President Trump seemed to have little way through the courts to shift the outcome of the political elections, leaving him dependent on long shots like recounts or pressure on state legislatures.
On Friday, elections workers were counting ballots in Philadelphia.
The vote count in Pennsylvania shifted in the favor of ex-Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Friday morning.
President Trump’s aggressive pledge to battle the outcome of the political elections in the courts struck on Friday into skeptical judges, intimidating Electoral College math, and a lack of proof for his claims of fraud.
On a day that started with vote counts in Georgia and Pennsylvania shifting in Joseph R. Biden Jr’s. favor, Trump’s campaign announced, “This election is not over,” as the Republican National Committee declared it had initiated “legal channel teams” in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And the Trump forces named a new general to direct the battle, David Bossie, the hardened conservative political combatant.
Yet, none of the dozen or so lawsuits they had brought in battleground states seemed to be gaining any traction in the courts. Moreover, none appeared likely to give Trump the edge he would require in vote counts in the states that will decide the result.
In looking to stir up widespread uncertainty about the legitimacy of the political election, Trump and his surrogates appeared to be less focused on meaningful legal arguments that could hold up in court than on supporting the president’s political narrative, unsupported by facts, that he was some way or another being robbed of a second term.
The high-profile step of the day came when Pennsylvania Republicans requested the U.S. High Court to step in and require election officials in the state to segregate ballots that showed up after Election Day and not to include them for now in the vote totals in the biggest and most pivotal of the swing states.Trump Elections
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. agreed to the request on Friday evening.
Yet the move was mostly for show: Pennsylvania is already segregating those ballots, counting them separately and excluding them in the announced vote totals. The secretary of state, over the objections of Republicans and Trump, has stated they can be counted if they showed up by 5 p.m. on Friday, in accordance with a state court ruling that the Supreme Court has left open the likelihood of reviewing once more.
A state official stated the ballots being referred to number in the thousands but not tens of thousands.
Their lack of progress in halting the count or presenting a convincing case for large-scale ballot fraud left Trump and his group increasingly dependent for political salvation on recounts — which seemed likely to happen in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin but which infrequently bring about huge swings in vote counts.
The Trump effort might Trump Elections be getting a lift from the state legislature in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which are both controlled by Republicans. In Wisconsin, Robin Vos, the speaker of the State Assembly, led a legislative committee to “utilize its investigatory powers” to hold a review of the political election, again raising the specter of voter fraud without submitting specific proof.
In Pennsylvania, the two top Republicans in the legislature approached Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, to lead “an immediate audit” of the political election.
with IANSinput
