Supreme Court delivers final blow to Trump’s last election challenge

The Supreme Court has tossed out former President Donald Trump’s last remaining challenge to the 2020 election after he lied about the results of the nationwide vote and urged states to wipe out thousands of ballots while promoting false claims of fraud.

The court without comment rejected Mr Trump’s appeal, which challenged thousands of absentee ballots filed in Wisconsin, an election battleground that the former president lost by more than 20,000 votes.

It was the last of three petitions filed at the Supreme Court near the end of his presidency that the justices declined to take up.

The court turned away Mr Trump’s other two appeals, including a second Wisconsin challenge and one relating to voting in Pennsylvania, another pivotal state he lost, last week. Lower courts previously had ruled against Mr Trump in those three cases.

It already was clear that the high court, which includes three justices appointed by Mr Trump, had no intention to intervene in the cases and others filed by his allies because it did not act before Congress certified Mr Biden’s victory on January 6.

That formal certification was interrupted when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, clashing with police and security officers in an apparent attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the former president’s electoral defeat.

In the Wisconsin case, Mr Trump sued two days after the state had certified its election results.

He challenged several Wisconsin election policies including one allowing the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both a federal judge and the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the claims, noting in part that Mr Trump had waited too long to sue.

Courts around the country rejected the cases brought by Mr Trump and his allies, sometimes in colorful terms. A judge put it this way in November in rejecting a Trump challenge in Pennsylvania: “This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together.”

Mr Trump has made - and continues to make - false claims that the presidential election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud and irregularities. Republicans are now seizing on those same unsubstantiated allegations in an effort to impose new voting restrictions in numerous states.

The Supreme Court on Monday also turned away another election-related case filed by Mr Trump’s ally Lin Wood, who had asked the justices to block the January 5 Senate runoff elections in Georgia.

The court never acted on the request and Democrats won both races, giving them narrow control of the Senate.

Reuters contributed to this report