Here are the legal challenges Trump's campaign and Republicans have filed to contest the 2020 election results

donald trump debate — President Donald Trump.

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President Donald Trump’s campaign and Republican officials have filed more than a dozen legal challenges as part of an effort to contest the results of the 2020 election.
The campaign filed lawsuits and motions to intervene in cases in several battleground states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. Trump’s campaign also requested a recount in Wisconsin.
Joe Biden is the projected winner of the election and of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. He leads Trump in tight races in Georgia and Arizona.
Here’s a list of lawsuits the Trump campaign and Republicans have filed and where they stand.
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The Trump campaign has mounted more than a dozen legal challenges in several battleground states since Election Day. On Friday, Insider and Decision Desk HQ projected that Joe Biden won the presidential election. The major cable news networks followed the next day by calling Pennsylvania and the election for Biden.

As of Monday, Biden had 279 electoral votes, while Trump had 214. The president-elect picked up the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and he led Trump in Arizona and Georgia.

Faced with the prospect of losing to a man he spent months hammering as corrupt, doddering, and mentally deficient, Trump is going on offense, spreading lies and conspiracy theories about a “rigged” election marred by “major fraud” from Democrats.

He’s alternated between demanding that some states stop counting ballots, which he doesn’t have the power to do, and saying that others should keep counting, which they were doing anyway. To that end, the Trump campaign has filed several legal challenges in battleground states.

Here’s a list of the lawsuits and where they stand

Pennsylvania — Biden is projected to win this state.
- The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit asking a state appeals court to reject the Pennsylvania secretary of state’s announcement that registered voters had until November 12 to provide proof of identity for mail-in ballots. Republicans believe the deadline should be November 9. A judge asked the secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, to segregate ballots from voters who provided identification from November 10 to 12 and said she would rule later on the legality of the extension.
- Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit in federal district court asking a judge to rule that the Philadelphia County Board of Elections must stop counting ballots until GOP campaign observers were present. The judge denied the motion.
- The campaign filed a separate lawsuit asking a state court to allow election watchers to stand a few feet closer to officials as they counted ballots. The campaign won the lawsuit, and it filed another suit accusing city officials of violating the judge’s order and blocking poll watchers from observing ballot counting.
- The Trump campaign filed a motion to intervene in a state court lawsuit from Pennsylvania Republicans disputing the secretary of state’s decision to allow voters to cast provisional ballots in person if their mail ballots were defective. A state appellate court judge dismissed the request but ordered the secretary of state to segregate provisional ballots in case their validity becomes contested.
- The Trump campaign and the RNC filed a lawsuit seeking to toss out about 600 ballots because they didn’t have secrecy envelopes that are required under state law.
- In a longshot case filed in the US District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign alleged that “Pennsylvania has created an illegal two-tiered voting system” that violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. The lawsuit accused Boockvar of inadequate oversight of the mail-in voting process compared to ballots cast in-person, and it asked to disqualify the ballots of voters who had the opportunity to correct problems on their ballots, and for the court to prevent state and county officials from certifying Pennsylvania’s election results.
- The campaign filed a motion to intervene in a Supreme Court case brought by Republicans that centers on the deadline by which Pennsylvania officials are allowed to receive ballots. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled that officials could receive ballots until November 6 as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. Republicans appealed the decision to the high court, which was deadlocked at 4-4 because Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not participate, leaving the lower court’s ruling in place. The Supreme Court signaled it would hear the case again but has not granted the request to intervene.
Nevada — Biden is projected to win this state.
- The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit requesting that ballots stop being counted in the state over concerns about signature-matching technology and election observers’ claims that they weren’t being allowed to watch ballots being processed closely enough. The Nevada Supreme Court denied the request.
- The Trump campaign and the RNC filed a lawsuit in state court asking to stop ballot counting in Clark County — a heavily Democratic area — until GOP officials could observe the process. A district judge rejected the request on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not have evidence to back up their allegations. Republicans appealed the case to the Nevada Supreme Court, which said on November 5 that the campaign and Republican officials had reached a settlement that allowed expanded ballot observation. They later withdrew the case.
Georgia — Biden leads in this state.
- A judge in Chatham County denied the Trump campaign’s request to toss out 53 ballots that a GOP poll watcher said arrived after polls closed at 7 p.m. on November 3. The Washington Post reported that the poll watcher presented no evidence in court that the ballots came in late and that county officials testified that they were received in time.
Michigan — Biden is projected to win this state.
- In a federal lawsuit, the Trump campaign alleged a number of irregularities — such as that GOP election observers were told to stand six feet away from ballot counters because of the coronavirus — meant that Michigan should not certify its votes.
- A judge on the Michigan Court of Claims denied the Trump campaign’s request to stop counting ballots in the state. Judge Cynthia Stephens dismissed the case, saying that litigating the issue didn’t make sense given that ballots in Michigan had more or less been fully counted. Biden leads Trump in the state and is projected to win its 16 electoral votes.
- A poll challenger named Sarah Stoddard and a group called the Election Integrity Fund filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the certification of election results in Detroit, claiming that absentee ballots were improperly reviewed. Judge Timothy Kenny denied the motion on the grounds that there was no proof that election oversight protocol hadn’t been followed.
- A Republican-aligned law firm called the Great Lakes Justice Center filed a lawsuit in Wayne County’s Circuit Court against Detroit and Wayne County alleging “massive fraud in the election vote-counting procedures” and calling for an entirely new election. David Fink, the lead lawyer defending against the lawsuit, described it as “based upon various conspiracy theories” that “have already been debunked.”
Arizona — Biden leads in this state.
- The Trump campaign joined in a lawsuit brought by two Republicans in Maricopa County claiming that a substantial number of GOP ballots were invalidated because voters used Sharpies to fill in their choices. There is no evidence that using Sharpies leads to issues with scanning ballots, and, in fact, officials have said that using Sharpies is preferred. The Post also reported that the Maricopa County attorney’s office said no ballots were rejected and that if they are, voters have an opportunity to cast another one. A Republican-aligned group abandoned the legal fight after Maricopa County officials challenged the factual basis for the lawsuit.
- The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in state court alleging that Maricopa County was improperly rejecting ballots cast by some voters. The suit was filed after all the major news networks projected Biden to win the election. Arizona’s secretary of state said the Maricopa County lawsuit was “grasping at straws.”

Key cases and Supreme Court rulings before Election Day

Pennsylvania

In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court ruled that election officials could receive mail-in ballots until November 6 as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. Republicans requested an immediate stay from the US Supreme Court that would have blocked the state Supreme Court’s ruling.

But the US Supreme Court was deadlocked at 4-4, leaving the lower court’s ruling in place. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito voted to grant Republicans’ request, while Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to participate in the case “because of the need for a prompt resolution of it and because she has not had time to fully review the parties’ filings,” the court said in a statement. However, Barrett has not recused herself, meaning she could cast a decisive fifth vote when the Supreme Court takes up the case again.

North Carolina

In a similar case brought by Republicans in North Carolina, the Supreme Court ruled that ballots received up to nine days after November 3 could be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

The decision came after the Trump campaign and Republicans asked in two separate cases for the high court to put back in place a June statute from the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature that would have allowed ballots to be counted only if they were received up to three days — not nine — after Election Day.

Five justices — Roberts, Kavanaugh, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor — ruled against reinstating the statute. Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas dissented, while Barrett did not participate in the North Carolina case.

Wisconsin

Republicans notched a victory in a case involving the deadline to receive ballots in Wisconsin. The US Supreme Court ruled against reviving an appeals court decision that would have allowed election officials to receive absentee ballots up to six days after Election Day.

The court’s five conservative justices — Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Alito — ruled against reviving the lower court’s ruling, while the three liberals — Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor — dissented.

The Wisconsin case made headlines because of Kavanaugh’s and Kagan’s dueling opinions.

Kavanaugh, a Trump-appointed justice who was confirmed to the high court in 2018, wrote in a concurring opinion that all ballots should be received by Election Day.

“Those States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election,” he wrote. “And those States also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter.”

Kagan fired back in a sharp dissent, taking issue with Kavanaugh’s assertion that the arrival of absentee ballots after Election Day could “flip” the results of the race.

“Justice Kavanaugh alleges that ‘suspicions of impropriety’ will result if ‘absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election,'” she wrote. “But there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted. And nothing could be more ‘suspicio[us]’ or ‘improp[er]’ than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night. To suggest otherwise, especially in these fractious times, is to disserve the electoral process.”

Texas

A federal court in Texas and the state’s Supreme Court denied two Republican requests to throw out nearly 130,000 ballots that were cast via drive-thru polling sites in Harris County, one of Texas’ most heavily Democratic areas.

The Texas Supreme Court rejected a request from Republican candidates and activists to toss the ballots. US District Judge Andrew Hanen, appointed by President George W. Bush, reached the same conclusion and denied the second request from GOP candidates and a right-wing radio host.

Hanen ruled that the plaintiffs did not have the standing to sue and ask that ballots that were legally cast be discounted. However, he ordered the county to set aside the 127,000 ballots in case an appeals court disagreed with him and ultimately threw those votes out.

This article has been updated.

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Here’s a list of the lawsuits and where they stand