Trump attacks own Supreme Court over mail-in ballots in tweet

President Donald Trump raged at the Supreme Court Friday after it ruled officials in Pennsylvania and North Carolina could count mail-in ballots which arrive after the election, arguing the election should end on November 3. 

‘This decision is CRAZY and so bad for our Country. Can you imagine what will happen during that nine day period. The Election should END on November 3rd,’ he tweeted.

That was after a similar tweet sent just before 3am accusing the Supreme Court of helping Biden to victory – which he called ‘ridiculous.’

Voting does end on November 3. But ballot counting can go on for several days depending on turn out and how late voting went. Legally, states have to let anyone who is in line to vote by poll closing time cast their ballot.

Complicating matters this year is the high number of mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic. Many states are accepting ballots as long as they are postmarked by Election Day – meaning the tabulation of results could go on for several days.

The Supreme Court has allowed those extended deadlines in North Carolina and Pennsylvania – both of which Trump sees as crucial to his victory. Republicans believe Democrats are more likely to vote by mail, so restricting numbers of late-arriving ballots is likely to favor them – meaning the SCOTUS rulings  are seen as victories for Joe Biden. 

Trump also got in a jab at the court when he began his first campaign rally of the day on Friday, speaking to thousands in Waterford Township, Michigan.  

‘We have a lot of great crowds. There’s something happening and you’re going to see that on the third although the Supreme Court would probably like to delay it for a long time,’ he said. 

Republicans, particularly the president, are infuriated by the extended deadlines and are suing in several states to stop them. 

Trump also warned Biden would pack the Supreme Court with more justices in a 2 am tweet rage that claimed his rival ‘will destroy the United States Supreme Court.’ The Democratic nominee said he would appoint a national commission to study the court system should he win the White House.  

‘If Sleepy Joe Biden is actually elected President, the 4 Justices (plus1) that helped make such a ridiculous win possible would be relegated to sitting on not only a heavily PACKED COURT, but probably a REVOLVING COURT as well. At least the many new Justices will be Radical Left!,’ the president wrote.

His early morning tweet storm – which also predicted a ‘red wave’ of Republicans wins – came after the president spent the day campaigning in Florida and North Carolina. On Friday he’ll campaign in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. 

The Supreme Court on Wednesday left in place extensions of North Carolina and Pennsylvania’s deadlines for receiving mail-in ballots.

The ruling was a big victory for Democrats as it will allow mail-in ballots to be counted past November 3 as long as they are post-marked by Election Day.

Both states are critical for a White House win. Trump will spend Saturday holding three rallies in Pennsylvania. Biden was there Monday. Trump’s Thursday rally in North Carolina was canceled due to bad weather. He’s rescheduled it for this Monday.

Biden will campaign in Pennsylvania on Sunday. On Monday, he, Jill Biden, running mate Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff will spend the day barnstorming the state. 

Republicans have received victories of their own in the rash of lawsuits both parties have implemented as record numbers of Americans use mail-in ballots during the coronavirus pandemic. 

More than 90 million people have requested mail-in ballots this year, according the Election Project, which tracks voting data. And 53.6 million of those ballots have been returned. Thus far, 82 million Americans have already voted this year – either via in-person early voting or by mail-in ballot. 

Below are some of the biggest victories for Trump and Biden in legal suits.

BIDEN WINS

NORTH CAROLINA BALLOT EXTENSION

The Supreme Court on Wednesday left in place North Carolina’s extension of the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots.

The state election board, citing potential U.S. Postal Service mail delivery delays, opted to allow absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrived up to nine days later.

The justices rebuffed a request by Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and North Carolina Republican officials to block a lower-court-approved agreement permitting the extension.

The Supreme Court’s order came two days after Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the court. Barrett did not participate in the decision.

PENNSYLVANIA LAWSUIT OVER MAIL-IN DEADLINES

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in September that officials in the closely contested state can accept mail-in ballots three days after the Nov. 3 election, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to review the decision on an expedited basis.

On Oct. 19, the court deadlocked 4-4 on an emergency request by Republicans to halt the lower court decision. Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s three liberal justices in denying the request.

Republicans did prevail on one key issue at Pennsylvania’s high court. Interpreting a state law, the court said officials must throw out ‘naked ballots’ – ballots that arrive without inner ‘secrecy envelopes.’

Republicans argued the secrecy sleeves help deter fraud. Democrats have warned the ruling could lead to more than 100,000 votes being thrown out.

PENNSYLVANIA JUDGE REJECTS VOTER FRAUD CLAIMS

On Oct. 10, U.S. District Judge Nicholas Ranjan in Pittsburgh, a Trump appointee, rejected a bid by the Trump campaign and the Republican Party to limit the use of drop boxes in Pennsylvania.

Ranjan wrote that the plaintiffs failed to prove a risk of voter fraud. ‘At most, they have pieced together a sequence of uncertain assumptions.’

TRUMP WINS

TEXAS BALLOT DROP-OFF SITES

Drop boxes have become a partisan flash point, with Democrats promoting them as a safe option for voters unnerved by the COVID-19 pandemic and U.S. Postal Service delivery problems. Republican officials and Trump’s campaign have argued without evidence that the boxes could enable voting fraud.

Republicans scored a major win in Texas on Tuesday when the state’s highest court ruled that Governor Greg Abbott can limit drop-off sites for ballots.

‘The plaintiffs complain that limiting early hand-deliveries of mail-in ballots to one office per county requires more travel time for some voters. But this ignores the other options for casting their ballots that these voters have,’ the court wrote. The three justices who issued the decision are Republicans.

Texas voters must qualify to vote by mail by, for example, being older than 65, being ill or disabled, or not being present in their voting county during the early voting period through Election Day.

The plaintiffs said they will not appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

Nearly 8 million Texans had cast ballots as of Tuesday, approaching 90% of the entire 2016 vote – a higher percentage than any state in the country, according to the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida.

FIGHT OVER MAIL-IN BALLOTS IN WISCONSIN

Wisconsin election officials cannot count mail-in ballots that arrive after the Nov. 3 elections, a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday, dealing a significant setback to Democrats.

The 5-3 ruling left in place a decision by the U.S. 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said that it was too close to Election Day to make significant modifications to the voting process.

The high court’s order was issued just before the Senate confirmed Barrett.

Liberal Justice Elena Kagan dissented, saying that the majority’s decision would ‘disenfranchise large numbers of responsible voters in the midst of hazardous pandemic conditions.’

Wisconsin is crucial to Trump’s re-election chances against Biden.

Democrats had argued that ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive up to six days later should be tallied, saying such a policy would protect the right to vote amid a surge in mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic.

TEXAS SIGNATURE REQUIREMENT

A federal appeals court on Oct. 19 said Texas does not have to give voters a chance to correct mail-in ballots that are rejected because the signature does not match the one on file with the state.

The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by a voting rights group against Republican Party officials in Texas, a longtime Republican stronghold that may be up for grabs this year.

FLORIDA RESTRICTS EX-FELONS’ RIGHT TO VOTE

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in September that Florida can require felons to pay fines, restitution and legal fees they owe before they regain their right to vote.

By a 6-4 vote, it reversed a lower court ruling that the measure amounted to an unconstitutional poll tax. Five of the six judges in the majority were appointed by Trump.

Former felons in Florida are more likely to register as Democrats, according to an analysis published this month by the Tampa Bay Times, Miami Herald and ProPublica.

Nearly 900,000 Floridians with felony convictions will be unable to vote in the election because of the decision, according to an Oct. 14 study by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform group. 

Super-lawyers get ready to contest the election with Joe Biden’s claiming Donald Trump will ‘fantasize about stomping out results’ – and president’s campaign saying Democrats ‘won’t accept results’

With eventful federal court directions in both directions in recent days, the head of Joe Biden’s supercharged legal effort tamping down the notion that President Trump can ignore the election results. 

Amid a surge of mail-in voting and a flood of early votes – Texas on Thursday surpassed its 2016 vote total four days before Election Day – Republicans and Democrats have spent months assembling legal teams for the ongoing battle and those that will come. 

‘Trump may fantasize or claim he has all sorts of ways of stomping out the election results, terrorizing polling places and the like, and that’s just not the case,’ said Bob Bauer, who is heading up Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s efforts. ‘If he tries, he won’t succeed,’ he said.

Bauer played Trump in Biden’s debate preparation and helped to vet Kamala Harris as his running mate. Now, the battle-tested election attorney Bob Bauer has been at the center of Biden’s presidential campaign.

Two key rulings have gone Biden’s way in recent days: The Supreme Court declined to revisit a case after an earlier 4-4 deadlock allows the state to count mail-ballots postmarked by Election Day for three days afterward. The high court also let stand lower court rulings allowing election officials in North Carolina to count votes properly postmarked for nine days after Election Day.

But in Wisconsin, under a 5-3 Supreme Court ruling days ago, only ballots received by Election Day will be counted. A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that votes in Minnesota must be received by Election Day. 

Trump has been under fire for weeks for refusing to say he will accept the results of the election – but his campaign tried to turn the issue on Biden.  

Trump campaign spokeswoman Thea McDonald said people should be concerned about the possibility that ‘Biden doesn’t accept the results when President Trump wins reelection.’ 

‘The President and the Trump campaign have long fought for a free, fair, transparent election,’ McDonald said.

President Trump fired off tweets as early as 3 am Friday morning raging against the Supreme Court for allowing mail in ballots in two states.

‘If Sleepy Joe Biden is actually elected President, the 4 Justices (plus1) that helped make such a ridiculous win possible would be relegated to sitting on not only a heavily PACKED COURT, but probably a REVOLVING COURT as well. At least the many new Justices will be Radical Left!,’ he wrote.

Biden is narrowly leading polls in both Pennsylvania and North Carolina – although Trump is predicting a ‘red wave.’ 

‘If Sleepy Joe Biden is actually elected President, the 4 Justices (plus1) that helped make such a ridiculous win possible would be relegated to sitting on not only a heavily PACKED COURT, but probably a REVOLVING COURT as well. At least the many new Justices will be Radical Left!,’ he wrote.

Trump tweeted out an article about a postal service employee discharged for discarding mail ballots in a dumpster in Kentucky. 

‘RIGGED?’ the president wrote. 

Now, days before Tuesday’s election, Bauer is focused on the end game: advising an army of lawyers who are monitoring early voting and preparing for the Trump-Biden showdown. They are working to ensure voter access, combating disinformation and voter intimidation, and preparing for attacks on the legitimacy of the vote. Republican Trump has deployed his own coalition of lawyers to tackle election disputes.

‘It’s a pretty heated environment,’ Bauer, who served as White House counsel in Barack Obama’s administration, said in an interview. ‘But we don’t want there to be undue concern and alarm that would discourage people from voting. We can respond anywhere in the country to these issues immediately.’

White-bearded and bespectacled, Bauer, 68, is on leave from New York University Law School, where he is a professor. But he spent most of his career at Perkins Coie law firm, where he founded the political law practice and fought in the trenches of Washington’s partisan warfare.

‘He looks and has the temperament of the college professor and he’s a hard-as-nails litigator and strategist,’ said fellow NYU law professor Samuel Issacharoff, who worked on Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns under Bauer, the general counsel.

As senior adviser to the Biden campaign, Bauer has been helping the team prepare for a possible contested election and meet unprecedented challenges, including Trump’s unfounded claims that the surge in mail-in voting from the coronavirus pandemic is leading to widespread fraud and his calling for supporters to be ad hoc poll watchers.

‘Trump may fantasize or claim he has all sorts of ways of stomping out the election results, terrorizing polling places and the like, and that’s just not the case,’ said Bauer. ‘If he tries, he won’t succeed.’

Bauer has worked behind the scenes for Democrats for decades. He advised on legal strategy in the 2000 battle between Democratic nominee Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, before the U.S. Supreme Court halted the Florida recount and handed the presidency to Bush.

As general counsel to Obama’s 2012 campaign, Bauer argued a case that overturned Republican efforts to reduce in-person early voting in Ohio the weekend before the election.

Early voting in Texas surpasses total voting in 2016 ALREADY with nine million ballots cast as state becomes crucial battleground

Texans have already cast more ballots in the presidential election than they did during all of 2016, an unprecedented surge of early voting in a state that was once the country’s most reliably Republican, but may now be drifting toward battleground status.

More than 9 million ballots have been cast as of Friday morning in the nation’s second most-populous state, exceeding the 8,969,226 cast in 2016, according to an Associated Press tally of early votes from data provided by Texas officials.

Texas is the first state to hit the milestone. This year’s numbers were aided by Democratic activists challenging in court for, and winning, the right to extend early voting by one week amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Texas also offers only limited vote-by-mail options when compared to the rest of the country, meaning casting in-person, early ballots is the primary way to vote for people who don’t want to line up and do so on Election Day.

Voters in Texas do not register by party affiliation, so no one can be sure until the ballots are counted whether one party or the other will benefit from the surge in turnout.

Still, the fact that the state exceeded its entire vote total for the past presidential cycle with hours still to go in its early voting period which ends Friday, and before millions more people are likely to vote on Election Day, hints at a potential electoral sea change.

For Democrats, anything different is likely positive. The party hasn’t won a state office in Texas since 1994 – the nation’s longest political losing streak – nor seen one of its presidential nominees carry the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976. The party now believes it has a chance to seize control of the state House, flip as many as six congressional seats and a Senate seat.

President Donald Trump carried Texas against Hillary Clinton in 2016 by a comfortable 9 points, even though that was the smallest margin since Republican Bob Dole beat Democratic President Bill Clinton by 5 points in 1996.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign has for months insisted that Texas, with its 38 electoral votes, is among the traditionally conservative states it is looking to flip – though it has long been more bullish on Arizona and North Carolina. 

Biden’s running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, is visiting Fort Worth, Houston and the U.S.-Mexico border town of McAllen on Friday, just four days before Election Day, using precious campaign time on the state far later than any major national Democrat in decades.

The news may not be all positive for Democrats, however.

The spike in early voting is most apparent in suburban counties around Dallas and in areas outside Austin, especially those south toward San Antonio. 

One area that has not seen voting rise dramatically, however, is the Rio Grande Valley, where Harris will be. Its population is about 90% Mexican-American and it is among the state’s youngest and fastest-growing areas.

In Hidalgo County, which includes McAllen, early voting has only increased by about 1% compared to 2016, despite the extra week to do so – far below the at least 15% increase in nearly every other large Texas county.

Not turning out voters there – especially when the rest of the state is shattering records – could spell trouble for Biden as well as Democratic challenger MJ Hegar, who is trying to topple long-serving Republican Sen. John Cornyn. The area is solidly Democratic, even if many of its Latino voters tend to be slightly more conservative than many of their counterparts in other parts of Texas or the country.

Its also been among the hardest hit areas in the nation by the coronavirus and has seen new cases soar in recent weeks as they have in many parts of the country.

‘They were forced to place bodies in refrigerated FEMA trailers because they ran out of room in the morgues and the funeral homes,’ said Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman and Democratic presidential candidate who came within 3 percentage points of upsetting Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 – and might have closed that gap had he turned out more Hispanic people in the Rio Grande Valley.

‘This part of Texas has borne witness to the cruelty of the Trump administration and the incompetence of his leadership,’ O’Rourke added.

Recent polls have shown Biden topping Trump among Latinos in places like Florida, but trailing the level of support Clinton received from the community in 2016. The former vice president was in Florida on Thursday and noted that 20% of the nation’s population is now Hispanic.

‘It’s our future and we should invest in the future,’ Biden told reporters while campaigning in Fort Lauderdale. ‘The better the community does, the better the country does.’ 

Barack Obama will campaign with Joe Biden in Flint and Detroit tomorrow in push to get African-American voters out in Michigan – their first joint appearance of campaign

Barack Obama will join Joe Biden in Michigan on Saturday for a pair of campaign appearances – marking their first time together on the presidential trail.

Obama has campaign for Biden in solo stops in Philadelphia and Florida but the two men – who spent four years serving together in the White House – have yet to stand together on the same stage due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The campaign picked Michigan to showcase the duo – known for their ‘bromance’ while in the White House.

Obama and Biden will appear at drive-in events in Flint and Detroit as they work to win the state for the Democratic ticket, particularly looking to court African American voters in the state.

The two will discuss bringing ‘Americans together to address the crises facing the country and win the battle for the soul of the nation,’ according to Biden’s campaign. 

Early voting is already underway in Michigan. As of Tuesday, more than 3.1 million voters have requested absentee ballots and about 2.1 million have returned them, according to the Michigan Secretary of State’s office. 

Biden leads by 6.5 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average of Michigan.

President Donald Trump will hold a campaign rally in Waterford Township on Friday, Sterling Heights on Sunday and Grand Rapids on Monday. He has visited Michigan six times in 2020. 

Michigan is part of the ‘blue wall’ – the industrial Midwest states that used to be solidly in the Democrats’ corner.

But Trump burst through that wall in 2016 – carrying Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Trump carried both Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 point in the 2016 election. He became the first Republican candidate in more than 20 years to carry the states.  

Both campaigns are focusing on the Midwest area in the final four days until Election Day.

Biden and Trump are campaigning in Wisconsin on Friday as coronavirus cases hit new levels. Wisconsin is third in the nation in per capita COVID cases.  

Biden leads by six points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls in Wisconsin. 

Meanwhile, the Biden campaign revealed its plans to wrap up the campaign – the entire ticket will spend Monday barnstorming the must-win state of Pennsylvania.

Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Kamala Harris, and Doug Emhoff will ‘barnstorm Pennsylvania and fan out across all four corners of the state,’ the campaign said in a statement. 

Biden will also campaign in Philadelphia on Sunday.

Both sides are campaigning hard to win Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes. Trump wants to repeat his 2016 win and Biden wants to win the state he was born in. 

Trump will hold three rallies in Pennsylvania on Saturday – in Bucks County, Reading, and Butler. He’s expected to make another stop in the state before Election Day. And he held three rallies in the state on Monday. 

Biden leads by four points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls in the state. 

The Trump campaign is also using an all-hands on deck approach for Pennsylvania. 

First lady Melania Trump made a rare campaign appearance there on Tuesday.  And first daughter Ivanka Trump was there on Wednesday.