Trump campaign will again ask top court to upend election result

President Donald Trump’s campaign said on Sunday it would again ask the US Supreme Court to overturn results from the November 3 election, its latest long-shot effort to subvert the electoral process and sow doubt about the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

In a statement issued by the campaign, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said the campaign had filed a petition asking the high court to reverse three rulings by a Pennsylvania state court interpreting the state’s rules for mail-in ballots.

“The Campaign’s petition seeks to reverse three decisions which eviscerated the Pennsylvania Legislature’s protections against mail ballot fraud,” Giuliani said in a statement.

Giuliani said the filing sought all “appropriate remedies”, including an order allowing Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature to award the state’s 20 electoral votes to Trump. Biden won the state by more than 80,000 votes.

While the prospect of the highest court in the land throwing out the results of a democratic election based on unfounded charges of voter fraud is extraordinarily unlikely, it would not change the outcome. President-elect Joe Biden would still be the winner even without Pennsylvania because of his wide margin of victory in the Electoral College.

The petition is “frivolous” and is not going to stop Biden from becoming president on January 20, said Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky.

“The Court will shut it down quickly,” Douglas said.

The Supreme Court on December 11 rejected a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Trump seeking to throw out voting results in four states, including Pennsylvania, that went for Biden.

Several senior Republican US senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have acknowledged Democrat Biden as the country’s president-elect after the Electoral College affirmed his victory, and have rejected the idea of overturning the 2020 presidential election in Congress.

A candidate needs 270 Electoral College votes to win the White House. Biden won 306 of those votes to Trump’s 232 and defeated the Republican president by more than seven million ballots in the popular vote.

Congress will count the electoral votes on January 6 and Biden will take office on January 20.

Trump’s campaign and his allies have now filed roughly 50 lawsuits alleging widespread voting fraud. Almost all have been dismissed or dropped because there was no evidence to support their allegations.

Trump has lost before judges of both political parties, including some he appointed. And some of his strongest rebukes have come from conservative Republicans. The Supreme Court has also refused to take up two cases — decisions that Trump has publicly scorned.