I'm gonna tack into this thread some punditry on what the Republicans expect to pursue as an agenda between now and when electors cast their votes in the electoral college, presumably (?) as usual in December... and what role the courts might play in cases heard in the interim.
There was a thoughtful piece in the NYT about some of that, and I have put up a few quotes below.
Judges, like most Americans, will surely see that the winner should be chosen by no one other than voters.
www.nytimes.com
The court having led [Pennsylvania] voters to believe they could mail back their ballots in confidence if they were received up to three days after the election, it would be stunning for the justices to turn around now and declare, in essence: “We misled you. Those votes are not valid.” The court might, for instance, decide that the state court acted beyond its authority, but still conclude that the ruling applies prospectively, not retroactively to invalidate ballots already cast.
It is hard to know the true motivation behind these new lawsuits. They could be all sound and fury, an effort to appease the president and his troops, demonstrating that the campaign is fighting to the last dawn. On the other hand, they may be less about their individual claims, or about winning in court, and more the start of a plan to attempt to sow confusion, to generate a sense of chaos, to undermine the perceived integrity of the vote — even to set up later tactics.
The bold right there is mine. It's a concern but it's not clear to me that it can be effective, not least because Americans are already confused --and is Trump himself not confused by seeming to fight in one state for more votes to be found somehow and in others for counting of perfectly validated ballots to be set aside despite the state's longstanding ways of treating mailed votes last?
And,,, Americans in 2020 may already have certain doubts about integrity of the vote if not of any outcome, even undeservedly so. There are thousands of self-described Republicans online who persist in accusing Dems to this day of a mass rejection of Trump's 2016 election --neven if we wished his presidency well in 2017 although not having voted for him.
We've lived before through a bunch of hotly contested fights over disputed elections and in the end we all have things to get done that end up reclaiming our attention. The same will prevail in 2020. It's kinda like what women say about childbirth, really.
You can remember that it was painful, but thanks god not quite the pain itself else no way in hell would any of us have ended up with brothers and sisters.
So it's much the same with protracted wrangling over narrow elections: they're extremely painful and thank God we don't remember exactly how painful as we set off for another adventure in figuring out who gets to make a cartoonist's day every day for the next four years. By time we must go again to the polling place we remember elections as a pain in the ass and we'll all be sure of winning. And really, we all do win so long as we remember that
voting is how we elevate someone to those elective offices.
And so to the wrap of that Times piece:
My guess is that courts will make quick work of these new cases. At the time of the 2000 election, only half of registered voters
believed it “really mattered” which candidate won the election. Today, 83 percent have that conviction. Few judges are going to believe it is good for the country or the courts for this election to be decided by anyone other than the voters.
The author of the piece, Richard H. Pildes, is a professor at New York University’s law school and an author of the casebook “The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process.”