[The Soup Nazi]

From Demand Progress:

Trump is already suing to stop ballot counts

In the cover of darkness Monday night, Trump had his third Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett, sworn in. And the Supreme Court is signaling it might hand next week’s election to Donald Trump.1

Trump has already said he “can’t go along with” an election decided by mail-in ballots, and the Supreme Court just put limits on mail-in ballots from Wisconsin this week.2,3 We’re going to have to make sure Congress protects the integrity of the election and that every vote is counted.

Less than a week before the election, more than 60 million votes have been cast between mail-in ballots and early voting poll sites.4

And GOP lawyers have filed numerous lawsuits to get as many of those votes thrown out as possible.

In Nevada, the Trump campaign has sued to get ballots from Las Vegas—the largest Democrat-leaning city in the state—invalidated because of a supposed lack of supervision over signature matching.5 In Wisconsin, the state GOP was successful in convincing the Supreme Court to toss ballots received after November 3, even if they were mailed in time.6 These are just two of the dozens of suits that have been filed.7

These lawsuits are working in concert with Trump’s ongoing slander of vote-by-mail ballots that began over the summer. Trump will likely use this doubt that he himself has cast on absentee ballots to challenge the results if he isn’t the winner. He already said as much during the first debate.

We are heading into a constitutional crisis that could drag state legislatures, Congress, and the Supreme Court with it. Trump could try to convince states to overrule their voters in the Electoral College. He could ask his Barrett-majority Supreme Court to throw out millions of ballots for specious reasons. We can’t know exactly what he’ll do.

That’s why we’re getting ready now, so we can go to Congress at the first hint of a challenge to next week’s results. The Constitution gave Congress power over the election and how electoral votes are counted, and we need to make sure Congress uses that power to protect our votes.

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Robert Cruickshank,
Demand Progress

Sources:
1. CNN, "Brett Kavanaugh foreshadows how Supreme Court could disrupt vote counting," October 27, 2020
2. Rev Services, "2020 Joe Biden Donald Trump 1st Debate Part 2," accessed October 28, 2020
3. CBS News, "Supreme Court quashes Wisconsin court order that said absentee ballots could be counted up to 6 days after Election Day," October 27, 2020
4. CNN, "The latest on the 2020 election," October 27, 2020
5. Associated Press, "Trump campaign sues in Nevada to stop Vegas-area vote count," October 23, 2018
6. CBS News, "Supreme Court quashes Wisconsin court order that said absentee ballots could be counted up to 6 days after Election Day," October 27, 2020
7. Business Insider, "The Trump campaign is waging an all-out legal war to stop the expansion of vote-by-mail in 7 different states," September 27, 2020