For anyone who may have been living on Mars for the past couple weeks, Donald Trump has indicated repeatedly that he may not accept the election results on November 8th should they not be in his favor.
I’m not interested in arguing for or against Donald’s point but rather am curious how he could legitimately contest the election results. I’m putting this in GQ because I’m hoping to learn the factual process for contesting the presidential election.
As I understand it, there are contingencies in place that automatically trigger a recount in certain scenarios—i.e. a very close vote count. Barring those scenarios the election results will be certified and… that’s it, right?
So if someone who was running for president decided to contest the election, what could they do legally to attempt to get the votes recounted or… well, whatever they think they need to do to overturn the election results. Each polling place counts ballots and sends the result to their respective county clerk, yes? Then the county clerk certifies that county’s results and then sends them to the state, who then certifies them again? Do I have this more-or-less correct? (I know each state is different, but this seems to be the gist of it… the certification process works up from the individual polling places to the Secretary of State.) Does the sore loser start by suing each and every county that didn’t vote in their favor? Each Sec. of State? Do they start at each polling place and simply sue every poll worker in the state?
I assume simply saying on Nov. 9 “I don’t concede ‘cuz the election is rigged” has no legal authority. Again, I’m not interested in debating Trump’s position but rather using his comments respective to this election to flesh out the actual legal process one could undertake to contest the results.
If he announces beforehand that he’s going to contest the election, then says “See, I told you so”, that would probably have a lot less gravity than if he actually came up pwith empirical evidence that enough votes were rigged to swing the results of the election.
If he fails to win an elector in almost every state, and the electoral vote is a landslide, the burden of getting it looked at will be pretty heavy.
Anyone who remembers 2000 has a pretty good idea of what some of the contesting procedures are like. First, recounts. And an examination of the legitimacy of individual voters. Then, the electors in the state being contested would have their credential examined by that state’s courts. Then, that court decision can be reviewed by the US Supreme Court.
There wee a number of glaring miscarriages in Florida’s 2000 counting process. For example, on absentee ballots, those from servicemen overseas were held to a different standard than those from civilians overseas, a discriminatory fact that was pretty much ignored in the courtroom challenge. But such details comprise a burden of proof that must be met by the challenging candidate.
Well, for just one example, Florida state law provides a cause of action and procedures for challenging the result of an election conducted in that state. So in 2000:
Gore v. Harris (pdf). The defendant was the Florida Secretary of State. My guess is that most states would have some similar process in place for arguing that the voting or the count was not conducted according to the appropriate standards, and that any litigation would involve the state, as the authority that is ultimately administering the election.
Even if there are no specific procedures for doing so, in any given state I would think just the plain old lets start a lawsuit about it could gain enough traction in some places to be heard.
Before the EC votes, contest the election in each state/DC that you feel was fraudulent. An alternate plan would be to convince the electors that you won and have them vote for you anyways Faithless Elector Laws (and party loyalty) be damned.