united-states president elections
Can any lawsuit be filed by a sitting US president at the state level?
<p>For the sake of argument, let's say that in the 2020 elections Trump lost these 19 &quot;Much more republican&quot; states (according to this <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/results/president" rel="nofollow noreferrer">NY Times article</a>) that he had easily won in 2016:
<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/3uw43.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/3uw43.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>
<p>According to an excerpt of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/us/politics/trump-debate-election.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this NY Times article</a> and Tuesday's debate, it's very clear that Trump has been recently pushing to discredit the election:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>President Trump’s angry insistence in the last minutes of Tuesday’s debate that there was no way the presidential election could be conducted without fraud amounted to an extraordinary declaration by a sitting American president that he would try to throw any outcome into the courts, Congress or the streets if he was not re-elected.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is an assumption, but Trump being Trump, he will not only try to discredit the elections of all these states but he will also want to win by a <em>huge</em> margin (he said he wanted to win 9-0 if it went to the Supreme Court).</p>
<p>My question: what process would he need to go through to discredit the votes of the 19 &quot;Much more republican&quot; states that he had won in 2016 but lost in 2020?</p>
<p>In this <a href="https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57437/how-would-election-results-end-up-in-supreme-court">closed question</a>, a user mentioned that he needs to file a lawsuit in &quot;state or federal court with jurisdiction over the state in which an irregularity was alleged&quot;.  Would this be his first step of would another &quot;entity&quot; need to verify that his complaint merits a lawsuit?</p>
<p>For example, at the debate he said he found ballots in a river. Can he file a state-level lawsuit saying that there's fraud or a miscount because someone found ballots in a river? He also said that he would send his followers to the voting booths, and one of these guys says that he &quot;saw&quot; fraud taking place. Is that enough for a lawsuit?</p>
<p>And how long would all of this take? Trump being Trump, I assume he'll try to drag out as long as humanly possible.</p>

<p>IANAL, however I would have to believe that a sitting president could file lawsuits at both the federal and state levels in his capacity as a citizen. I can not find any ruling that would prohibit a citizen from filing and pursuing a lawsuit in Federal or State Courts. For example, Donald J Trump filed suit against Elijah Cummings in April 2019 <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/407135962/Trump-lawsuit" rel="nofollow noreferrer">DJT V. Cummings</a></p>
<p>Whether a court would determine if a sitting president, acting in his capacity as a citizen, has standing before a court of course is a different matter entirely. The court would determine that.</p>
