https://time.com/5908881/president-trump-cant-sue-his-way-to-a-second-term-why-he-is-trying-anyway/
Shortly after the Associated Press projected that Joe Biden would win
enough electoral college votes to defeat President Donald Trump, Trump
released a statement saying that his campaign would go to court Monday to fight the outcome.
“Networks don’t get to decide elections,” Trump’s personal attorney,
Rudy Giuliani, said later at a press event at a landscaping company in
Philadelphia, “Courts do.”
That is, of course, not the case. With the notable
exception of the 2000 presidential race, which was effectively decided
by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, it is voters who decide
elections. And that, legal experts say, is the main flaw with Trump’s
strategy: Biden has won too many votes for the Trump campaign to mount
any legal challenge that would actually change the outcome.
For an election to be successfully litigated,
experts say, the margins between the candidates have to be exceedingly
close. The dispute between George W. Bush and Al Gore two decades ago,
for example, hinged on just 537 votes in Florida. Election litigation is
only consequential, says Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law
School, “if the number of contested ballots exceeds the margin of
victory.”
So why pursue a legal strategy that seems so clearly destined to
fail? For Trump, some observers say, the goal may not be to win the
election so much as to cast a pall of uncertainty over the results,
thereby encouraging the perception, however unfounded, that he is the
victim of fraud and remains the rightful leader of his fervent base.
“This is all looking increasingly like disinformation through
litigation, rather than plausible legal claims,” says Joshua Geltzer, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law.
