US Election: Where things stand at this hour. By William Jacobson.
Democrats organized for a mail-in election, Republicans didn’t. Republicans were out-organized, out-hustled, and out-lawyered.
Back to Wisconsin. … The court voted 4-3 … to deny Trump’s challenge to clearly defined categories of votes that allegedly were cast in violation of Wisconsin law based on misguidance by the Wisconsin election commission. The majority never analyzed the merits for most of the claims, it declared that it was too late, “laches” just like the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
I raise this issue because Wisconsin was the clearest case of one judicial problem Trump faced. The remedy was too much for any court to grant. As I cautioned many times, no court was going to disallow thousands (and in some cases millions, such as PA) of votes which technically may have been unlawful, but were cast by people who thought they were voting lawfully and who were following the procedures of election authorities. …
Technical arguments, while possibly legally correct, were not going to, and did not, persuade a majority of any appellate court to grant the relief sought. …
A big part of the problem was the truncated electoral college timetable. … Trial court judges expected Trump or his proxies to come into court with conclusive evidence of fraud at the get-go, while eschewing the normal documentary and testimonial discovery process that would take months or years. I think it’s fair to say Trump never got his evidentiary day in court because of this truncated process, but it’s also fair to say that the law requires that election disputes — particularly presidential disputes — be resolved quickly and that only definitive proof of fraud affecting the result gets you past go. …
As to the Supreme Court, the unanimous decision was to deny Texas any relief (7 Justices voted against even allowing the filing, Alito and Thomas would have allowed the filing but denied relief). Alito and Thomas are the two most consistent constitutional conservatives on the court, if they say Texas had no legal case, then it’s hard to argue against.
All that said, I don’t blame people for fighting these legal fights. I said all along, and stand by it, that we should let the legal cases play themselves out. There is a strong sense that something went very wrong here; tens of millions of people have that sense. I certainly do.
Alternative electors?
Today electors appointed by states around the country cast their votes for Biden-Harris in an amount enough to elect them. I’ve looked at two Congressional Research Service Reports, one from 2020 and one from 2016, explaining the process for counting and contesting electors at a Joint Session of Congress.
The bottom line is that even if you think contesting electors at a Joint Session of Congress is a good thing, it’s not going to happen here because both chambers would have to concur. There is zero chance the Democrat-controlled House would vote to disallow Biden-Harris electors.
So the nomination of alternative electors, and the vow to contest the electors on January 6, is a dead end.
In summary, all the legal cases against the vote fraud failed legally because:
- You cannot prove that the fraud assisted Biden, or by how much. Once the fraudulent votes were mixed in with the legal votes, they couldn’t be unscrambled.
- The remedies requested are too much. They would require cancelling the votes of many people who voted as the election authorities directed. The Republican Party should have contested the unconstitutional voting arrangements before the election. (That party’s reputation as stupid is well deserved. The left are evil, but not stupid.)
They failed politically because the judges were afraid of the consequences of crossing the left:
- The left would riot, as this year’s political violence shows. The right probably won’t riot, so for the sake of peace the judges have sided with the left.
- The friends and peers of the judges are from the upper and middle classes, who are now solidly Democrat. Cue the social hate and ostracism if the judges act against the left.
- The media and big tech would trash their reputations and make life miserable for any judges who did not accede to the left.
It’s a great idea to choose the President based on which side will riot the most. That’s the way all the most successful countries are run. (Irony alert.)
US elections henceforth:
