BIDEN-HARRIS: Local Legal Experts Critical Of President Trump's Threatened Challenge To Election Results
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- President Donald Trump continued to call "mail-in balloting a hoax" on Twitter Sunday night, but over the weekend the lead of Democratic challengers former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris grew in Pennsylvania in the wake of their victory in the 2020 election.
As the Bay Area celebrated the announcement of Biden as the 46th President over the weekend, Trump's closest confidants ramped up their claims of fraudulent voting in multiple states.
"It seems like the President is putting all his marbles on claims of fraud, but so far nobody has seen any evidence that they've produced that there is such fraud," said Stanford University Professor of Political Science Bruce Cain .
"It's to support a narrative that President Trump has been sending out that this election was stolen," UC Berkeley Professor of Law Bertrall Ross added. "So it may not be that these suits could overturn the election but perhaps for his supporters it could support the narrative that something nefarious went on, that this was stolen."
Cain extensively studied the 2000 election, when George W. Bush was eventually declared the winner in Florida.
"When it went to the Supreme Court in 2000 it was because you had different counties using different procedures," Cain said.
Those procedures and the counting of votes, including mail-in ballots, are a lot different 20 years later.
"The systems that we have today, make recounting faster, and make it less likely that there's any controversy over what a voter actually did," said Cain.
Biden's lead in Pennsylvania is now more than 43,000 as of Sunday night with 99 percent of votes counted. Legal experts say there's no historical precedent for overturning that kind of margin.
California's Republican National Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon discussed the possibility of that kind of margin and scenario Friday.
"If there ends up being an overwhelming margin, one way or the other, most of these kinds of lawsuits tend to go away," said Dhillon. "Nobody has ever seen fraud on a magnitude that could change your race by 1000 votes."
Because of the delays in results, Dhillon believes Democrats and Republicans would agree something needs to be done about federal elections, calling for "better standards that are uniform"-- so that both sides accept the outcome in the future.
