Although thousands of words could be written about everything that’s wrong with this statement (to say nothing of the rest of his speech), there are two critical, practical flaws that are worth emphasizing: First, there’s no actual mechanism for anyone, including the president, to “go to” the Supreme Court and get the court to stop a state’s vote counting. Second, as the results from that count become clearer, the actual legal mechanisms that are available to the president are increasingly unlikely to change the outcome of this election. Whether or not the Supreme Court may otherwise be inclined to help Trump in an appropriate case, the odds that it will be in any position to do so are getting longer by the minute.
As a general rule, the Supreme Court is primarily an appellate court — meaning that virtually all of the cases it hears start in a state or federal trial court and work their way up to the justices through state or federal appellate courts. Although the court has what’s called “original” jurisdiction for a small class of cases, a candidate’s challenge of election results doesn’t come within a country mile of that category. Simply put, the only way the Supreme Court could step in here is to review what a lower state or federal court already decided — just as it did with the Florida Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore in 2000.
