Why the lawsuits will fail
In the days leading up to the election, President Donald Trump made clear that he expected the Supreme Court to deliver him a victory. “I’m counting on them to look at the ballots, definitely,” he said at one debate with Joe Biden. Just before the election he told a crowd: “If we win on Tuesday, or thank you very much, Supreme Court, shortly thereafter.”
But his effort to convince the courts to do for him what the voters wouldn’t is not going well.
Trump’s command on Thursday morning—“Stop the count!”—is not the cry of someone who knows he’s winning.
So Trump is filing a grab-bag of lawsuits, with almost pathetically thin rationales to reverse what appear to be results shaping up in Joe Biden’s favor:
Pennsylvania. The Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits alleging that vote counting should be stopped for numerous reasons. One is that its representatives in Philadelphia couldn’t see the writing on mail ballots being processed. Another is that the state supreme court should not have ordered the acceptance of ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrived up to three days later. A third objection is to instructions given to voters for “curing” mail votes that had been temporarily disqualified.
The Trump campaign did get a court order allowing them to stand six feet away from election workers counting votes rather than the previous 20 feet, which they called an “incredible legal victory.”
Michigan. The campaign sued to stop the counting because they said they had not been granted proper access to oversee the processing of mail ballots.
■ Georgia. The campaign filed a suit alleging that mail ballots that had arrived too late were being mixed in with ballots that had arrived on time, and asked that the counting be halted. They claim that one of their poll watchers saw 53 late ballots mixed in with others.
Nevada. The campaign announced its intention to file a lawsuit claiming that dead people have voted. We do not know for whom these dead people might have cast their ballots.
The problem for Trump is that none of these suits amount to much even if they were to succeed, which most of them probably won’t.
As election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on Thursday morning, “These lawsuits are tinkering on the edges claiming potentially minor infractions; nothing which would reverse any Electoral College win for Biden.”
This is the core of Trump’s challenge: The problems he claims are occurring are too small, and the deficit that is taking shape for him right now is too large.
All of which is to say that Trump getting the courts to give him the victory he was deprived of at the ballot box is looking less and less likely with each passing hour.