GOP Abandons 4 Additional Election Lawsuits In Blow To Trump

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Republicans keep failing to prove their claims that widespread fraud plagued the recent presidential election that Donald Trump decisively lost. Now, Trump allies in four states around the country have dropped the court cases that they brought challenging the results of the election. In one of the cases, in Michigan, voters sought to have the presidential election results from three entire counties invalidated on the basis of their false claims of fraud. Conservative attorney James Bopp Jr. backed all four of the newly dropped lawsuits, CNN reports.

Besides Michigan, the newly dropped court cases challenging Biden’s win emerged in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Biden won all four states, flipping them away from Trump after the outgoing president won them in 2016. CNN notes that the lawsuits all “fed into a pro-Donald Trump legal strategy that’s almost certain to fail to block Biden’s presidential win before the Electoral College formalized it.” On the heels of court losses for Republicans around the country, Trump has tried to distance himself from many of the cases, but even if his name isn’t on the plaintiffs list, these failing court cases are clearly emerging from Trump’s own political coalition. It’s his side that is repeatedly losing.

After CNN asked Bopp why he was dropping the suits, he replied that “because of [attorney-client] privilege and because I do not telegraph my next moves, I cannot comment.” In the filing announcing the Republicans’ abandonment of their claims in Michigan, the plaintiffs did not admit to the consistent failure of the GOP to prove their claims of widespread fraud. Nevertheless, the Department of Homeland Security itself has characterized the recent election as the “most secure in American history,” which doesn’t exactly leave any room for argument. The same federal security officials have conclusively confirmed that there’s “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” refuting Trump’s recent claim that millions of his votes had been “deleted.”

Recently, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a lawsuit from some Pennsylvania voters who were challenging an extended deadline for receiving mail-in ballots for counting in the state. Under this extended deadline, ballots could arrive back to authorities up to three days after Election Day and remain valid, although voters still needed to send their ballots by Election Day itself. Republicans have alleged that the deadline extension was out of line because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rather than the state legislature implemented it.

The Third Circuit Appeals Court concluded that the voters in the recently rejected case didn’t have the legal standing to bring their challenge to the state’s electoral process in the first place — although even if they did, the court added that they would not have ruled in their favor and thrown out the post-Election Day ballots. The Third Circuit Court’s conclusion that the Pennsylvania voters didn’t have the legal standing to bring their claims could undercut cases brought by other voters under similar pretenses.

Amidst this flurry of losses, Trump’s claims of election fraud have gotten extreme and unhinged. He recently claimed that “millions of ballots… have been altered by Democrats, only for Democrats” — but, again, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that there’s “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” That’s unequivocal!