Here are all the losses Trump’s campaign has faced since Election Day
By: Business Insider
Tags: President, Supreme Court, Donald Trump, Election 2020, Electoral College

By Sonam Sheth

On Monday, the Electoral College will meet to formally cast its votes for President-elect Joe Biden following the November general election.

As the day inches closer, President Donald Trump continues insisting that the election was rigged by nefarious forces like the Democratic Party, “big media,” “big tech,” and in some cases, dead communist dictators, all of whom engaged in a broad conspiracy to steal the election while simultaneously facing devastating Democratic losses down the ballot.

“This is a great and disgraceful miscarriage of justice,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced. Never even given our day in Court!”

In fact, Trump did have his day in court, multiple times, and in almost every instance, he and his allies were told to take a hike.

Here are all the losses Trump has faced since November 3:

The president is on track to lose the Electoral College, notching 232 votes compared with Biden’s 306. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency, and Biden achieved that by flipping five critical battleground states that Trump won in the 2016 election: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia. The Electoral College will formalize its votes on Monday, December 14.

Trump lost the national popular vote. He earned a little over 74 million votes compared with President-elect Joe Biden’s 81 million. Trump had the highest number of votes of any incumbent president, while Biden had the highest number of any presidential candidate.

Trump lost two recounts his campaign requested in Georgia, both of which cemented Biden’s victory in the state. An initial risk-limiting audit consisting of a hand recount of all the votes cast in Georgia’s general election also confirmed Biden’s victory. “It’s been 34 days since the election on November 3,” Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said at a news conference last week. “We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged.”

Trump lost a recount in Wisconsin after which Biden actually gained votes. The Trump campaign shelled out $3 million for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties. Trump received an additional 45 votes following the Dane recount, while Biden snagged 132 votes after Milwaukee’s recount, for a net gain of 87 votes for Biden.

The Trump campaign and Republican officials have filed nearly 40 lawsuits challenging the election results since November 3 and haven’t won a single case. While the president and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have made sweeping allegations of nationwide voter fraud and election-rigging, their lawsuits have not made the same argument. Instead, the majority of their cases focused on small irregularities with voting procedures and election administration in different states, and asked judges to throw out millions of ballots as a result.

Overall, according to the Washington Post, at least 86 judges across the country, from the state level all the way to the Supreme Court, have rejected at least one legal challenge filed by the president or his supporters. Many of the judges who threw out GOP requests to nullify the election results in different states were appointed by Trump and previous Republican presidents, and they did not mince words when dismissing the lawsuits.

In Pennsylvania, US District Judge Matthew Brann, a former senior Republican official, denied the Trump campaign’s request to invalidate millions of Pennsylvania mail ballots, issuing a blistering opinion comparing the lawsuit to “Frankenstein’s monster.”

Brann criticized the Trump legal team, led by Giuliani, for presenting the court with “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpaid in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence,” and said he would not “disenfranchise” 7 million Pennsylvania voters as a result.

A Pennsylvania appeals court panel in a 3–0 vote rejected the campaign’s request to reverse Brann’s decision. “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so,” Judge Stephanos Bibas, another Trump appointee, wrote in a sharply-worded opinion that was joined by the panel’s two other judges, both of whom are Republican appointees. “Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here. The Campaign’s claims have no merit.” Bibas added: “Voters, not lawyers, choose the President.”

In Georgia, US District Judge Steven Grimberg, another Trump appointee, rejected the Republican lawyer Lin Wood’s request to halt the certification of votes in the state, alleging that Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, hurt him as a voter by agreeing to a settlement over signature matching on ballots in March.

When dismissing Wood’s suit, Grimberg wrote, “To halt the certification at literally the eleventh hour would breed confusion and disenfranchisement that I find have no basis in fact and law.”

In Wisconsin, yet another Trump judicial appointee, US District Judge Brett Ludwig, threw out the president’s lawsuit seeking to void Biden’s victory in the state. “A sitting president who did not prevail in his bid for reelection has asked for federal court help in setting aside the popular vote based on disputed issues of election administration, issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred,” he wrote. “This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits.”

On Friday, the Supreme Court handed Trump his biggest defeat yet when it issued a terse order declining to hear a case brought by Texas that sought to throw out the election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia over unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. Trump repeatedly hyped the case as being “the big one.”

Texas’ Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed the lawsuit and was backed by 18 other GOP attorneys general as well as a majority of House Republicans. It was the most brazen and far-fetched attempt yet by the party to ignore the will of the voters, overturn the results of a free and fair election, and reinstall Trump as president.

In a one-page opinion, the Supreme Court said that “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas disagreed with the other seven justices on whether the Supreme Court should have allowed Texas to file its complaint, based on their long-held view that as a matter of judicial procedure, the Supreme Court should always hear cases in which states sue each other. But Alito noted that even if he had heard the case, he “would not grant other relief,” meaning he would have denied Texas’ request to invalidate Biden’s victory in four other states.

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