- If President
Donald Trump wants to use lawsuits to win the 2020 presidential election, he'll need to make up a gap of about 45,000 votes inPennsylvania . - A Supreme Court case over late-arriving ballots could throw out some votes that leaned toward President-elect Joe Biden.
- Even if Trump is victorious on that front, there simply aren't enough votes to make up his loss margin in Pennsylvania.
USPS 's failure to deliver ballots in Pennsylvania quickly enough didn't seem to have enough of an impact either. Just a few thousand were recorded as arriving late — far short of the numbers Trump would need.
Even before media outlets called the 2020 presidential election for President-elect Joe Biden, President Donald Trump and his campaign were gearing up for a fight.
They would go to the courts, they said, hoping to swing the election their way.
The campaign has filed about a dozen legal challenges over election rules in states across the country. The heart of its strategy is a case pending before the Supreme Court over mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, the state that gave Biden enough electoral votes for victory.
Even if Republicans prevail in the case, it's extremely unlikely that it would affect the presidential-election results. And the much-feared delays in the US Postal Service likely won't matter either.
Ballots in Pennsylvania are still being counted. But for Trump to claw back his lead, he'd need to win about 45,000 more remaining votes than Biden, according to Decision Desk HQ, and the margin could increase.
The numbers just aren't there for Pennsylvania
Normally, it could take weeks to get a high-profile case to the Supreme Court. The Trump campaign, if it believed it had an actionable federal lawsuit on its hands, would have to go through a federal district court, and then an appeals court, and then the Supreme Court.
In this case, they're attempting to latch on to an existing Supreme Court case brought by the Republican Party of Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended the 2020 election-ballot deadline so that mail-in ballots would still be counted if they were postmarked by Election Day on November 3 but arrived at ballot-processing centers by November 6. The state Republican Party went to federal courts to try to rescind the extended deadline, arguing the state Supreme Court didn't have the authority to grant such an extension.
After failing at a district court and an appeals court, Republicans brought the case to the US Supreme Court, which gave a 4-4 ruling. The deadlock meant the ruling from the federal appeals court that upheld the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision would stand.
With Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump nominee, now confirmed to the Supreme Court, the Pennsylvania Republicans appealed again, hoping the case would swing their way.
After the election, Trump filed a motion trying to join their case, though the Supreme Court hasn't yet granted his intervention.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar is "segregating" the ballots that arrived in the mail between 8 p.m. on November 3 and 5 p.m. on November 6, in case the Supreme Court ultimately decides to throw those ballots out.
It's likely that Trump hopes the Supreme Court will force the state to reject those votes. Mail-in votes in the state leaned Democratic — unsurprising given Trump's promotion of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and
Even if the Supreme Court sided with Republicans, that wouldn't necessarily disqualify the segregated ballots.
"There's a legitimate argument that the state, based on its high court, ruled that due to the problem of the Postal Service, there's a need for the ballots to come in," Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who studies election litigation, previously told Business Insider. "The Supreme Court declined to stop that but did not decide on the merits."
The court may rule the Pennsylvania Supreme Court didn't have the authority to extend the arrival deadline for mail-in ballots but still conclude voters didn't do anything wrong, and that therefore their ballots should be counted.
"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," Daniel Tokaji, the dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School, told Politico.
If the ballots are thrown out, there probably aren't enough to swing the election.
Remember, Trump would need about 45,000 outstanding votes to go his way. Boockvar has said that larger counties have reported a few hundred late-arriving ballots at most, and some smaller ones have reported getting zero.
"Unless it's super close, I don't see them making or breaking this one way or another," Boockvar told CNN on Thursday.
USPS didn't do much to help Trump, either
Before the election, there was much concern over the speed at which ballots would be delivered.
Progressives worried that
Those worries did not materialize at a scale that would substantially affect the election. Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the NAACP and a consortium of other civil-rights groups, we have some transparency into how USPS has handled election mail. Every day in court, USPS has filed pages and pages of charts showing how much election mail it has delivered in different areas of the country.
It has not all been smooth sailing. USPS officials testified postal workers handled ballots in a way that circumvented the agency's data-recording process to speed up the handling of mail ballots. They sometimes handed the ballots directly to ballot-processing centers, skipping a step that would ensure they were recorded in USPS's official numbers.
All in all, it looks like the USPS delivered 150,000 ballots after Election Day across the country. Late deliveries aren't necessarily a problem everywhere, since plenty of states accept ballots late as long as they are postmarked on time.
In Pennsylvania, the Postal Service counted 3,439 ballots arriving Wednesday and 1,459 arriving Thursday. Numbers for Friday aren't available yet. That's a lot of ballots, and the numbers are more precise than the ones Boockvar talked about in her CNN interview.
But even if every single one of those votes were for Trump, they still wouldn't be enough to swing the election his way.
- Read more:
- How Trump's uphill legal battle against Biden over the election results could play out
- Pennsylvania, Texas, and Minnesota are setting aside some of their ballots in case a judge throws out the votes. Here's why.
- Here are the legal challenges Trump's campaign has filed to contest the 2020 election results