Elections in the US: Donald Trump wants to sue his way...

The Detroit counting center on Wednesday afternoon, one day after the presidential election. It is still not clear whether incumbent Donald Trump or his challenger Joe Biden won the election. Protesters have been standing in front of the congress hall in the center of the city for hours demanding that the counting of the ballot papers be stopped. When news spreads that the Trump campaign wants to take legal action against the count, Republicans cheer. Jeremy Sears is also there. He is an electrician, lives in Detroit, is 38 years old. He says he’s worried about his children’s future.

“The Covid experience showed me how quickly freedoms can be taken away from you,” he says. He couldn’t look at his son anymore without tears coming. His voice breaks. But Sears also says phrases like this: “Once they get Sharia in place, LGBT people will be kicked off the rooftops and they’ll call for help, but I’ll tell them they can piss off.”

If you google his name, you won’t find the man standing in front of the counting hall. He could be a Twitter troll, someone who anonymously spreads hateful comments on the Internet. But when he stands in front of you with tears in his eyes, it also becomes clear how afraid he is.

Misinformation from the White House

Sears is someone who can hardly be reached by traditional media. He believes what he reads on Facebook, Breitbart and Fox. Not what CNN does. Because of this, Sears thinks the Democrats stole the election. That the counting process is fraudulent. That Vice-Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris was installed by “foreign powers”. That he believes this has a lot to do with what the American president spreads on Twitter and in his speeches. He supports and feeds the conspiracy theories of his followers.

Trump said in a speech at the White House on Thursday evening that he won the election “with ease” if you “count the legal votes.” If you count the “illegal votes”, the Democrats could try to “steal” the election. In his speech on election night, he had already spoken of an alleged – unprovable – election fraud. “This is fraud against the American people. This is an embarrassment. We were ready to win this election – frankly, we won the election.”

He said, “We want the law to be properly applied. So we’re going to the Supreme Court. We want the voting to stop.” The election had already stopped by then, and Trump probably said he wanted the counting of the ballot papers to be stopped. He later wrote that on Twitter. On Thursday evening he said it would take “a lot of litigation”.

But Trump’s team cannot just go to the Supreme Court. The choice is largely governed by state law. Their courts have to call Trump’s lawyers first. (Read an interview here). His team has now sued in many states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. One allegation is that election observers were unable to properly accompany the counting of postal voting documents and that the count should therefore be stopped.

Defeats in Michigan and Georgia, minor success in Pennsylvania

Take Detroit, for example: In fact, not all people who wanted to enter the hall as election observers were actually admitted there because enough observers from both parties were already present. Trump’s team nevertheless filed a lawsuit to stop counting. Because the Republicans who were present wanted to go into the hall, security guards put up a screen. “Our campaign was not allowed to watch a count in Detroit,” said Trump on Thursday evening. That’s not true.

Both election observers and many journalists were in the hall, including SPIEGEL, TV stations reported live from the counting center. A Republican lawyer complained that the mood against party members was aggressive. The Trump team’s lawsuit after a count stop was dismissed. The judge stated that the counting of the postal voting documents had already largely been completed.

In Philadelphia, Rudy Giuliani, ex-Mayor of New York City and a friend of the president, accused the local government on Wednesday that election observers were not allowed to look at postal ballot papers. One problem is the distance rules that were introduced due to the corona pandemic. In Philadelphia, the Trump team has won a court case, now the election observers are allowed to move closer to the postal voting documents and thus to the counters.

In another Georgia trial, the Trump team was unsuccessful. In Savannah, the Trump campaign wanted 53 postal ballot papers not counted because the papers were moved after the deadline. The witnesses they called could not say, according to the news platform “Politico”, when the documents were received. Officials also said they were sure the documents had arrived before the 7 p.m. deadline. The judge said he had no evidence that the allegations were true.

Trump has been stoking distrust of postal votes for weeks

Jeremy Sears, the man in front of the Detroit census center, believes the election must have been fraudulent because he went to bed on the evening of November 3rd and Trump was ahead in Michigan. Then he woke up and suddenly Biden was lying in front. “Obviously something is going on here,” he says. Trump’s argument, who has been declaring for months that postal voting is particularly prone to fraud, sounds similar. FBI chief Christopher Wray had already rejected the president’s allegations at the end of September.

Trump sticks to it, he repeated the allegations on Thursday evening. But one of the reasons that election night and the day after it worked so well for Biden is the distrust of Republicans in the postal vote that Trump sowed. Because they often cast their votes on election day, their ballot papers were processed faster. Many states began to count these ballot papers. It was therefore expected that Trump could initially take the lead in many states.

In the important states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the postal voting documents could only be started on November 2nd (Michigan) and November 3rd (Wisconsin and Pennsylvania). That takes longer because, for example, the signatures on the documents have to be compared. Each state also has its own rules, which sometimes makes the system very confusing.

Unclear whether lawsuits could lead to success

But confusion is not a cause for complaint, and it has long been a practice that votes are counted after election day. The postal vote is constitutional. Trump cannot complain about many things, which is why many of the complaints filed so far are of a marginal nature. Trump’s comment on election night also caused irritation in the Republican party, according to the news platform “Politico”. Jan Baran, a longtime Republican attorney, said “I have no idea what he meant – I don’t think he either.”

One exception is a lawsuit in Pennsylvania, where the state’s Supreme Court had decided to accept postal votes three days after the election if they were postmarked on election day or before. Democrats and Republicans argue in court whether this rule will last. The Supreme Court was already sued, but because the Supreme Court was not fully staffed at the time, there was a stalemate of four judges versus four judges, and the Pennsylvania ruling stood.

Now the Trump campaign has officially applied to participate in the lawsuit and wants to have these votes withdrawn afterwards. Since the choice is very limited, such an approach could possibly lead to success, but it is not certain. But even if Trump asserts himself in Pennsylvania, he won’t win the election.

Another hope of the Trump campaign lies in a recount. In the 2000 election, Republican George W. Bush won the state by just 1,784 votes, which automatically led to a recount. The distance narrowed. Ultimately, however, the Supreme Court decided to prohibit the further recount, which resulted in Bush winning the state by only 537 votes ahead of Gore – and with it the presidency. The Trump team has already announced that they want to request a recount in Wisconsin. But there Biden is now leading by just over 20,000 votes. It’s hard to imagine that a recount would really lead to a different result.

Icon: The mirror