Government

Trump Campaign Charges Into Court To Stop Vote Based On Latest Internet Rumors

Garbage in, garbage out.

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What stage of grief is this?

“Plenty of proof – just check out the Media” is perhaps a suboptimal legal strategy. But it appears to be the one the Trump campaign is going with. Here’s the president’s pro bono lawyer Rudy “It Was a Tuck” Giuliani laying it out yesterday in Philadelphia.

Don’t answer that!

The Trump campaign has filed a bevy of small bore lawsuits to try to “STOP THE COUNT!” as Trump has repeatedly demanded. This morning Judge James Bass of the Superior Court of Chatham County Georgia tossed a suit filed by the campaign and the state’s Republican party because a witness who thinks he saw a stack of 53 absentee ballots that may or may not have arrived after the deadline and may or may not have gotten commingled with timely votes is insufficient evidence for an injunction to halt vote tabulation.

The Trump team has had what the president referred to as a “Big legal win in Pennsylvania!” By which he means that a state court ordered elections officials to let poll watchers stand a little bit closer as the votes are counted. The Trump team has pinned its hopes on getting late-arriving ballots tossed with an assist from the Supreme Court. But if Biden winds up with a 100,000 vote lead when Philadelphia and Pittsburgh’s absentee ballots are finally counted, a handful of late votes probably won’t make a difference.

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Trump ally Matt Schlapp, a veteran of the original Brooks Brothers riot and president of the American Conservative Union, has been flogging an internet conspiracy that contends poll workers deliberately invalidated Republican ballots by having voters fill them out with Sharpie pens.

Here on Planet Earth, the voting machines read felt tip pens just fine, and this is a totally made up controversy. Nevertheless, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group, has filed suit to put a stop to the vote tabulation in Arizona.

In Michigan, Donald J. Trump (apparently in his personal capacity) and a poll watcher sued Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to gain access to videotapes of every drop box and to halt the vote count based on vague allegations that this individual poll watcher was at some point improperly excluded from the counting process.

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Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens bounced them out of Zoom court this morning because (a) Secretary Benson already told the individual elections boards to comply with the law, (b) it’s unclear that Benson herself has access to the video feed from every drop box, so the plaintiffs can go ask the individual elections boards for it if they’re that curious, and (c) even if Secretary Benson had all the tapes in her purse, there’s no statutory requirement that she hand them over to the campaign.

Meanwhile in Nevada, the Trump campaign dream team called a press conference this morning to announce a lawsuit challenging 10,000 “illegal voters” in the Silver State.

As the Nevada Independent points out, state law does provide a procedure to challenge the eligibility of a voter. Unfortunately, if the campaign’s legal team bothers to read the fine print of NRS 293.535, they’ll find that “An affidavit filed pursuant to paragraph (a) of subsection 1 must be filed not later than 30 days before an election.”

In the event, former Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell (who initially refused to give his name to reporters, despite wearing a Team Trump “Grenell” sweatshirt to the event) failed to provide proof of any widespread vote fraud. And the one facially credible allegation he made was swiftly debunked by NBC.

There was also this bizarre exchange where Grenell insisted it was the Clark County Board of Elections job to prove that they weren’t clocking ten thousand “illegal” votes, not his job to back up his allegation with evidence.

We were given to understand that “the Media” had all the proof that these lawsuits weren’t just performative garbage meant to stall the count so that the election isn’t called for Biden. So confusing!

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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