The Facts on Trump’s Post-Election Legal Challenges

On Nov. 19, President Donald Trump’s legal team spouted a gusher of false and unfounded allegations of voter fraud at a 90-minute press conference.

We could fact check it, but we’re not going to. We’re not going to fact check Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, for repeating a bogus claim that voters in the Democratic counties of Allegheny and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania “were allowed to fix” ballot errors, but those in Republican areas “were given no such right.” We already wrote about that claim — and it is false.

We’re also not going to fact check Sidney Powell’s wild conspiracy theory about a “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States.” Powell provided no evidence for it, not even to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her,” Carlson said on his Nov. 19 show. “When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they also told us Powell had never given them any evidence to prove anything she claimed at the press conference.”

So, instead of writing about Giuliani and Powell, we took a cue from Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who said this after the press conference: “What matters most at this stage is not the latest press conference or tweet, but what the President’s lawyers are actually saying in court. And based on what I’ve read in their filings, when the Trump campaign lawyers have stood before courts under oath, they have repeatedly refused to actually allege grand fraud — because there are legal consequences for lying to judges.”

Below we look at what the president’s lawyers have been saying in court in key swing states and the outcome of their legal challenges. What sticks out are two things: a lack of evidence of voter fraud and a long string of legal defeats and setbacks.

Pennsylvania

Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., v. Bucks County Board of Elections

Outcome: Denied by the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas

Facts: The Bucks County board rejected 918 ballots as “legally insufficient,” because of such deficiencies as “a lack of signature or a lack of privacy envelope,” as Bucks County Court of Common Pleas Judge Robert Baldi wrote in his order. The Trump campaign sought to toss out an additional 2,177 absentee ballots that the county accepted as valid votes.

On Nov. 19, the judge rejected the campaign’s petition and ordered all 2,177 ballots to be counted, dismissing the alleged deficiencies as minor.

The judge’s order said, for example, that 1,196 ballots being challenged by the Trump campaign contained a partial date or no date on