Federal judges reject GOP effort to overturn swing state election results
Federal judges delivered blistering rejections on Monday to a pair of last-ditch lawsuits by allies of President Donald Trump seeking to overturn election results in Michigan and Georgia, describing the legal efforts as undemocratic.
“In fact, this lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the relief Plaintiffs seek — as much of that relief is beyond the power of this Court — and more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government,” Detroit-based U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker said in a written ruling.
Parker’s 35-page opinion, released just before 2 a.m. Monday, found the legal argument of the Trump electors defective for multiple reasons, most notably that the suit was moot because the state had already certified President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the state, sending his slate of electors to the Electoral College. She also found that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the suit, and brought it too late to be heard.
But Parker was at her most forceful when she considered the GOP electors’ goal: reversing Michigan’s entire election, disenfranchising millions of voters and declaring Trump the winner.
“With nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice President Biden, Plaintiffs’ equal protection claim fails,” wrote Parker, an appointee of President Barack Obama.
Even if their claims had merit, she added, “alleged injury does not entitle them to seek their requested remedy because the harm of having one’s vote invalidated or diluted is not remedied by denying millions of others their right to vote.”
Parker’s opinion was soon followed by a ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Batten in Georgia, who described the effort by that state’s GOP electors “extraordinary” and unsupported by the law.
After hearing about an hour of arguments from various sides, the George W. Bush appointee issued a rare ruling from the bench dismissing the case outright. Batten said the electors there lacked standing to sue and were seeking an outcome that he is not empowered to provide: decertifying Biden’s victory.
“They want this court to substitute its judgment for two-and-a-half million voters who voted for Joe Biden,” Batten said, calling it perhaps the most extraordinary relief ever sought in an election lawsuit. “And this I am unwilling to do.”
Batten rejected the suit on multiple grounds, including the timing of the complaint, the standing of the plaintiffs and the extreme relief they were seeking.
“We can't turn back the clock and create a world in which the 2020 election results are not certified,” he said.
Parker turned down the Michigan suit for similar reasons, repeatedly slamming the Trump electors for dallying in bringing their claims to court. She said many of the alleged irregularities would have been apparent by or on Election Day, but the plaintiffs waited more than three weeks after that to file the federal court suit she ruled on early Monday
“Plaintiffs showed no diligence in asserting the claims at bar,” wrote Parker. “If Plaintiffs had legitimate claims regarding the manner by which ballots were processed and tabulated on or after Election Day, they could have brought the instant action on Election Day or during the weeks of canvassing that followed — yet they did not.”
Both suits were spearheaded by Sidney Powell, a Texas attorney who briefly joined the Trump campaign’s legal team before being ousted last month.
During arguments on the Georgia case Monday morning, Powell insisted her team had moved aggressively to catalog overwhelming evidence of fraud, including what she contends are serious vulnerabilities of Dominion Voting Systems machines used in the state.
“We could not have acted more quickly,” she said
“You could have attacked the machines months ago,” Batten replied.
“We have come forward with our claims as fast as humanly possible. This is a massive case and of great concern not just to Georgia, but the entire world,” Powell declared.
