Election lawyer says Trump’s swing state lawsuits will have 'zero percent' chance of success

23 October 2024

With 13 days to go before Election Day, Republicans and aides of former President Donald Trump are already mounting legal challenges in the battleground states most likely to decide the 2024 race.

The New York Times recently reported that the various lawsuits are primarily challenging the use of voting machines in states like Georgia, Nevada and Virginia. Plaintiffs are baselessly claiming that voting tabulation machines are incapable of properly counting ballots and are opting instead for hand-counting of ballots on election night.

Hand counts are a pet cause of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who continues to deny that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. He told the Times: "My whole thing is to get rid of machines in the election and go to paper ballots, hand counted."

"Here in the USA, we have the worst election platforms in the world," Lindell said at one of former President Donald Trump's campaign rallies earlier this year.

Dominion Voting Systems, which is a manufacturer of voting machines, continues to fight back against a far-right disinformation campaign falsely claiming its equipment falsely awarded votes to Biden in 2020 that should have gone to Trump. The company won a $787.5 million settlement against Fox News in 2023, and is currently fighting back against a Georgia lawsuit claiming that its machines don't have proper encryption. That lawsuit has been thrown out, but plaintiffs are appealing.

"We remain fully prepared to defend our company and our customers against lies, and to seek accountability from those who spread them," a Dominion spokesperson told the Times.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, both Trump and the Republican National Committee filed dozens of legal challenges in various battleground states he lost to Biden. Almost all of them were dismissed for a lack of standing. The one case Trump did win concerned a negligible number of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that did not have even a remotely significant impact on the final vote count. Election attorney Marc Elias represented Democrats in nearly all of those suits, and said Trump's chances of success are just as slim in 2024.

"Will Trump, in the post-election, say that all the machines in every county that he lost in America were rigged? Absolutely," Elias told the Times. “Will there be litigation? Yes. Will those claims have any chance at all of affecting the outcome of a post-election contest? Zero point zero, zero, zero percent.”

It's likely that the winner of the November election will not be known by Tuesday night. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — which are part of the critically important "Blue Wall" states along with Michigan — state law prevents the counting of mail-in ballots (also known as pre-canvassing) before Election Day. While Democrats attempted to pass bills allowing for pre-canvassing in 2024, that legislation ultimately didn't become law.

Click here to read the Times' full report (subscription required).

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