President Donald Trump has vowed to fight his apparent election loss to Joe Biden, but legal experts say he doesn't have a chance.
The president's campaign has filed lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania challenging some of the ballots and the vote-counting process, but suits in Georgia and Michigan were already rejected because they lacked enough evidence to persuade a court, reported The Guardian.
“They all seem to have no merit whatsoever,” said Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky. “I think the goal is to sow discord and distrust and undermine the people and the integrity of the election. I think giving them additional airtime just plays into that theory.”
Trump has demanded an end to vote counting as Biden builds up leads with mail-in ballots, which the president had driven his supporters away from during the campaign, and now his campaign is filing a flurry of lawsuits to block them.
“It could be reflex," said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "On most people, if you hit their patellar tendon with a small rubber mallet, you get a knee jerk. With Trump, it’s possible that if you hit his patellar tendon with a small rubber mallet, you get a lawsuit."
So far, the challenges have met little success, although some of Trump's supporters have called the results into question.
“It could be a misguided sense that this sort of litigation will cast enough doubt on the election process that it somehow ends up in a declaration by the courts that undoes the will of the people (in the event that the count doesn’t go his way),” Levitt said. “I think there are a lot of missing steps between filing a lawsuit and that final declaration.”
