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Judges in the battlefield states of Georgia and Michigan were quick to dismiss Trump’s campaign demands overnight, undermining a legal campaign strategy to attack the integrity of the voting process in states where the The result could mean the defeat of President Donald Trump.
A judge’s gavel in a courtroom Source: Thinkstock
The rulings came as Democrat Joe Biden approached the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.
In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, the Trump campaign won an appeal ruling to bring party and campaign watchers closer to poll workers processing mail-in ballots in Philadelphia.
But the order did not affect the vote counting that is taking place in Pennsylvania.
Biden’s campaign attorney Bob Bauer called the Republican legal challenges unfounded.
“I want to emphasize that for their purposes these demands do not have to have merit. That is not the purpose … It is to create an opportunity for them to send false messages about what is happening in the electoral process,” Bauer said. overnight, accusing the Trump campaign of “continually alleging irregularities, system failures and fraud without any foundation.”
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Mark Gilbert says he believes Joe Biden will be the next president and that he will work with both sides of the political spectrum. Source: Breakfast
Biden said yesterday that the count should continue in all states, adding: “No one is going to take away our democracy, not now, not ever.”
But Trump campaign officials have accused Democrats of trying to steal the election, even though there is no evidence that anything like that is happening.
Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien, in a call with reporters yesterday, said that “every night the president goes to bed with a clue” and every night new votes “are mysteriously found in a sack.”
Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said additional legal action was expected and that it would focus on giving campaign officials access to places where ballots were counted.
“We will literally go through each and every ballot,” he said of the recount in disputed Nevada.
The Trump campaign has also announced that it will request a recount in Wisconsin. Stepien previously cited “irregularities in multiple Wisconsin counties,” without providing details.
The Associated Press called Wisconsin and Michigan yesterday for Biden. The AP has not called Georgia, Nevada or Pennsylvania.
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Some protesters are calling for vote counting to stop, while others want all votes to be counted, reports Anna Burns-Francis of 1 NEWS from Washington, DC. Source: Breakfast
The Pennsylvania and Michigan complaints largely involved campaign observers’ access to locations where ballots are processed and counted.
The Georgia case addressed concerns about 53 absentee votes in Chatham County. It was dismissed by a judge after election officials in the Savannah-area county testified that all of those ballots had been received on time. Campaign officials previously said they were considering similar challenges in a dozen other counties in the state.
Meanwhile, the vote counting has been extended until Thursday, US time. In all elections, the results reported on Election Night are unofficial and the ballot count extends beyond Election Day. This year, states were grappling with a flood of mail-in ballots fueled by fear of voting in person during a pandemic.
Ballots by mail usually take longer to verify and count. And the results were expected to take longer this year because there are so many vote-by-mail ballots and a close race.
Lawsuits the Trump campaign filed yesterday in Michigan and Pennsylvania called for a temporary halt to the count until he is granted “meaningful” access in numerous places and allowed to review ballots that have already been opened and processed.
The AP’s Michigan call to Biden came after the lawsuit was filed. The president has the upper hand in Pennsylvania, but his margin is shrinking as more mailed ballots are counted. The state had 3.1 million mail-in ballots, and a court order allows mail-in ballots to be counted until tomorrow if they are postmarked Nov. 3.
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He’s still too close to call a winner between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in six states. Source: Breakfast
In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign complained Wednesday that its observer could not get close enough to poll workers to see the writing on the ballot envelopes to ensure the envelope contains a signature and the name and address. of an eligible voter. Ballots without such information could be challenged or disqualified.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said in a CNN interview that the Trump campaign lawsuit was “more of a political document than a legal document.”
“There is transparency in this process. The count has continued. There are observers watching this count, and the count will continue,” he said.
Michigan’s lawsuit alleged that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, was allowing absentee ballots to be counted without teams of bipartisan and opposition observers. Michigan Democrats said the lawsuit was unlikely. Election watchers from both sides were plentiful yesterday at one of the major polling places in question, the TCF Center in Detroit, the AP noted.
Trump’s comments to supporters in the White House earlier yesterday about taking the indecisive race to the Supreme Court were difficult to decipher, but they did evoke a repeat of the court’s intervention in the 2000 presidential election, which ended with a decision that effectively handed over the presidency to George. W. Bush.
But there are important differences with respect to 2000 and they are already in sight. In 2000, Republican-controlled Florida was in critical condition, and Bush held onto a small lead. Democrat Al Gore called for a recount and the Supreme Court stopped him.
For some electoral law experts, asking for the Supreme Court to intervene now seemed premature, if not rash.
A case would have to come to court from a state where the outcome would determine the winner of the election, wrote Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, on the Election Law blog. The difference between the candidates’ vote totals should be less than the ballots at stake in the lawsuit.
“From this point on (although things may change), neither condition appears to be met,” Hasen wrote.
