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The same can be said for the people alleging fraud. Absent some specific evidence, of which none was provided, there was no basis for which Trump to even suggest that the election was fraudulent. Yet he was making these allegations before they had even finished counting the votes. This throws the whole call for forensic audits of voting machines into question as well. There was concerted effort to "audit" the election results in several states, but the auditors never explained exactly what they were looking for, or what they were doing, or how they expected what they were doing to demonstrate what they were looking for. Instead, they poked around with constantly changing procedures before concluding that the vote total wasn't substantially different from the official numbers. Not that this satisfied the election truthers, who merely backtracked and said that the methods the auditors used wouldn't have uncovered any of the other 199 types of fraud they alleged without evidence.
Dismissal on standing grounds did not prevent the lawsuits from uncovering fraud; that would have required fraud to have been alleged in the first place. What the lawsuits did was allege improprieties in election procedure and ask that the court throw out the results for an entire state as a remedy, or at least throw out some tranche of ballots, the goal being that if certification could be prevented in enough states it would throw the election into the House. IIRC, these suits never alleged any facts that were in dispute, and thus would not have resulted in any kind of discovery or investigation. These cases being heard on the merits would have simply meant that the parties would have gone into court and argued different issues than they actually argued. Some of these cases were heard on the merits and were found lacking; I doubt the ones dismissed for standing, or laches, or any other affirmative defense would have fared differently had they been allowed to proceed.
You want to file a lawsuit that will actually result in a thorough investigation? File one that makes specific allegations of fraud: Tell a story in the complaint about how specific people took specific actions at specific times. Have actual witnesses on hand whom you can depose under oath, subject to cross-examination. Be prepared to do some of your own cross-examination as the other side puts up their witnesses contradicting yours. Don't be afraid to get subpoenas. Even if you have forensic evidence that your expert says is ironclad, it's worthless unless you have lay witnesses who can substantiate your claims. Saying there's proof that votes were switched is meaningless if you don't know who switched them. In other words, you have to have an actual case. It's not hard. Attorneys manage to file real cases every day, even attorneys who suck.
Correction: He was making these claims before the election even happened.
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You might well have reason to suspect the results if the results coming in were more than 1σ off from internal polling. If you’re looking at a poll in Georgia that says Trump should win 60-40 over Biden, and Trump ends up losing 40-60 to Biden on a poll with an error margin of +/-3% it’s not going to be hard to see that something strange is happening here. If this happens over several states, especially if they all happened to break in the same direction. Like if 5 states that should be in the bag for Trump suddenly swing for Biden, it’s really something that should be looked at.
So, in other words, if Trump wins by a wide margin, and Kamala Harris says that her own internal polling shows her winning by a landslide in all 50 states, this should be enough to conduct whatever and as many investigations as she wants, and that we should delay certification until all of them are complete and/or she should refuse to conduct the electoral vote count until she's satisfied?
It should be enough to raise a question. Keep in mind that both parties have their internal polling data so if she’s lying about the data, Trump can easily show that his polling data that disputes hers. Plus there is exit polling, and so on that can be used. A serious anomaly deserves to be investigated, not just to assure that the correct person takes office, but also to assure the public that the election process is free, fair, and not being tampered with.
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