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Trump Legal Efforts Falter in Bid to Undo Biden's Presumptive Victory

Masood Farivar

   U.S. President Donald Trump's legal battles to undo Democrat Joe
   Biden's presumptive victory in the Nov.3 presidential election faltered
   Friday as courts pushed back against allegations of voting
   irregularities and fraud.

   A Michigan judge rejected a bid by Republican Party supporters to
   prevent the certification of election results in the predominantly
   Democratic Detroit area, undercutting the prospects of a similar
   lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign.

   In Pennsylvania, another judge dismissed a series of Trump lawsuits
   challenging the validity of several thousand mail-in ballots, while in
   Arizona the Trump campaign dropped a lawsuit over the election results,
   acknowledging that Biden's lead was too large to surmount.

   The three states are among a half dozen where Trump and his supporters
   launched legal challenges to the results in the wake of projections
   that Biden had decisively won the election, with well in excess of the
   270 Electoral College votes necessary to claim victory.

   Legal challenges

   Trump, who had yet to concede the election to Biden as of Friday
   evening, has engaged in a battle of dubious legal challenges and
   unfounded claims on social media in a long-shot bid to overturn the
   election results. Taken together, the latest developments bode poorly
   for Trump's chances of winning the election with unsupported claims of
   rampant fraud, according to experts.

   "I think these lawsuits can best be understood as ways in which the
   president is messaging to his base that he is contesting the results of
   the election and is continuing to try to fight to overturn the
   results," said Louis Caldera, distinguished adjunct professor of law at
   the American University Washington College of Law.

   He added that this was "not a serious effort to actually change the
   voting outcome in sufficient numbers of states to be able to collect
   the Electoral College votes that it would be necessary for him to win
   the election."

   The Michigan lawsuit, filed Sunday by a conservative group, sought to
   have hundreds of thousands of ballots in Wayne County tossed because of
   alleged fraud and voting irregularities. According to unofficial
   results, nearly 73% of the 565,484 votes in Wayne County went to Biden.
   The petitioners asked a judge to order an independent audit and an
   entirely new election.

   But Chief Judge Timothy Kenny of the 3rd Circuit Court in Wayne County
   ruled that the allegations of "sinister fraudulent activities occurring
   both openly '¦ and under the cloak of darkness" were contradicted by
   other poll challengers and officials, including a former "highly
   respected" state election official.

   Stopping the certification process now would amount to "an
   unprecedented exercise of judicial activism," Kenny wrote in his order,
   while conducting an independent audit would delay the vote tabulation
   and "undermine faith in the electoral system."

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