I have broken it down for our great minds like @Purple, @T.Vercetti, @uwesmake.
[SIZE=5]Will the Supreme Court Intervene?[/SIZE].
“We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump declared early Wednesday during a speech to supporters at the White House. Asked to parse Trump’s comment, longtime GOP election lawyer Jan Baran said: “I have no idea—and I don’t think he does either.”
In this election, the President is trailing President-elect Joe Biden in the states in question, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, by about 100,000 votes. According to SMU Constitutional Law Professor Dale Carpenter , “A much higher bar (than 2000 Bush-Gore-537 votes)_is required, because courts are going to be much less inclined to get involved and to make it look like they are changing the outcome of an election. In 2000, the Supreme Court in some sense, was simply validating what was the most likely outcome of the election, albeit a narrow one.”
Another, perhaps insurmountable, legal challenge for Trump is that even if the Supreme Court ultimately rules that a change like Pennsylvania’s three-day was unconstitutional, there are signs a majority of the court could order those ballots to be counted anyway.“I wouldn’t want to speculate on how the Court would rule, but the argument that voters relied on the rules in place on and before Election Day – and should therefore have their votes counted – is very strong,” said Dan Tokaji, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The best indication of the uphill battle Trump faces may be the Supreme Court’s approach early last month to a legal fight over a federal court order that blocked South Carolina’s requirement that a witness sign absentee ballots. Republicans prevailed in that battle, as the high court reinstated the usual rule. Supreme Court’s decision came with a seemingly minor caveat that voters who’d already sent in their absentee ballots without a witness signature wouldn’t have the absence of that held against them. The justices even added—seemingly out of thin air—a two-day grace period from their decision to allow those unwitnessed ballots to reach election officials. If the court extends that principle to the Pennsylvania case, that would mean late-arriving ballots should be recognized because voters might have mailed them on Election Day thinking they’d be counted if received in the following days.
Beyond the Pennsylvania case, if Trump wanted to use a lawsuit to challenge the election outcome in a state, he’d need to begin by bringing a case in a lower court.
Robert Kuttner: Do you think the Supreme Court will be hesitant to overturn the results of the 2020 election,
Michael Harvard Law professor Michael Klarman is a legal historian and scholar of constitutional law : The Court isn’t going to overturn the election result. The election isn’t close enough for any of Trump’s litigation to affect the result. What the president wants is to stop the counting of votes in Pennsylvania (while demanding that vote counting continues in Arizona!). But there is no legal controversy about the votes in Pennsylvania. They were received before election night. There is no question they should count. The Pennsylvania legislature should have changed the law to allow them to be counted before Election Day, as many other states permit, but Republicans in the legislature would not allow this, perhaps because they wanted to support Trump’s fraudulent claim that votes counted after election night are fraudulent.
Had the final result been closer, then the litigation would have involved issues such as whether mail-in ballots postmarked before election night but not actually received until after that day can be counted if the legislature did not authorize this, but a state court or state electoral commission did. Several of the conservative justices have implied or stated that they would buy such a legal challenge on the ground that the Constitution authorizes only state legislatures to make rules for presidential elections. It’s a pretty weak legal argument, but that hasn’t stopped some of the Republican justices from indicating they would have accepted it.
But, to repeat, the election result in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania just isn’t close enough for the Court to find any credible basis for interfering(Klarkman).
