The 2020 presidential election is all but over as President Trump continues to cling to hope through the many legal challenges his campaign is pushing forward in many of the battleground states. But even for his most fervent supporters, this is a Hail Mary into the end zone. So the question is: will it work?
After many major media outlets called the race for Vice President Joe Biden and California Senator Kamala Harris, the Trump campaign filed or backed more than two dozen different lawsuits in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona.
Prior to the race being called, President Trump delivered some remarks in the White House press briefing room, doubling down on his victory claim and even alleging “historic election interference from big media, big money, and big tech.”
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Trump said during a November 5th press conference. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late — we’re looking at them very strongly. But a lot of votes came in late.”
So what exactly are these legal challenges?
In Pennsylvania, where the Associated Press has called the race for Biden, netting 20 electoral votes on a nearly 81,000 vote margin of victory (as of November 22nd), there have been a number of challenges. In the biggest of all the lawsuits, the Trump campaign is seeking to prevent Pennsylvania election officials from certifying the results, alleging that election procedures were unfair across the state. Amongst its other lawsuits, the Trump campaign alleged that voters in Democrat-leaning regions were given more leeway to correct any mistakes on their postal ballots and that more than 680,000 postal ballots were counted without proper oversight from poll watchers. The deadline for Pennsylvania to certify the vote is November 23rd.
Similarly, in Michigan and Georgia, the Trump campaign is seeking to block the states from certifying their election results. The AP called the race for Joe Biden in Michigan, giving him 16 electoral votes on a 146,000 vote margin of victory, but did not issue a call in Georgia at the time the lawsuit was filed, where Biden is leading by the slimmest of margins of almost 14,000 votes with 16 electoral votes on the line.
If you’re wondering what the play is here, it’s as simple as this: by ensuring that these key battleground states can’t certify their votes, they’re essentially 100% erased from Biden’s win column creating a situation where neither candidate wins a majority of the electoral college votes.
If results hold, Biden would win 306 electoral votes. But if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia don’t certify their vote, they basically abstain from the electoral process altogether and knock Biden’s projected electoral college vote total to 254 –– 16 votes shy of the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency.
In the highly unlikely scenario that all three states go down this route, what happens then? This is where things get interesting and the tide turns in Trump’s favor.
Like the presidential elections in 1800 and 1824 where neither candidate won a majority of the electoral college votes, a contingent election for president will be held in the House of Representatives. Since each state House delegation gets a single vote, it would not matter if Democrats held a majority of seats, it’s all about which party controls more states. Even if Democrats control 42 out of 53 seats in California, they still only get one vote. And while all the election results have not yet been finalized, the GOP controls 26 out of 50 states for the incoming House in 2021, which would be enough to give Trump the presidency.
Given the rate of success that the Trump campaign is having with these lawsuits in court, which is quite low, unless there’s a massive bombshell of widespread voter or election fraud, it might take even more than a Hail Mary for Trump to remain president for another four years.
