Will the American presidential election be decided in the courts? Even before the official voting day scheduled for Tuesday, November 5, the United States courts are overwhelmed by appeals requesting the calling into question of electoral laws in different states. More than 200 electoral files are in progress throughout the country, a record.
Georgia, in the southeast of the United States, is one of the swing statesthese key states where the election is very close. In Atlanta, for months, legal actions against electoral procedures have multiplied and are more numerous than elsewhere in the country.
Georgia is the state that swung the 2020 election. In this Republican stronghold, Democrat Joe Biden was ahead of Donald Trump by only 11,779 votes. The Republican candidate had cried fraud and already launched legal appeals but without success, to the great dismay of his supporters.
“We now know, after four years, that everything in the machines was rigged”supports Patrick who has lived in Georgia for 34 years and still defends the myth of the stolen election. An American citizen, he started by voting for Obama, before becoming a fervent supporter of Trump. “Everyone you talk to in the street tells you that Trump is going to win. But they are afraid that at the last minute the same thing will happen again, that the machines could be rigged at night. They're afraid that on election night something will happen again.” Patrick has decided not to vote this year.
“I wanted to vote for Trump again but I saw last time that it didn't matter, so I won't vote this time.”
Patrick, partisan de Donald Trumpat franceinfo
The Republican Party in power in Georgia therefore gradually wanted to make electoral procedures more secure in its eyes and therefore more restrictive as well. Last September he voted for new measures, including the possibility of recounting ballots by hand and for electoral officials not to certify the results of the election if they think there is fraud. Jannel King, a Republican member of this electoral college, was at the origin of these proposals.“The election officials at the polling stations who told me that it was not uncommon for them to find lost ballots after the polls closed. So I told myself that this rule was a way of responding to this electoral dysfunction. Especially since there are constituencies where this is already being practiced. The only novelty in these measures was to impose new observers in the polling stations, the rest was nothing new and was precisely aimed at. create common electoral rules.” But on October 15, the Georgian courts, seized by the Democratic Party, challenged these new electoral rules.
This type of dispute between Republicans and Democrats is found in other states. In the United States, the right to vote is not in the Constitution, it is therefore the States, according to their political color, which decide the rules for voters, and this often causes a game of judicial ping-pong. This is the case for example in Pennsylvania where Republicans have launched appeals to prohibit postal voting for military personnel returning from abroad. In Nevada, they wanted to ban some late mail-in ballots. Most of the time, these appeals are rejected by the courts but they are part of a strategy of Donald Trump's party, explains lawyer Henry Chalmers. He launched an appeal against Georgia's electoral college for lack of transparency.
“The Republicans of Donald Trump will launch appeals if they lose. Their objective is to gain time because if the score is so close that there is debate on the number of ballots and no clear decision then according to our constitution , the House of Representatives could choose the winner, but the House of Representatives is won by the Republicans.
“I think the strategy of the Trump camp is to create so much legal wrangling that the House of Representatives takes back the election.”
Henry Chalmers, avocatat franceinfo
But before that there is the Supreme Court card. This is what happened 20 years ago during the election between Al Gore and George Bush. The result was so close that the Supreme Court had to decide between them. Donald Trump during his previous term appointed four conservative judges but nothing says that they will rule in his favor, hopes Anthony Mickael Kreiss, specialist in constitutional law and the political history of the United States at the State University of Georgia.
“When we were at our lowest level of democracy in the United States, there was no search for evidence and justice was done with guns, so I think our justice system is a good thing for democracy, estimated Anthony Mickael Kreiss. But there is an essential parameter, which is that the court respects the rule of law and that the judges have integrity. Because one of the reasons Donald Trump failed to overturn the election in 2020 was that judges and lawyers came together to say 'no.'
The Republican candidate is still being prosecuted in this case, but the American Constitution does not prohibit him from running.
