The Trump campaign filed a series of lawsuits in key states to win the presidency. This is what we know | CNN

Fox News anchors object to legitimacy in 1:43 elections

(CNN) -

President Donald Trump's team has filed a series of lawsuits in key contested states that seemed less like sound legal reasoning and more to stop Joe Biden from marching above the electoral vote threshold.

At times, lawsuits have challenged double-digit ballots - hundreds, if not thousands, of votes to potentially change the outcome of any state.

"Admitting defeat is not a plausible reaction so soon after the election, so they launch a lot of lawsuits as a last resort and hope that something will stick," said Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election attorney and CNN contributor.

He said these kinds of demands are not indicative of a campaign that feels optimistic and is instead in revolt.

"I think much of the litigation is unlikely and unlikely to be successful," said Franita Tolson, a professor of law at USC Gould School of Law and a CNN contributor.

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This is how the count requested by Trump 1:08 applies state by state

Tolson pointed to a lawsuit in Georgia, which the Trump campaign announced Wednesday night, about a poll worker mixing processed and unprocessed absentee ballots.

That could have the potential to affect some votes, he said.

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"I suspect a big goal of this litigation is, in the short term, to change the narrative" from a possible Biden victory to a conversation about electoral mismanagement or even fraud, Tolson said.

Another law professor and CNN contributor, Rick Hasen, said the lawsuits appeared to be more public relations than serious litigation.

"So far these lawsuits are not addressing any major issues that appear to call into question vote totals," he said.

Justin Levitt, another election expert and law professor, called some of the lawsuits, as in Michigan, "ridiculous."

“It is said that since there were no people by the absentee voting boxes, then the count must be stopped.

What?".

Even a Republican-appointed federal judge in Pennsylvania questioned the validity of a Republican lawsuit Wednesday, when they challenged fewer than 100 ballots that absentee voters corrected in a county outside of Philadelphia.

At a hearing on Wednesday morning, Judge Timothy Savage did not speak;

however, he suggested that the attorney for the Republican scrutiny watchers was trying to deprive someone of the right to vote.

He noted that the lawsuit appeared to have other problems in its arguments.

Some Pennsylvania legal challenges from Trump's campaign were quickly dismissed on Election Day, and Trump touted his appeals of those losses as apparently new cases on Wednesday.

For example, on Election Day, a Philadelphia judge had rejected a Trump campaign case regarding access to ballot processing, writing that "observers are directed only to observe and not audit ballots."

The judge added that the city's electoral board complied with the law.

Another lawsuit, filed on Election Day by the Trump campaign, against the ballot observation process in Bucks County, Pennsylvania - also near Philadelphia - was dismissed by a judge, though Trump is now appealing, according to the Pennsylvania court records.

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Trump's campaign filed another lawsuit over Nevada elections

Lawyers for Trump's campaign also filed a lawsuit in Nevada on Tuesday, alleging that their observers did not have sufficient access to all aspects of the ballot counting process, from opening ballots to typing and manual signature verification and the duplication of damaged ballots.

A Nevada judge denied the Republican challenge to the early voting process in the Democratic-majority county.

"If this last minute lawsuit were to be successful, it would require a major change in the way [Nevada] processed absentee [ballots] to determine if the signature on the ballot matched the voter's previous signature on file," he said. Richard Pildes, a professor of Constitutional Law at New York University and CNN's Election Law analyst.

"Courts are usually unwilling to allow plaintiffs to walk in the door so late and ask for major changes to a process that is already underway."

However, a lawsuit, the petition before the United States Supreme Court on Pennsylvania's voting deadline, can be a more serious challenge to litigation.

It challenges the validity of several thousand votes cast in good faith by voters, but received by officials after the election through the mail.

For this case to make a difference, Pennsylvania would have to be the decisive state for the elections, and the margin of difference between Trump and Biden would have to be a few tens of thousands of votes.

- CNN's Maeve Reston and Stephen Collinson contributed to this report.

Elections 2020 United States