Experts: Trump has little ground to challenge Pa. results
With President Donald Trump pledging to go to court Monday to challenge Democrat Joe Biden’s decisive victory in Pennsylvania, political experts say there’s little he can argue that would change the outcome.
Trump’s campaign and other Republicans have already mounted challenges to Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting system, access for poll watchers and other details of the process. Jason Harrow, chief counsel of the government reform group Equal Citizens, called them “legal shenanigans” with chances of success that are vanishingly close to zero.
“The ones in theory that could succeed are so crazy and so anti-democratic they’ve already been shot down by the Republican party,” Harrow said.
On Saturday, as Biden’s supporters took to the streets in celebration, Trump said in a statement Biden had rushed “to falsely pose as the winner” before the election results in any state had been certified. He claimed his campaign has valid legal challenges that could change the results in Pennsylvania and other highly contested swing states.
He claimed, without evidence, that the results include votes that are fraudulent, manufactured, or cast by ineligible or deceased voters.
Perhaps Trump’s strongest case led to an order Friday night by Chief Justice Samuel Alito for Pennsylvania election officials to separate mail-in ballots that arrived after polls closed Tuesday.
While the state Supreme Court said they could be counted if they arrived by Friday, Republicans argued the court overstepped its authority in the ruling.
The appeal presents a paradox for the president, said Penn State political science professor Michael Berkman.
“If Trump is behind, arguing they don’t want them counted doesn’t make much sense,” Berkman said.
And the more the margin between Trump and Biden grows as the count continues, the more likely the case is to become moot, he said.
While the Supreme Court’s ruling was seen as a victory for Trump, it could present a tactical disadvantage in any other effort to discredit the legitimacy of Pennsylvania’s election results, Harrow said.
Even before Alito’s order, Pennsylvania election officials were keeping late-arriving mail-in ballots separate from others. If they had not been segregated, it could make Trump’s case for a recount stronger.
“They haven’t polluted the vote pool. The vote pool is clean,” Harrow said.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said in a news conference outside a Philadelphia landscaping business Saturday that litigation would continue over the vote count in Pennsylvania. Giuliani said the campaign would renew its claims that poll watchers were denied meaningful access to the counting process in Philadelphia, the Bucks County Courier Times reported.
Trump’s campaign pursued those claims in state court on Election Day and won an order that poll watchers could be within 6 feet of election workers inspecting and counting ballots. A federal judge refused the campaign’s demand to stop counting in Philadelphia over the access issue and told Trump’s people and election officials to reach an agreement.
Debbie Smith, who had a Trump 2020 flag and two signs in her Morrisville, Bucks County, front yard, echoed Trump’s unfounded allegations of a rigged vote Saturday.
“I personally do not feel it was an honest win at this point. I really don’t,” Smith told Associated Press. “And if they think this is going to keep the country together, it’s not. It’s just dividing it more.”
Harrow said Trump’s persistence in his claims that the election was rigged are “pure optics,” that will permit him to never concede that Biden’s presidency is legitimate.
Throughout the campaign, Trump sowed distrust in voting by mail, saying without evidence that it would vulnerable to widespread fraud. His calls for supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully,” stoked fear of voter intimidation. Republican Party officials suggested that if the election was chaotic enough, Pennsylvania could completely disregard the result.
Pennsylvania Republican leaders, however, repudiated a suggestion floated by Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., that Republicans who control the state Legislature could bypass the popular vote by appointing pro-Trump electors to give the president the state’s 20 electoral college votes.
Harrow said that while the Constitution gives states the power to determine how electors are chosen, to change it after votes have already been cast would be illegal and seen as a coup d’etat.
In contrast to Trump’s claims, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said the election went “remarkably smoothly” with no widespread problems or irregularities.
The challenges that the Trump campaign has already launched appear stymied by simple math. Lawsuits by Trump and other Republicans to invalidate certain ballots are unlikely to erode Biden’s lead enough to make a difference, Harrow said.
“It looks like Biden could win by quite a lot,” he said. “You can’t change a margin of 100,000 with 10,000 invalid ballots.”
Trump faces a fight in as many as four states if he asks for recounts. Pennsylvania alone or any two together would give Biden the 270 electoral college votes needed to become president, Temple University political science professor Mike Sances said.
“It’s one thing to have a recount fight in one state, but to have it on a multistate front is more difficult,” Sances said. “It’s not just Pennsylvania. It’s Arizona, Nevada and maybe Georgia.”
Besides being expensive and difficult to get, Harrow said a recount is unlikely to allow Trump to overcome Biden’s lead, which continued to grow Saturday.
He noted that in the last 20 years, statewide recounts across the country have changed election outcomes by an average of 282 votes. The only time a recount changed the outcome of a presidential vote was in 1960, when Hawaii flipped from Republican Richard Nixon to Democrat John F. Kennedy, Harrow said.
“If you’re losing by 100,000, no recount is ever going to change the outcome,” he said.