Election Litigation Status

[canpakes]

Supporters of former President Donald Trump this week filed an amended motion for a restraining order against President Joe Biden that left one veteran legal reporter stunned.

Reuters legal reporter Brad Heath on Monday posted a lawsuit filed by multiple pro-Trump organizations against multiple government officials that sought to bar President Biden from enacting any further executive orders on the basis that he is not a legitimate president.

"The Disputed President is hereby enjoined from signing any further Executive Orders without first submitting the order first to this Court for approval," the plaintiffs wrote in their request for a restraining order against Biden.

The motion also declares that all Trump executive orders reversed by Biden should automatically go back into effect.

The lawsuit also demands that the entire 2020 presidential election be thrown out so that a new election can be held.

Link to the filing:

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov ... 7.10.0.pdf

[Gunnar]

The lawsuit also demands that the entire 2020 presidential election be thrown out so that a new election can be held.

I strongly suspect that if they actually succeeded in making that happen, Biden would win by an even bigger landslide than he did on Nov 3.

[Gunnar]

Are we facing a future now in which every election not won by Republicans will be automatically be challenged in court by Republicans on some specious pretext or other?

[Chap]

Are we facing a future now in which every election not won by Republicans will be automatically be challenged in court by Republicans on some specious pretext or other?

Yup! Agent Trump has achieved his mission, comrades! Bourgeois democracy has been dealt a stunning blow!!!

[honorentheos]

Are we facing a future now in which every election not won by Republicans will be automatically be challenged in court by Republicans on some specious pretext or other?

Maybe. That's not the most significant battle line being drawn, though.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ ... undup-2021

In a backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election, and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, legislators have introduced three times the number of bills to restrict voting access as compared to this time last year. Twenty-eight states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 106 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020).

Of course, other state lawmakers are seizing on an energized electorate and persistent interest in democracy reform (which is likewise reflected in Congress). To date, thirty-five states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 406 bills to expand voting access (dwarfing the 188 expansive bills that were filed in twenty-nine states as of February 3, 2020). Notably 93 such bills were introduced in New York and New Jersey.

With unprecedented numbers of voters casting their ballots by mail in 2020, legislators across the country have shown particular interest in absentee voting reform, with more than a quarter of voting and election bills addressing absentee voting procedures. Only seven of the forty-one states that have introduced election bills have not proposed policies to alter absentee voting procedures in some way.

With competing bills seeking to either restrict or expand voter access being fought over in state legislatures, the outcome will have an actual impact on election outcomes unlike the challenges against the 2020 general election results.

[Gadianton]

With competing bills seeking to either restrict or expand voter access being fought over in state legislatures, the outcome will have an actual impact on election outcomes unlike the challenges against the 2020 general election results.

H,

You know much more about these issues than I do. My understanding is that Democrats pushed mail-in voting because it would get a lot of potential democrats who are poor voting who otherwise would have a difficult time voting in person. My understanding is that Republicans pushed in-person voting in order to lay siege on remote voting, knowing they are outnumbered.

But aren't there a couple other important factors here? Isn't strategy a moving target, where people change their habits based on feedback from the system?

Given the unprecedented desperation people have felt on either side to vote this year, and given that a sitting president lied through his teeth about an election he was trying to steal being stolen, and that his gang of goons have now embraced QAnon and faqs-level dumbness and are out for a second try at a coup, couldn't this change the strategy of Democrats?

I mean, when Democrats said vote by mail, they didn't know there would be 60 baseless lawsuits, an attack on the capitol, and an unprecedented attempt to destroy votes not for Trump. Knowing what we know now, supposing that Republicans were to substantially limit remote voting, couldn't Democrats go all-in on in-person voting? Yes, it might be hard for many people, but those many people have additional reasons to be motivated now, and those organizing voting efforts such as those who did a stellar job in Georgia, as I understand it, could get a plan in place to get more people out to the voting site.

[honorentheos]

With competing bills seeking to either restrict or expand voter access being fought over in state legislatures, the outcome will have an actual impact on election outcomes unlike the challenges against the 2020 general election results.

H,

You know much more about these issues than I do.

I don't know about that. And I'm not really into speculation on what strategy either party is going to take going forward.

What I do suggest, however, is finding out what bills are being proposed in your state. Then write your representatives telling them what your views are on the matter. Then tell everyone in your circle about what's going on and encourage them to do the same.

For example, check this out from my state of Arizona:

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion ... ium=UpNext

Bolick is proposing that our leaders be allowed to override the state’s certification of election results and appoint presidential electors of their own choosing.

“The Legislature retains its legislative authority regarding the office of presidential elector and by majority vote at any time before presidential inauguration may revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election,” the bill says.

That "legislative authority," of course, being the superpower some Republican legislators think is conferred upon them by the U.S. Constitution, giving them the right to hijack the presidential election.

Bolick is not the only who thinks the Legislature should substitute its judgment for ours.

Sen. Kelly Townsend, R-Mesa, already proposed overthrowing the 2020 election results and declaring Donald Trump the winner of Arizona with her Senate Concurrent Resolution 2002. But she ran out of time.

Bolick’s bill would ensure that never again would the Legislature be forced to abide by the will of the little people.

Bolick, who is married to state Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick, also proposes a variety of other bad ideas in her bill. Chief among them is a provision that judges no longer be allowed to dismiss frivilous election lawsuits.

Instead, judges would have to hold jury trials despite the lack of any actual evidence.

So if some nut wants to sue, claiming that Hugo Chavez jumped out of his grave to rig Venezuelan voting machines to steal Arizona's election from Republicans?

Yep, a full-blown jury trial.

It's that crazy.

So, set some of your DiscussMormonism time aside and spend it instead finding out what's going on in your neck of the woods. Then get active.

[Gunnar]

H,

You know much more about these issues than I do.

I don't know about that. And I'm not really into speculation on what strategy either party is going to take going forward.

What I do suggest, however, is finding out what bills are being proposed in your state. Then write your representatives telling them what your views are on the matter. Then tell everyone in your circle about what's going on and encourage them to do the same.

For example, check this out from my state of Arizona:

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion ... ium=UpNext

That is both incredible and outrageous! How could any supposedly patriotic, liberty and democracy loving American even conceive of, let alone seriously consider proposing or supporting a bill like that even for a second? I'm sure no Republican would even begin to favor such a proposal if the shoe were on other foot, and it were a Republican nominee for President who obviously won both the popular and the Electoral College vote.

If anything, It is only the Democrats who had any virtuous and reasonable justification for demanding that the 2016 Presidential be overturned--not the Republicans in 2020, because Clinton lost only the Electoral College vote, while winning the popular vote by more than 3 million votes, whereas in 2020, Trump lost both the Electoral College vote by the same margin that Hillary did in 2016 and the popular vote by more than double the margin than he did in 2016.

Hopefully, even a majority of the Republicans in the Arizona Legislature will see how outrageously undemocratic Bolick's bill is, and will vote it down. If not, based on Governor Doucey's courageous, ethical endorsement of November's election certification, I'm fairly confident that despite being a Republican himself, he will have the courage to defy the potential censure of corrupt Arizona Republican leaders, and veto the bill.

I agree with Reach Roberts:

This may be — make that, is — the most arrogant power grab I have ever witnessed.

[honorentheos]

I doubt that bill will pass as written but it could. I would hope the Governor would veto it if it did, but he also recently faced censure from the State GOP who reelected a crazy person in Kelli Ward as chairperson. Ducey may decide his political death isn't going to stop the inevitable so why fall on the sword if no one else is going to stand up. It's surreal.

That said, I disagree that a democratic challenge in 2016 could be called virtuous. It wasn't. The electoral college is Constitutional and how we run things. It's part of the whole way we supposedly do business that we accept outcomes we don't like when they are fairly arrived at by the agreed upon rules. So, in a sense your comment is part of the surrealism of our current moment in my mind. I don't know. I guess there is some comfort to be found in walling off in an echo chamber of agreement somewhere and inflating the sense of self righteous justification that is feeding the death spiral we are moving into at the moment. I mean I really think we are screwed now. We aren't ready to deal honestly with where we are, where we are heading economically and politically to avoid seeing the extremists on both sides winning the messaging campaign. That leads to a flip in 2022 of Congress and 2024 making 2020 look like a warm up. It's pretty crazy, really.

[Gunnar]

Maybe it can't be said that advocating overturning the 2016 election is literally virtuous given the currently established rules, but it comes a lot closer to being so than trying to overturn the last election that was won decisively by both the Electoral College vote and the popular vote. That the Electoral College system can and has made it possible for candidates to sometimes win the popular vote and still lose the election makes it inherently undemocratic IMHO. I hope that the recent deplorable events reinforce the impetus to amend the constitution to eliminate that glaring flaw sometime during what remains of my lifetime. I would die a little happier if I could see that impediment to fair and democratic elections permanently removed, particularly for the sakes of my children and grandchild, even though I know that even that is not a surefire guarantee that the best available candidate will win always win the Presidency.