President Donald Trump and his administration spent months trying to meddle with the electoral process in various states, but the blue wave was so large it was, in Trump’s own words, “too big to rig.”
The two biggest legal challenges before the midterms have effectively been put to rest, reports Slate. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to the Department of Justice’s suit against California election officials, which argued they must put aside some 20,000 mail ballots the feds thought were from noncitizens. A day earlier, a federal judge threw out the DOJ’s Alaska case, which sought to set aside certain Senate race ballots in the event Republican Dan S. Sullivan was defeated. In nearly all cases where the DOJ has taken states to court for access to their voter rolls, the federal government has come up short.
Some election challenges remain, with a couple of major Senate races and House seats not yet decided. The AFL-CIO has sued the DOJ to stop demands that state and local officials cordon off disputed ballots, under threat of prosecution if those ballots are counted.
In Alaska, the DOJ sent 20 Democrats letters warning they could be targets of a federal probe for donor fraud and conspiracy and should hold on to certain records. Joyce Vance, ex-U.S. attorney for Alabama’s Northern District, found the notion of prosecuting them strange on her Substack, given the Alaska Supreme Court has already ruled both Dan Sullivans could be on the ballot.
None of this is on the level of what followed the 2020 presidential election, the report notes. Since Tuesday night, the president and his allies have been much more restrained. Charles Stewart III of MIT sees a likely reason for the lower-key approach: “these intellectual wars, election administration wars” are not delivering results for them politically or strategically.
Should the Trump administration or Republican candidates challenge tight Senate races in Mississippi or Alaska, “the heavy hitters of both the Democratic and Republican parties, with respect to legal talent, will not be spread thin,” Stewart told Slate. “I think it will be much easier for attacks on the democratic process to be beaten back.”
The numbers bear this out, with Democrats notching double-digit wins in states like Texas and Georgia. Even in the closer contests, Democrats have put together comfortable vote counts that largely fall outside margins of error. That presents a mathematical problem for Republicans. Democrats have won 54 Senate seats so far, and once the Senate confirms the results, the Trump administration does not have the Republican majority needed to push its legal shenanigans through this time.