On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court set aside the final pending court challenge from ex-President Donald Trump over the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost.
In this case, Trump originally asked the Court to throw out the documented presidential election outcome in Wisconsin, where President Joe Biden was victorious and flipped the state after a 2016 Trump victory there. Trump wanted the Court to deliver the matter to the GOP-controlled state legislature, which he proposed would then decide how to allocate the 10 electoral votes from the state. This context is not the only occasion when this idea of state legislative intervention in the electoral process emerged, and in every instance, it’s glaringly anti-democratic. Trump was proposing to have leaders totally usurp the will of the people, setting it aside in favor of their own preference for the allocation of electoral votes after the presidential election.
Trump appealed to the Supreme Court after a rejection from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, as explained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The majority on that court concluded that Trump waited too long to launch his court challenge, because the election-related procedures that he targeted were not new. Trump wanted ballots from so-called indefinitely confined voters removed from the count, and he also sought the discarding of mail-in ballots whose envelopes had addresses filled in by election workers. Trump’s broad implication that adequate and effective security measures aren’t in place was ignorant and false, and the court observed that the “practices he questioned have long been in effect and Trump should have challenged them before the election,” as summarized by the Journal Sentinel.
Trump is still pushing the false and baseless idea that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential race, despite the fact that no court in the country ever even partially accepted the idea that fraud was responsible for Biden’s overall victory. Nevertheless, Trump has pushed his fraud claims in a Fox interview, a public statement, and at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, and Republicans have proven an eager audience for the delusional and dangerous nonsense.
