President Donald Trump's flurry of post-election litigation is winding down as just a handful of active cases challenging the 2020 presidential race remain in the courts.
According to Bloomberg, Trump dropped a lawsuit Thursday seeking to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's victory in Georgia. The action comes just one day after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to protest the certification of the election by members of Congress.
Before the president's voluntary dismissal of the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Mark Cohen had rejected his emergency injunction request to order the state legislature to choose a new slate of electors. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, two Republican officials sued by Trump, had called the case "absurd."
Trump and his Republican allies have launched more than 60 lawsuits since the November 3 general election, alleging widespread voter fraud and election irregularities. But nearly all of them have failed.
Now according to an election case tracker maintained by the Ohio State University, there are only three major election-related cases brought by Trump or his campaign still pending in the courts.
The most recent active lawsuit filed was against the New Mexico secretary of state's office, alleging the use of drop boxes to collect absentee ballots in the general election violated state law. The suit asks the U.S. District Court to order Secretary of State Toulouse Oliver to conduct a statewide canvass of absentee ballots and an investigation into the drop boxes.
The other remaining cases are taking place in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—two key battleground states that went for Biden over Trump.
On December 2, Trump sued the Wisconsin Election Commission accusing officials of "unlawfully departed from the state legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors." The president's lawyers argued in court that the guidance issued by the commission related to absentee ballots deviated so much from state law that "the election was itself a 'failure.'"
But a federal judge in Wisconsin bluntly dismissed the lawsuit on December 12, a decision later upheld by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. On December 30, the Trump campaign petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case and declare the Wisconsin election unconstitutional. Biden won Wisconsin by over 20,000 votes.
The campaign also asked the high court to step in Pennsylvania, where Biden led by roughly 81,000 votes. In a lawsuit against Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, the president's legal team alleged there were a host of election irregularities in the 2020 race. A chief concern was that Republican poll observers were not permitted to watch the absentee ballot canvassing and counting.
Trump's failure to overturn the 2020 election through the courts prompted him to take a different approach the past several weeks: pressuring Republican members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence to object to the Electoral College count.
The president repeatedly suggested Pence had the power to reject the electors sent by all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Addressing the crowd of his supporters on Wednesday, Trump said: "If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election."
Pence formally rejected the president's demands, telling members of Congress that his "oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not." The vice president officially announced that Congress completed the certification of Biden's electoral victory early Thursday morning.
In the aftermath of the Capitol riot, several lawmakers have attributed the violence to Trump's rhetoric and repeated attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace told CNN Thursday that "what happened yesterday is because millions of people across the country were misled by Republicans and by the administration that members of Congress could overturn and usurp the Electoral College in a single vote to object yesterday, and that's simply not true."
Calls are now mounting for lawmakers to remove Trump either by impeachment or by the 25th Amendment, which would require Pence and a majority of the Cabinet to vote Trump out due to his inability to "discharge the powers and duties of his office."
Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign for comment on dropping the Georgia lawsuit, but did not receive a response prior to publication.
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Donald Trump Drops Bid to Overturn Biden's Win in Georgia, Leaving Just 3 Lawsuits Left - Newsweek
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