US President Donald Trump called in his lawyers to shore up his dimming re-election prospects, but legal experts said the flurry of lawsuits had little chance of changing the outcome but might cast doubt on the process.

As Trump’s paths to victory narrowed, his campaign on Thursday was ramping up legal challenges and said it was planning to file its latest case in Nevada.

On Wednesday, the campaign sued in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia and asked to join a pending case at the US Supreme Court.

Experts said the litigation serves to drag out the vote count and postpone major media from declaring Biden the victor, which would have dire political implications for Trump.

“The current legal maneuvering is mainly a way for the Trump campaign to try to extend the ball game in the long-shot hope that some serious anomaly will emerge,” said Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. “As of now, we haven’t seen any indication of systematic irregularities in the vote count.”

Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a statement Wednesday the lawsuits were aimed at ensuring legal votes were counted.

“The lawsuits are meritless,” said Bob Bauer, who is part of Biden’s legal team. “They’re intended to give the Trump campaign the opportunity to argue the vote count should stop. It is not going to stop.”

Ultimately, for the lawsuits to have an impact, the race would have to hang on the outcome of one or two states separated by a few thousand votes, according to experts.

In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump asked courts to temporarily halt the vote counts because the campaign’s observers were allegedly denied access to the counting process.

The Michigan case was dismissed on Thursday but a Pennsylvania court ordered that Trump campaign observers be granted better access to counting process in Philadelphia.

At the Supreme Court, the campaign is seeking to invalidate mail-in votes in Pennsylvania that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive by the end of Friday.

In Georgia, the Trump campaign asked a judge to require Chatham County to separate late-arriving ballots to ensure they were not counted, but the case was dismissed on Thursday.

“There is no consistent strategy there,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She said the campaign was “throwing theories at a wall to see if anything sticks for long enough to muck up the waters.”

Edward Foley, who specializes in election law at the Moritz College of Law, said the cases might have merit but only affected a small number of ballots and procedural issues.

“But merit in that sense is very different from having the kind of consequence that Bush v. Gore did in 2000,” said Foley.

In that case, the Supreme Court reversed a ruling by Florida’s top court that had ordered a manual recount and prompted Democrat Al Gore to concede the election to Republican George W. Bush.

The 2000 election improbably close, with a margin of 537 votes in Florida deciding the outcome.

The campaign is still challenging late arriving mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, which according to media reports numbered in the hundreds so far, likely too few to have a meaningful impact.

In addition, it appears increasingly likely Biden can win the race even if he loses the state.

Danielle Lang, who advocates for voting rights at Campaign Legal Center, said Trump has a long history of attempting to whip up mistrust in our electoral system.

“Allegations of ‘irregularities’ — backed up by lawsuits, even frivolous ones — could potentially serve that narrative,” she said.

Experts said the lawsuits and claims of fraud might be aimed at softening the sting of being bounced from office by calling the process into question.

“The litigation looks more like an effort to allow Trump to continue rhetorically attempting to delegitimize an electoral loss,” said Joshua Geltzer, a professor at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy & Protection.

(Source: Reuters)

Democratic US presidential candidate Joe Biden is nearing 270 electoral votes after key victories in Michigan and Wisconsin, while President Donald Trump demanded a recount and threatened legal action.

Victories in those Midwestern states gave Biden a critical boost in the race to obtain the magic number of 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

Trump had won both Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016. With the count still underway, he has falsely declared victory, accusing the Democrats of trying to steal the election and vowed to fight the states in court.

“It’s clear that we’re winning enough states to reach (the) 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency,” Biden said in his home state of Delaware.

“I’m not here to declare that we’ve won. But I am here to report that when the count is finished we believe we will be the winners.”

There are five states still left uncalled, including Pennsylvania, and key small state of Nevada – meaning both Trump and Biden still have a path to victory.

Biden has so far secured 264 electoral votes while Trump stands at 214.

If Biden were to win in Nevada, which has 6 electoral votes, he would in theory have the necessary 270.

Other closely contested states including Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina were still counting votes, leaving the national election outcome uncertain.

Trump’s campaign launched lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop vote counting and demanded a recount in Wisconsin.

Trump provided no evidence to back up his claim of voting fraud and did not explain how he would fight the results at the Supreme Court. US election experts say fraud is very rare.

Source: Presstv

Tension spiralled in the still undecided US election Wednesday after President Donald Trump made unprecedented claims of fraud and demanded a recount in Wisconsin, where Democrat Joe Biden notched up another win to inch closer to overall victory.

While there was no official winner more than 12 hours after the last polls closed on Tuesday, the fate of the most divisive contest in decades was coming down to just a handful of states where the Republican incumbent and his challenger fought over razor-thin margins.

In the latest blow to Trump, Biden, 77, was declared the winner of Wisconsin, with an unsurmountable lead of 20,000 after 98 percent of ballots had been counted.

This mirrored Biden’s slow but steady march across the remaining toss-up states in the vast country, where counting was complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic and record numbers of early and mailed-in votes.

Biden led in Michigan by nearly 45,000 votes with 94 percent counted and has already been declared winner of another tight race in Arizona. Results were still being tabulated in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — all of them close contests.

The apparent shift in fortunes toward the Democrat prompted Trump, 74, to launch a tirade claiming mass fraud that he claimed on Twitter had made his victories “magically disappear.”

Trump’s campaign announced a lawsuit to try and suspend the vote count in Michigan, where it said its team was denied proper access to observe vote counting.

The campaign said it was also suing to halt the counting of votes in Pennsylvania — after the president called overnight for Supreme Court intervention to exclude the processing of mail-in ballots after the close of polls.

And it demanded a recount in Wisconsin, citing “irregularities.”

– Biden’s confidence –

The Biden camp expressed confidence, with campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon calling victory by the former vice president a “foregone conclusion.”

Biden himself was expected shortly to make a statement on the knife-edge race.

But Trump has made clear he will not accept defeat before he has exhausted every possible challenge.

During the night after polls closed Tuesday, he went on live television from the White House to claim “we did win this election” and to allege there had been “fraud on the American public.”

He later repeated his vague accusations of vote rigging on Twitter, despite a lack of any substantiated reports of meaningful irregularities during voting or counting.

“Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled,” Trump tweeted. “Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted.”

– ‘We have to be patient’ –

The tightest and messiest count could potentially unfold in Pennsylvania — the biggest prize still outstanding.

Here, Trump had a roughly 500,000 vote lead with an estimated 78 percent of the vote counted but votes were awaited from heavily Democratic parts of the state, promising to level things up.

“We have to be patient,” Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf said. “We may not know the results today.

“There are millions of mail-in ballots,” he said. “They’re going to be counted accurately and they will be counted fully.”

The Democratic governor shrugged off criticism from the White House over the slow vote count and said “our democracy is being tested in this election.”

“Pennsylvania will have a fair election,” he said. “And that election will be free of outside influences.”

The tight White House race and recriminations evoked memories of the 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

That race, which hinged on a handful of votes in Florida, eventually ended up in the Supreme Court, which halted a recount while Bush was ahead.

The US Elections Project estimated total turnout at a record 160 million voters including more than 101.1 million early voters, 65.2 million of whom voted by mail.

Source: AFP