troubled with state ballots, Gore’s campaign sought a statewide recount. The Bush campaign appealed to the US Supreme Court, which ultimately failed to block a full recount, handing Florida – and the election – to Bush.

Experts say such lawsuits are only practical if they focus on a real problem and the vote gap is narrow. In states contested by Trump, like Pennsylvania, the vote count is much broader. Professor Richard Hasen, an electoral law expert at the University of California, said: “Trump’s litigation strategy is going nowhere. It is not going to make a difference in the outcome of the election.”

If a campaign or candidate files a lawsuit under state regulations, they must first exhaust their options in the state justice system before going to federal court and the United States Supreme Court. By leveraging the existing ballot extension case, the Trump campaign has increased its chances of reaching superior court.

One case would bring into the limelight the political leanings of the court’s six conservative and three liberal justices, especially about Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the court only last month after being nominated by Trump and receiving a hearing from accelerated confirmation of Republicans in the Senate. Trump said he rushed her appointment in part so she could be there to hear any election cases.

But since the 2000 elections, the Supreme Court has been cautious about getting involved in voting matters that are decided by the states, aware that it risks its position as an independent body, especially since it effectively handed over the presidency to Bush 20 years ago. years.

Trump’s campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh previously tweeted photos of the campaign headquarters, covered in a Photoshopped 2000 article that claimed Al Gore had won the presidency. The tweet, which has since been deleted, read: “Say hello to @TeamTrump headquarters staff this morning, a reminder that the media does not select the president.” Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler found the real version, which shows the opposite: that Bush won.

Trump’s campaign demands attack a unique aspect of the 2020 election: millions of voters cast ballots by mail due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Covid-19 threat forced states to promote the sending of ballots by mail and change the rules on how they would be collected, verified and tabulated. That included extending the periods for receiving ballots, due to an overloaded United States Postal Service, adding time for vote counting. Republicans say some of those changes were decided or implemented incorrectly and in ways that favor Democrats.

In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign said it would join an existing Republican lawsuit over extending the state’s deadline for receiving mail-in ballots. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the extension is legal, but the US Supreme Court has still refused to get involved. If successful, they have the potential to disqualify tens of thousands of ballots that arrived after November 3.

In one respect, Trump is right: Legal votes do decide who becomes president. The election will not actually end until each state formally certifies its vote, and this will take place over the next several 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.

It is highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will move to overturn the election results, as most states register thousands of additional votes for Biden. The Trump campaign legal team is in an uphill battle.