Trump?s bluster and millions haven't stopped universal mail-in voting plans

He tweets relentlessly about it.Yet six months into a crusade to stop universal mail-in voting, Trump hasn’t yet prevented a single state from sending voters the unsolicited ballots he claims, with minimal evidence, are ripe for fraud.AdvertisementHis attempts in Nevada, New Jersey and Montana are tied up in court. There will be an unprecedented number of absentee ballots, some states will start verifying ballots before Election Day and the country will likely not know the winner of the presidential race on Nov. 3.“The pandemic has changed everything about our lives, so why wouldn't it change the way we run elections, too?” he said.In near-daily diatribes, tweets, interviews and speeches, Trump has spent months making evidence-deficient allegations about mail-in voting leading to massive election fraud. And they cite victories in three key states for Trump — New Mexico, Minnesota and Pennsylvania — where the GOP successfully opposed lawsuits designed to force those states to send universal ballots or ballot applications to all voters.“The RNC is involved in several cases in which we are challenging attempts to mail unsolicited, live mail-in ballots to every voter on the voter roll in contradiction of both state and federal law,” RNC spokesperson Mandi Merritt said. But the Trump campaign did not join that suit, according to the RNC.The Trump campaign also did not sue to stop ballots in the five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — that were already conducting all-remote elections before the pandemic, according to the RNC.Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said Republicans have an uphill battle in these suits: First, they need to prove to a judge that they have a legal interest in cases; then, they have to prove their fraud allegations.“The courts have been skeptical of those kinds of claims and more deferential to the states if they’re going to allow mail-in ballots or not,” he said.