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WILMINGTON, Delaware: President Donald Trump called in his lawyers to shore up his bleak re-election prospects, but legal experts said the spate of lawsuits had little chance of changing the outcome but could cast doubt on the process.
As Trump’s paths to victory narrowed, his campaign Thursday increased the legal challenges and brought his latest case in Nevada.
On Wednesday, the campaign filed a lawsuit in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia and asked to join a pending case in the United States Supreme Court.
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Experts said the litigation serves to prolong the vote count and postpone the mainstream media declaring Biden the winner, which would have serious political implications for Trump.
“The current legal maneuvers are primarily a way for the Trump campaign to try to spread the game in the hope that some serious anomaly will emerge,” said Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Law. “So far, we have not seen any indication of systematic irregularities in the counting of votes.”
Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said in a statement Wednesday that the lawsuits were intended to ensure legal votes were counted.
“The lawsuits are without merit,” said Bob Bauer, who is part of Biden’s legal team. “They intend to give the Trump campaign a chance to argue that the vote counting should stop. It’s not going to stop. “
Ultimately, for the lawsuits to have an impact, the race would have to depend on the outcome of one or two states separated by a few thousand votes, according to experts.
In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump asked the courts to temporarily halt vote counting because campaign watchers were allegedly denied access to the counting process.
In the Supreme Court, the campaign seeks to invalidate votes-by-mail in Pennsylvania that are postmarked on Election Day but arrive late Friday.
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In Georgia, the Trump campaign asked a judge to require Chatham County to separate late-arriving ballots to make sure they don’t get counted.
Georgia’s case was dismissed Thursday, according to the Associated Press.
“There is no coherent strategy there,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She said the campaign was “throwing theories up a wall to see if something holds up long enough to foul the waters.”
Edward Foley, who specializes in electoral law at Moritz Law School, said the cases might have merit, but they only affected a small number of ballots and procedural issues.
“But the merit in that regard is very different from having the kind of consequence that Bush had against Gore in 2000,” Foley said.
In that case, the Supreme Court reversed a Florida superior court ruling that ordered a manual recount and led Democrat Al Gore to grant Republican George W. Bush the choice.
The 2000 election improbably closed, with a margin of 537 votes in Florida deciding the outcome.
The campaign continues to challenge Pennsylvania’s late-arrival ballots, which media reports number in the hundreds so far, probably too few to have a significant impact.
Also, it seems increasingly likely that Biden can win the race even if he loses the status.
Biden is forecast to lead Michigan, according to Edison Research, and stopping the count would help Trump little, experts say.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Trump’s litigation was aimed at undermining a system that seemed poised to defeat him.
“This is a frivolous lawsuit and it really is an example of the kind of misinformation designed to sow seeds of doubt among our voters about the integrity of our electoral process,” Benson said Wednesday in an interview with MSNBC television.
Experts said the lawsuits and allegations of fraud could be aimed at easing the pain of being fired from office by questioning the process.
“The litigation looks more like an effort to allow Trump to continue to rhetorically attempt to legitimize an electoral loss,” said Joshua Geltzer, professor at Georgetown Law’s Constitutional Defense and Protection Institute.
