Several of the key members of the team that helped deliver the presidency for
Trump has claimed he won based on early leads in Pennsylvania and other battleground states. But those leads evaporated as mail-in ballots were counted, so his campaign began filing multiple lawsuits to invalidate those ballots. The campaign has said it plans to seek a recount in Wisconsin and hopes to stop certification of the results in Pennsylvania and Michigan that would make Biden’s win official.
But several members of Bush’s team in 2000 predict this election won’t be overturned because of the size of Biden’s lead in multiple states and a lack of evidence on which to base any claims.
“You can’t just say, ‘This election’s tainted, throw it out,’” said
“I do believe the election is over,” Olson said at a Federalist Society event last week. “We do have a new president.”
Olson also wrote an
Even
“The president’s efforts are unlikely to move a single state from Mr. Biden’s column, and certainly they’re not enough to change the final outcome,” Rove said.
Trump’s campaign and its supporters have argued in lawsuits filed in Pennsylvania and Michigan that Republican observers were kept too far away from the ballot-counting process to see whether there was fraudulent activity. But courts are unlikely to throw out votes based on minor irregularities that don’t affect enough votes to change the election results. And on Sunday, the Trump campaign withdrew its request that the court do so in Pennsylvania.
“If the court were to overturn this election on that basis, they’d be disenfranchising many thousands of voters just because somebody said there was some irregularity in a particular place,” said
Not all members of the Bush legal team in Florida are saying Trump has no path. Texas Senator
The Trump campaign has sued to stop Pennsylvania from certifying results based on the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution -- which was at the heart of Bush v. Gore. Republicans argue that largely Democratic counties allowed voters to fix mistakes on their mail-in ballots and Republican counties didn’t. But the Florida case was different because it involved ballots being counted differently by different counties, Richard said.
Lawsuits from Republicans alleging various ballot irregularities have
Some conservative commentators are still holding out hope that Trump campaign lawsuits in one or more states needed to flip Biden’s advantage in the Electoral College can still reach the U.S. Supreme Court to decide the race, as in 2000.
But that case revolved around counting in Florida after the presidency came down in just one state. And the margin was only 537 votes -- close to enough to require the recount that produced the litigation. Now, Biden leads by tens of thousands of votes in some states.
The idea of the Supreme Court intervening this year to sway the election is wishful thinking, Ginsberg said.
“With the paucity of proof that’s been presented so far, it’s not remotely realistic,” he said.
(Updates with other Republican lawyers on case in 12th paragraph.)
--With assistance from
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Max Berley
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