Judges striking down and dismissing Trump’s election lawsuits keep asking: Why’d you wait so long?

4 min readDec 17, 2020

President Donald Trump and his allies have been on a hot streak trying to overturn the will of more than 81 million voters, losing 29 of the 38 election court cases they’ve brought so far — and winning zero.

The judges have struck down the lawsuits for various reasons. Voters, not judges, decide elections, they say, and more voters chose President-elect Joe Biden than Trump. They point out that the Constitution does not grant anyone the power to ignore voters and declare voters on their own, that Trump’s campaign lawyers incorrectly interpret state election laws, that the lawsuits are based on falsehoods and conspiracy theories, and that the cases bring forth hearsay rather than actual evidence of misconduct.

They also keep asking the lawyers representing Trump and other Republicans the same question: What took so long?

In a ruling in a federal court in Arizona on Wednesday, for example, Judge Diane Humetewa pointed out that the plaintiffs seeking to overturn the state’s election results included evidence in their lawsuits showing they knew about the supposed misconduct for “weeks, months, and even years” before the election.

“Plaintiffs also include documents showing that the facts underlying their allegations of ballot counting and verification misconduct occurred weeks before Election Day,” she wrote.

Trump and his allies are fighting voting rules that have been on the books for months — and sometimes years

It’s been more than a month since voting ended. Yet almost all the lawsuits from Trump and his allies argue that election rules in particular states are unconstitutional and that the results should therefore be overturned.

In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign argued that ballots cast by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic (including their top lawyer’s ballot) shouldn’t have been legal.

In Pennsylvania, the campaign argued that most of the state’s votes should be thrown out because some voters were allowed to fix clerical issues on their ballots.

In those states — as well as Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia — Republicans sued over what they said was the illegal expansion of mail-in voting in the middle of a pandemic that’s killed more than 291,000 people so far.

US President Donald Trump. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

But all of those rules — which in most cases were passed by Republican state legislators — have been in place for months and sometimes years. Trump should have challenged them before voting ended, judges have said.

The voting laws had something of a trial run earlier this year during primaries, with additional laws passed later in the summer after those elections revealed unforeseen problems.

GOP lawyers have blasted through deadline after deadline: early voting, Election Day, and the electoral college “safe harbor” deadline, and they’re still bringing new lawsuits.

Before the November election, Republicans did bring numerous challenges to election laws that made it easier to vote. Those were almost all resolved before the election commenced, and the ones that weren’t settled in time don’t cover enough votes to change the election results.

Rudy Giuliani announcing election lawsuits on November 7, several days after voters finished voting. Photo: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

But the current wave of lawsuits was brought after the 2020 election was already over and Trump had already lost to Biden. The Trump campaign and other Republicans are filing new lawsuits challenging voting laws this very week, well over a month after voting already ended, in the hopes of retroactively disenfranchising voters.

Judges aren’t having any of it.

“Prohibiting certification of the election results would not reinstate the Individual Plaintiffs’ right to vote. It would simply deny more than 6.8 million people their right to vote,” Judge Matthew Brann wrote in a ruling.

Brann was dismissing a case the Trump campaign brought in late November to challenge a Pennsylvania voting law passed in October 2019.

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