Election 2020: A look at Trump campaign election lawsuits and where they stand
In the days after the election, election, the Trump campaign has been filing lawsuits in battleground states where the race has been extremely close.
Here’s a quick look at where the legal action stands.
Pennsylvania
The Trump campaign and its legal team have pursued several legal actions in the state.
The day after Election Day, the campaign filed a lawsuit alleging that observers were not allowed to “meaningfully” watch the vote count in Philadelphia County. A Pennsylvania judge on Thursday granted the Trump campaign’s request to observe Philadelphia poll workers as they process the remaining mail-in ballots.
The city of Philadelphia promptly filed an appeal to the state Supreme Court to overturn the decision.
Alleging that its poll watchers were not being allowed to properly observe the vote count, as previously granted, the Trump campaign filed a federal lawsuit Thursday evening intending to stop the Philadelphia vote count. A judge ultimately denied this request.
The Trump campaign filed another lawsuit the same day in state court alleging that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar illegally extended a deadline for mail-in voters to supply any missing ID requirements from Nov. 9 to Nov. 12. A judge ordered the Pennsylvania State Department to further segregate any mail-in ballots with missing voter ID information provided after Nov. 9. The judge has not ruled if the deadline should be moved back to Nov. 9, but wants the ballots segregated, and ordered that the state count them in the event she decides they are invalid.
Also the same day, the campaign’s legal team filed a motion to join a pending lawsuit brought by the Pennsylvania GOP seeking to challenge a three-day mail ballot deadline extension that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld late last month.
In response, Pennsylvania Democrats and Boockvar asked the Supreme Court to deny Trump’s request to formally join the case. In a filing Thursday evening, Boockvar argued that Trump has not provided any justification for being added at this stage.
On Friday, Pennsylvania Republicans sought an emergency order from the Supreme Court mandating that late-arriving ballots not be counted. The state Republicans argued in the filing that Broockvar’s guidance that the ballots are not showing up in the tallies is non-binding on county boards and claims that 25 of 67 Pennsylvania counties haven’t indicated whether they are abiding by it and in fact segregating the late-arriving votes.
“Without an immediate order from this Court, [Republican Party of Pennsylvania] could lose its right to ‘a targeted remedy’ if the State Supreme Court’s decision is ultimately overturned,” they wrote.
Later that day, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued an order requiring that all Pennsylvania county boards of election segregate late-arriving mail ballots, pending further order from the high court.
On Saturday, after Biden became the apparent winner of Pennsylvania — and, as a result, the apparent president-elect — Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, vowed to file a lawsuit Monday to challenge the conduct of elections officials in the state. Giuliani alleged that the Trump campaign was deprived of the ability to watch the ballots being processed. He said the campaign would make similar allegations in other states that could lead the campaign to make the case of a “massive nation-wide lawsuit.”
Later Saturday, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro informed the U.S. Supreme Court that, contrary to Republicans’ stated concerns, all of the state’s counties have been complying with the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s guidance to segregate late-arriving mail ballots. The move seemed to suggest that Alito’s order late Friday was not necessary since the counties were already doing the segregation.
On Monday, the Trump campaign filed a catchall lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania asking the court to prohibit the state from certifying the election — or at least the over 680,000 mail-in ballots cast in Pennsylvania.
The lawsuit focuses on the mail-in ballots processed in the Democratic-leaning counties of Allegheny and Philadelphia, and argues that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar “created an illegal two-tiered voting system” that subjected in-person voters to “greater burdens or scrutiny” than those who voted by mail.
Georgia
The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit along with the Georgia Republican Party Wednesday in Chatham County seeking to order the county to compile, store and account for all ballots received after the state’s deadline of 7 p.m. on Election Day.
Chatham County Judge James Bass dismissed the suit during a hearing on Thursday morning, citing a lack of evidence that the ballots referenced in the petition were received after the deadline.
Michigan
On Wednesday, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in state court asking that vote counting stop until courts can enforce rules that permit campaign observers to watch the ballots being opened and counted. The campaign alleged that poll watchers were being denied close-up access to observe vote counting at locations in Detroit.
A judge in Michigan said Thursday afternoon that she would deny the plea, largely on the basis that the counting there is already largely done.
On Friday, Judge Cynthia Stephens issued her formal order denying the Trump campaign’s request to halt counting in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, specifically citing the lack of evidence and detail provided by the campaign.
“As stated on the record at the November 5, 2020 hearing, plaintiffs are not entitled to the extraordinary form of emergency relief they have requested,” she wrote.
Over the weekend, a lawsuit was filed in Detroit by two poll observers, also known as “challengers,” alleging a wide range of fraud claims. The suits, which includes affidavits signed by five poll challengers and one City of Detroit employee, asks officials to “void the election” and order a new one in Wayne County.
Arizona
The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee filed a motion Thursday to intervene in an Arizona lawsuit that raises issues with the use of Sharpies on ballots in Maricopa County and other regions of the state. The case was brought by a woman who claims that a voting machine failed to properly read her vote after she was provided a Sharpie to fill out her ballot at her polling place.
A judge ordered parties in the case to decide on a path forward and present it to her on Friday.
The plaintiffs dropped the lawsuit without prejudice on Saturday, court records show.
In a new lawsuit on Saturday, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee allege that votes were improperly rejected, bringing up similar issues as the dismissed Sharpie lawsuit. They claim that “potentially thousands of voters across Maricopa County have been disenfranchised by systematic improper tabulator overrides.”
The Arizona secretary of state and Maricopa County elections officials have repeatedly said that Sharpies do not pose an issue for the tabulation equipment.
Nevada
On Thursday, the Trump campaign announced it was filing a lawsuit in federal court in Clark County over voter fraud. The lawsuit, filed later that day by Nevada GOP groups, alleged that “lax procedures for authenticating mail-in ballots over 3,000 instances of ineligible individuals casting ballots.”
The lawsuit sought injunctive relief directing poll workers to manually check all ballot signatures and to allow for “meaningful access” to ballot counting.
A Nevada district court judge denied the emergency request Friday afternoon. Judge James Gordon said he didn’t think the plaintiffs came to the court with “sufficient evidence” to get what is required of the “extraordinary relief of an injunction” that would get him to “dictate how Clark County should do their job.”
On Sunday, former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt and American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp held a press briefing outside the Clark County Election Department, where they provided a number of anecdotal stories of voter fraud.
Among the unverified allegations were repeated complaints about the machine used to verify voter signatures and charges that Republicans were denied the right to vote. The pair also claimed that hundreds of dead people voted in Clark County. However they said they had no legal action to announce at that time.
ABC News’ Devin Dwyer, Cheyenne Haslett, Alex Hosenball, Kendall Karson, Adam Kelsey, Soo Rin Kim, Allison Pecorin, Olivia Rubin, Benjamin Siegel, Matthew Mosk, John Santucci, Michelle Mendez and Matthew Fuhrman contributed to this report.
