Despite the flurry of litigation, the cases have tended to be fairly small-bore, with few likely impacts for most voters.
“When you have all this money to spend on litigation, you end up litigating less and less important stuff,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame University.
The stakes would increase dramatically should Trump lose the election and then try to overturn the result. That’s what he attempted in 2020, but the court system rejected him across the board. Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits trying to reverse President Joe Biden’s win.
Whether they could be successful this year depends on the result of the election, experts said. A gap of about 10,000 votes — roughly the number that separated Biden and Trump in Arizona and Georgia four years ago — is almost impossible to reverse through litigation. A closer one of a few hundred votes, like the 547-vote margin that separated George W. Bush and Al Gore in Florida in 2000, is much more likely to hinge on court rulings about which ballots are legitimate.
“If he loses, he’s going to claim that he won. That goes without saying,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said of Trump. “If it looks like what we had last time … I expect we’ll see the same kind of thing.”
Trump has done nothing to discourage that expectation as he seeks his return to the White House. He has said he would accept the results of the election only if it’s “free and fair,” which raises the possibility it would not be, something he continues to falsely contend was the case in 2020. He also continued to insist that he could only lose due to fraud.
“The only way they can beat us is to cheat,” Trump said at a Las Vegas rally in June.
To be clear, there was no widespread fraud in 2020 or any election since then. Reviews, recounts and audits in the battleground states where Trump disputed his loss four years ago all affirmed that Biden won, and Trump’s own attorney general said there was no evidence that fraud tipped the election.