As legal challenges fly, a bumpy ride still lies ahead

WITH Donald Trump showing no sign that he will concede the election even if Joe Biden reaches 270 votes in the electoral college, attention is turning to whether the president has any workable strategy to hold on to the White House – or at least delay his eviction from it.

The president’s campaign yesterday filed a lawsuit in Nevada, the latest in a blizzard of legal efforts to stop counting in states where he has fallen behind.

Challenges have been mounted on assorted grounds, from complaints that Republican poll-watchers have been denied access to observe the handling of ballots, to claims that some of the votes should be ruled out because they did not arrive on time.

But yesterday judges in Georgia and Michigan gave the Trump campaign short shrift, throwing the cases out, and there is a fair chance the others will get similar treatment.

On election night Mr Trump said he was going to the Supreme Court and these lawsuits are the first step in what the president hopes will be a long and ultimately successful legal battle.

Experts, however, questioned whether the Supreme Court would even want to take on the cases.

“I don’t think the Supreme Court is interested in burning its political capital and they have bigger fish to fry,” said Christopher Galdieri, an associate professor of politics at Saint Anselm College.

The likeliest candidate for a Supreme Court case is Pennsylvania. Just before the election it declined to consider an appeal from the Republicans to stop postal votes being counted if they arrived up to three days after Nov 3.

But it left open the possibility of revisiting the issue after the election.

It is not a given, however, that this would affect the outcome in the state, and even if it did, Mr Biden could win the presidency without Pennsylvania.

Mr Trump hopes the Supreme Court will intervene as it did in the contested election in 2000 between Al Gore and George Bush, which dragged on for 36 days. Prolonged litigation raises a further problem because of the strict US presidential election timetable designed to ensure the occupant of the Oval Office is sworn in on Inauguration Day – in this case, Jan 20.

Electoral college votes must be agreed on Dec 14, to enable the result of the presidential election to be rubber stamped by a joint session of Congress on Jan 6. If the deadline is missed America would face what is known as a “contingent election” in which the result would be decided by the House of Representatives – as it did when Thomas Jefferson defeated Aaron Burr in 1800.

‘Trump’s lawsuits are the first step in what he hopes will be a long and ultimately successful legal battle’