The Washington Post has put together a very nice summary of the various claims the Trump campaign is making in state and federal courts to support its assertion that there was massive voter fraud. (WaPo did not put it behind their paywall, so you can read the full article.) Here’s a brief history of flailing arguments:
PENNSYLVANIA
GOP observers were barred from tabulation rooms. Status: Denied. Info: GOP lawyers admitted in Court that the GOP had “a nonzero number of people in the room.”
GOP observers were too far away from vote counters to see anything. Status: Granted. Info: The judge allowed both GOP and Democratic observers to get access within six feet of poll counters.
Ballots received after 5 p.m. on Election Day should not be counted because they’re invalid. Status: TBD. Info: Justice Samuel Alito re-issued an order, echoing one by the state supreme court and the Pennsylvania Secretary of State, that these ballots could be counted, but should be separated pending further possible legal action. Alito’s order was essentially a loss for Trump because the votes will be counted and the results released. Alito, however, referred the case to the full Supreme Court for review. These votes are a small part of the overall vote in Pennsylvania and would not overturn the lead Biden currently holds if they were to be excluded.
Election officials cannot release the names of voters whose votes were rejected because of errors. Status: Denied. Info: Pennsylvania allows local elections boards to inform voters whose ballots were rejected because of errors–they lacked signatures, they were incomplete, they weren’t in security envelopes, etc.–so the voters can vote on Election Day, fix their ballots or take other actions to vote. Trump lawyers wanted election officials to keep this list secret–i.e., not release this information to the voters so they can remedy the problems. A judge denied this motion.
MICHIGAN
Trump lawyers claimed that they were denied access to review votes that election officials “cured” due to errors or damage, therefore the count should be stopped. Status: Denied. Info: “Curing” essentially means that officials duplicate a ballot, vote for vote, because the ballot itself was unreadable by scanning machines due to a stray mark, a stain, a tear or another flaw. Poll workers duplicate the ballot so the new piece of paper can be run through the scanner and after, they attach the “cured” ballot to the original ballot. GOP lawyers tried to stop vote counting because, they claimed, this was going on unregulated, but they offered no evidence this was happening and the judge determined it was “mere speculation.”
A Trump lawyer claimed that an unnamed poll observer was given a Post-It note from an unnamed ballot counter claiming that absentee and mail-in ballots were being counted improperly, therefore all vote counting should be stopped. Status: Denied. Info: The judge ruled that this was double-hearsay and therefore inadmissible. The judge also ruled that because the motion was made late Wednesday afternoon, the motion was moot because the absentee ballots had largely been counted.
In a non-legal claim, RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel claimed that votes in Rochester Hills, Michigan were given to Democrats instead of Republicans “due to a clerical error.” Status: The Republican city clerk of Rochester Hills declared this to be “categorically false” and that an entry error made by a data clerk had been corrected.
This claim has morphed into a claim by Trump supporters that a software program used in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and other locations to tally votes was inherently flawed. Again: the error was human error in one specific case. There is no evidence that there is any other error, in the calculations or in the software.
GEORGIA
Trump lawyers filed an affidavit from a poll worker in Chatham County claiming that other workers were intentionally mixing ballots received after the Election Day deadline with those received before the deadline. Status: Rejected. Info: Georgia allows absentee ballots sent by military and overseas citizens to be counted if they’re received up to ten days after Election Day, but all other ballots must be received by Election Day. In this case, Democrats submitted affidavits by two other poll workers at the same location who said they saw no such co-mingling of ballots, and the poll worker who filed the initial affidavit could provide no other evidence of the claim. The number of potentially invalid ballots was also said to be very small and insignificant compared to the total number of ballots. The judge dismissed the case in one day saying the claim could not be substantiated.
ARIZONA
The Sharpie-gate conspiracy claim, claiming that invalid “bleed through” votes were either counted twice or thrown out, depending on which version of the conspiracy theory you hear. Status: First case was thrown out; a second case is pending. Info: Trump lawyers claim that voters and absentee vote counters were told to push a button on ballot scanning machines to enter their votes even though the scanners were logging an “overvote,” meaning the voter filled in the ballot for too many candidates. In such cases, the voter should be given a new ballot to re-vote, and those ballots should be invalidated. If this happened with a mail-in ballot, the voter would be notified and given an opportunity to correct the ballot; otherwise, the ballot would be rejected. Trump supporters say this was due to the use of Sharpies by voters, which would bleed through to the other side of ballot, inadvertently voting for candidates in other races. Trump lawyers wanted vote counters to undertake a manual review of every single ballot to ensure such “bleed throughs” weren’t in the vote tallies. Another version of this conspiracy theory is that poll workers and vote counters were throwing out large number of Trump votes because of the bleed through. However, the state uses off-set ballots, meaning that the dots to fill in on one side do not line up with the dots on the other side of the ballot, and scanning machines look for marks in specific points of the ballots, making “bleed through” irrelevant to scanning. Sharpies are used because the ink dries faster than ball-point pen ink, leading to fewer smears on the ballot and a reduction in disabling scanning machines with wet ink.
NEVADA
Illegal voters who are not residents of the state cast thousands of ballots. Status: Withdrawn, but possibly another pending. Info: Richard Grenell, a former ambassador in the Trump Administration, initially made the accusation that up to 10,000 non-residents of Nevada cast ballots in the state. While he could not produce any evidence, it’s believed that he was referring to students who are studying out of state, people on temporary out-of-state work assignments or members of the military and their families who are stationed out of state. Nevada law allows these people to maintain their legal residence in the state, and therefore allows them to vote in the state. Trump campaign officials held a news conference Saturday to bolster this accusation again, distributing a list of more than 3,000 people who they claimed voted illegally because they lived out of state. The Nevada Secretary of State has, again, educated them about the state law.
One of the people on the list provided by the Trump campaign is Amy Rose, the spouse of a member of the Air Force who is in California pursuing a doctorate degree by doing Air Force-sponsored work in aerospace engineering. Rose herself works for a veterans relief organization while her husband pursues his work. “It’s really appalling to be used as pawns,” Rose said. “We both take our duties as citizens seriously. It was quite shocking to see our integrity challenged without any basis in fact.”
The case of Jill Stokke, a Nevada resident who claimed that her mail-in ballot was stolen and filled out by someone else. Status: Nothingburger. Info: Stokke claimed that someone stole her ballot, filled it out, and submitted it, thereby disenfranchising her. County election officials tracked her ballot and certified that the signature on her ballot matched her signature on file. They offered Stokke the opportunity to “spoil,” or invalidate, her ballot and vote again, so long as she signed an affidavit affirming that her original ballot was not stolen. She refused to do so.
GOP lawyers attempted to reject machine-verified mail-in vote signatures. Status: Denied. Info: Trump campaign and state Republican officials attempted to prevent election officials from using a machine that matches signatures on mail-in ballots to those on file, claiming the machine and software was unreliable and requesting the Court to order all signatures be confirmed by election commission staff, an act that would draw out process of ballots immeasurably. The Trump campaign provided no evidence that there was an inherent flaw in using the signature-matching machine. The judge rejected the case, but left room for the case to be refiled if the GOP found evidence to support their claim.