WASHINGTON — After Donald Trump claimed victory in the early morning hours of 2020 election night, his campaign and supporters turned to the courts to make that claim a reality. The Trump campaign and surrogates began filing lawsuits the same day, challenging the results on various grounds, long before the final votes were counted.
The legal process and tactics could provide insight into how Trump or his allies might pursue similar efforts if he were to lose again this time.
Throughout the rest of November and into December, Trump and his Republican allies filed dozens of lawsuits in key swing states that, if successful, would have given Trump the Electoral College votes needed to remain in the White House. Their efforts extended from local district courts to the U.S. Supreme Court and were supported by both solo practitioners and attorneys general.
Of more than 60 lawsuits filed in the post-election period, Trump received a favorable ruling in only one case — the rest were ultimately dismissed, settled or voluntarily withdrawn.
About 12 hours after Trump declared victory in a 2 a.m. speech from the White House, the campaign filed lawsuits to halt the counts in Michigan and Georgia. Later that day, a third lawsuit was filed in Pennsylvania to prevent voters from “curing” mail-in ballots without ID.
More lawsuits from the campaign and Republican allies quickly followed in those states and other heated battlegrounds. In Arizona, voters and the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit claiming that thousands of people in Maricopa County had their ballots disqualified due to ink bleeding caused by Sharpies. In Nevada, Trump’s voters have filed a lawsuit after faulty signature-matching machines cast doubt on more than 100,000 mail-in votes in Clark County. In Wisconsin, Trump filed a lawsuit alleging widespread voter fraud and demanded a recount, which ultimately confirmed Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
In the days and weeks that followed, all of these lawsuits ended in losses for Trump, with the exception of his first lawsuit in Pennsylvania. That resulted in an order finding that Pennsylvania’s secretary of state had exceeded the deadline for voters to provide missing IDs for ballots received after Election Day, and by barring counties from returning ballots that were “cured” during that time ‘ could be counted. Even with that ruling, Biden still won Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes.
On November 19, 2020, nearly two weeks after all major media outlets called the election for Biden, Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis held a press conference in Washington, D.C., to present evidence that they claimed showed widespread fraud and demonstrated fraud. election interference by foreign countries.
“The number of voter fraud cases in Philadelphia could fill a library,” Giuliani said.
“What we’re really dealing with here, and it’s coming to light more and more every day, is the enormous influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and probably China in interfering with our elections here in the United States,” Powell said .
Powell’s claims at that press conference went too far even for Trump, who behind the scenes dismissed her as “crazy” and “unhinged,” according to documents in special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump on criminal election interference.
The number of new lawsuits dropped significantly in December, but Trump and his allies had not given up. A week later, Texas asked the U.S. Supreme Court for permission to file a lawsuit against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, arguing that officials in those states had made illegal changes to election laws and renewed allegations of fraud. Seventeen Republican attorneys general would add their support to Texas’ case. The justices ultimately declined to hear the case, stating that Texas had shown no “legally discernible interest in the way another state administers its elections.”
The Supreme Court, with the exception of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, has never shown any real willingness to hear other election cases that rose to their level. The justices addressed a handful of post-election challenges from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin without further explanation in an order a month after Biden was inaugurated.
“These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address the authority non-legislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle,” Thomas wrote in a dissent. “The refusal to do so is inexplicable.”
The legal efforts to keep Trump in power had failed, but the consequences of these challenges would continue to unfold for their participants in the years to come. The federal indictment against Trump cites these baseless lawsuits as evidence of his corrupt intentions to stay in power despite knowing he had lost the election. Giuliani has been suspended in New York and DC, indicted in Georgia and Arizona and ordered to turn over his Manhattan apartment and other properties to two Georgia election workers he has defamed.
Powell and Ellis have been charged in Georgia and have both pleaded guilty. Ellis was also charged in Arizona and has since agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for her charges being dropped. And dozens of ethics complaints against local attorneys who filed election challenges are still pending across the country.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
