Mo Brooks said this week that he would challenge the Electoral College vote, garnering a “thank you” tweet from Trump.īut for that to work, Trump would have to convince both chambers of Congress to reject the results, an extremely unlikely scenario, particularly in the Democrat-controlled House. Green said it was possible Trump was hoping to use these court fights to angle for a political solution - for instance, to convince members of Congress to reject slates of electors in states that Biden won. Green said it was a “strong-slash-insurmountable burden” for an election challenger to convince a court to undo results after a state had certified them and the safe harbor deadline passed. The remaining cases brought by Trump and Republican challengers - which he described as “factually inaccurate,” “grotesquely implausible,” and “fishing expeditions” - did not come close to meeting that bar, he said. Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School said that for any court to consider the extreme step of invalidating election results at this stage, a case would need to present a “real meaningful question” about whether ballots were invalid and at a scale that would change the outcome. 20, 2021, stressed that such scenarios were extremely unlikely. The federal Electoral Count Act accounts for situations where there are competing slates of electors - if, for instance, a state certified results by the safe harbor deadline, but a court later invalidated those results and ordered a different slate of electors to be sent to Congress.īut election law experts who patiently gamed out for BuzzFeed News all the hypothetical legal paths that Trump and his supporters could pursue between now and Biden’s inauguration on Jan. Judges can still rule on election challenges after Dec. The campaign quickly filed appeals in county circuit courts later that day and sent a letter requesting a fast timeline “to avoid any delay.” Trump’s lawyers wrote that “given the time limitations inherent in the election for President,” they were prepared to submit all briefs and evidence by Dec. 3, the court ruled 4–3 that the campaign couldn’t jump ahead and had to go through the standard appeal process. 1 - one week before the safe harbor deadline - it attempted to skip the lower courts and bring a challenge to hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots in Milwaukee and Dane counties (the state’s largest and most racially diverse counties) directly to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Trump’s campaign has focused its attention more recently on Wisconsin. To help keep this news free, become a member. BuzzFeed News has journalists around the US bringing you trustworthy stories on the 2020 elections. The court agreed to expedite the case and ruled against Trump in a 3–0 decision just five days later. 22 that it was “critically important” for a federal appeals court to hear the case before the deadline, which at that point was 16 days away. In the campaign’s failed constitutional challenge to Biden’s win in Pennsylvania, Trump’s lawyers argued on Nov. ![]() It has pushed courts to rush to consider cases by then. 8 deadline is key to the fate of its legal challenges. Trump’s campaign has conceded that the Dec. I think it would only happen or be successful if some kind of wild evidence of just unbelievable scale were unearthed that was credible.” “It’s going to be a heavy lift to convince a judge to defy federal deadlines. “The doors close significantly after the safe harbor deadline passes,” said Rebecca Green, codirector of the Election Law Program at William & Mary Law School. Judges are already wary of injecting legal uncertainty into the election and causing chaos and will be even more reluctant to do so after the deadline passes. The fact that lawsuits are pending won’t prevent states from getting the benefits of certifying results by that date, according to election law experts. ![]() Tuesday marks the “safe harbor” deadline - the date when states must certify results if they want protection under federal election law against Congress stepping in to decide which candidate gets their electoral votes. A key date in the federal election timeline next week will make it even harder for Trump and his supporters to convince any court to take dramatic steps that would upend Biden’s victory. ![]() Trump has vowed to press baseless allegations that the election was tainted by widespread fraud - his campaign filed another round of legal challenges in Wisconsin on Thursday - but his own lawyers have acknowledged that they’re up against a narrowing window. 3, President Donald Trump and Republicans have not persuaded any judge to invalidate a significant number of ballots, let alone flip a state that President-elect Joe Biden won - and they’re running out of time. WASHINGTON - One month and dozens of failed election challenges since Nov.
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