PHILADELPHIA — As Republicans begin filing their court challenges in various swing states over the Election Day results, a clear legal strategy has emerged.
Democrats and some in the media say that the president and his allies are cynically raising claims of voter fraud in a last-ditch effort to retain power.
But lawyers representing Republicans are beginning to take a different route in court by raising issues with the election process itself rather than getting bogged down in specific examples of alleged voter fraud. That strategy, they believe, gives them a higher chance of success in front of judges who may choose to nullify ballots in voting precincts that failed to follow state guidelines.
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In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit on Monday asking a federal court to block the state from certifying its election results. The suit cited complaints from GOP poll watchers who said they were denied their legally guaranteed right to inspect thousands of mail-in ballots, many of which were processed in the middle of the night.
“Nothing less than the integrity of the 2020 Presidential election is at stake in this action,” the Trump campaign’s lawsuit reads. “Defendants, the very officials charged with ensuring the integrity of the election in Pennsylvania, have so mismanaged the election process that no one — not the voters and not President Trump’s campaign — can have any faith that their most sacred and basic rights under the United States Constitution are being protected.”
Multiple lawsuits are being planned in Nevada as well, with Trump’s legal team expected to ask judges to provide a remedy regarding allegations that thousands of people improperly voted in the state on Election Day. In one lawsuit, the Trump campaign claims that over 3,000 individuals who are no longer Nevada residents sent mail-in ballots in the state. Even if all those ballots were cast for Biden, Trump would still trail in the state by over 33,000 votes.
“Every time someone from the Trump campaign goes in front of the media and says ‘there’s fraud here, here, and here,’ that’s a mistake,” said one individual advising members of the Trump campaign on its lawsuits. “The focus should be on whether a fair election took place and whether people have faith that all their votes mattered. Each one of these instances show the process broke down, raises doubts about everything.”
Corey Lewandowski, an adviser to the Trump campaign, said he had evidence of a dead person voting in Pennsylvania during a press conference in Philadelphia on Sunday. Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani said the lawsuits focused on “civil rights” violations rather than specific instances of voter fraud.
Although legal challenges by the Trump campaign in Michigan have so far proven unsuccessful, sources in the state’s GOP told the Washington Examiner that the party is considering a lawsuit related to the use of Dominion Voting Systems’ technology, which, in one case, was responsible for erroneously giving 6,000 votes to presumptive President-elect Joe Biden. At the moment, Republicans are investigating other counties in the state to check if similar errors have occurred before deciding on the next steps. GOP officials have not claimed that the error, which a Michigan county executive blamed on a mistake by a clerk, is part of a broader deliberate conspiracy but rather raises questions about the integrity of the results in any districts that relied on the software to tabulate votes.
A judge tossed a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign in Georgia that asked the state to halt the counting of ballots after evidence arose that dozens were potentially mishandled by the Chatham County Board of Elections. Despite that setback, the state GOP said it plans on filing dozens more. Georgia, where Biden leads Trump by just over 12,000 votes, is set to undergo a recount.
In each of these states, the Trump campaign has been unable to show any specific instance of fraud that would have tilted the race for Biden. Those familiar with the Trump legal team’s strategy said that verifying individual votes should not be the goal but rather compelling a judge to toss out many, if not all, the ballots from a voting precinct Biden won as a result of problems with the process. In Georgia, for instance, tossing tens of thousands of votes from an Atlanta precinct would hand Trump a victory in the state.
“Free and fair elections are the corner stone of our republic,” said Missouri Attorney General Michael Schmidt, who filed a brief in support of the president’s Pennsylvania lawsuit, said in a press conference on Monday. “We have to make sure that every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is not counted.”
