Looks Like Biden Has Won, But Will He Win? Probably.

Trump supporter protesting the possibility of a Trump loss

It looks like Biden will legitimately win the electoral college. He has legitimately won the popular vote. The question is whether partisan courts or GOP subversion of the electoral college process will take victory from Biden. Probably not. According to the New York Times: 

The president appeared to have little path through the courts to shift the outcome of the election, leaving him reliant on long shots like recounts or pressure on state legislatures. President Trump’s bellicose pledge to fight the outcome of the election in the courts crashed on Friday into skeptical judges, daunting Electoral College math and a lack of evidence for his claims of fraud. 

The most high-profile step of the day came when Pennsylvania Republicans asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and require election officials in the state to segregate ballots that arrived after Election Day and not to include them for now in the vote totals in the largest and most critical of the swing states.

On Friday evening, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. agreed to the request.

But the move was almost entirely for show: Pennsylvania is already segregating those ballots, counting them separately and not including them in the announced vote totals. The secretary of state, over the objections of Republicans and Mr. Trump, has said they can be counted if they arrived by 5 p.m. on Friday, in line with a state court ruling that the Supreme Court has left open the possibility of reviewing again.

A state official said the ballots in question number in the thousands but not tens of thousands. 

At the same time, allies of the president openly suggested an extreme move: to use baseless allegations of Democratic malfeasance to pressure Republican-controlled state legislatures in key states to send pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College regardless of the results of the popular vote.  

But a supportive outside group, True the Vote — one of the most prominent promoters of the false narrative that “voter fraud” is rampant in the United States — sought to help Mr. Trump build his cases. On Friday, it announced it had formed a $1 million “Whistleblower Defense Fund” to “incentivize” witnesses to step forward with charges of malfeasance.  

But even if the court were to take the case and rule in favor of the Republicans to wipe out all of the ballots in question — votes from mail ballots have overwhelmingly gone to Mr. Biden — it would not affect the current vote totals, which do not include the ballots that came in after Election Day. By early Friday evening, Mr. Biden had a lead of about 17,000 votes in Pennsylvania.  

Other suits in Pennsylvania sought to knock out votes that were the result of a decision by Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar to allow county officials to give voters a chance to fix mistakes in their rejected mail-in ballots or to cast provisional votes instead. But even if that case had succeeded, it would have affected only 93 votes. Similarly, in Michigan, a judge dismissed a Republican suit challenging the vote count in the state, noting the counting was already effectively over and dismissing some of the evidence as based on hearsay. 

Frustrated supporters of the president like the talk radio host Mark Levin called on Republican legislatures in states including Pennsylvania to use their constitutional authority to send a pro-Trump delegation of electors to the Electoral College regardless of the popular vote. 

That description indicates that the odds are low that the president will win by cheating. Given that, it looks like Biden has about a 96% chance of knocking the monster in the White House out. It is getting much easier to feel optimistic about the outcome.