The voters have spoken. Now we’re going to hear from the lawyers.

By Dana Milbank,

The voters have spoken. Now we’re going to hear from the lawyers.

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, this much is clear: Democrat Joe Biden was on his way to a historic win in the popular vote. Forecasts pointed to turnout of 161.2 million — likely the highest ever in absolute terms and the highest voter turnout percentage in 120 years — and Biden likely to eclipse the record Barack Obama set in 2008 of 69.5 million votes.

But that did not turn, at least for now, into the electoral college landslide that would repudiate President Trump from coast to coast. Biden was on the cusp of seizing Arizona, a state Trump won in 2016, but other battleground states largely followed 2016 — likely leaving the outcome to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all states that weren’t allowed to count all early ballots before Election Day. Forecasts based on patterns from votes already counted in those states point to Biden victories, in all three.

But that’s only if the votes get counted.

Late on Election Day, Republicans sued in Pennsylvania to block temporarily the votes of people who were allowed to correct mistakes on their mail-in ballots. A state court hearing is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

Trump signaled well before Election Day that he intended to file lawsuits to challenge the results. “We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers,” he said. His campaign had indicated it would go ballot by ballot trying to disqualify votes. Republicans also tried to halt the counting of ballots in Democratic-leaning Clark County in Nevada, but the state Supreme Court unanimously denied the request on Tuesday night.

Trump, trailing in both the popular and electoral vote early Wednesday, declared “A big WIN!” and tweeted: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Poles are closed!” (He later revised that to “polls.”)

Biden, by contrast, said he wants to see that “every ballot is counted,” and told supporters at a drive-in rally: “Keep the faith, guys. We’re going to win this.”

This has long been part of Trump’s strategy to win reelection: Unable to command majority support, he and his allies set out to suppress his opponent’s voters in key states.

They fought against absentee voting despite the raging pandemic.

They sabotaged the U.S. Postal Service so mail-in ballots wouldn’t be returned on time.

Then they filed suit so late-arriving ballots wouldn’t be counted.

They sued to stop people from returning ballots in a drive-through setting.

They sued to limit the days of early voting.

They sued to disqualify ballots if a signature didn’t exactly match the one on file from years earlier.

They restricted ballot-drop sites to disadvantage large counties full of Democratic voters.

They purged eligible voters, particularly voters of color, from the rolls, and they imposed ID requirements and restricted voting locations and hours in ways that disproportionately disenfranchise non-Whites.

They fought to keep ex-felons from getting their voting rights restored.

They fought to keep Native Americans on reservations from voting.

They harassed voters returning their ballots by videotaping them.

They encouraged armed militias to patrol polling places.

On Election Day, after the U.S. Postal Service, now run by a Republican megadonor, reported on-time delivery rates below 90 percent and disclosed that it could not trace more than 300,000 ballots it had collected, a federal judge ordered the Postal Service to sweep its facilities for “held up” ballots. The Postal Service, represented by Trump Justice Department lawyers, disregarded the court order.

By all accounts, the election was a referendum on Trump — something the Trump campaign had tried to avoid by casting Biden as corrupt, senile and socialist and even a pedophile.

But Morning Consult’s exit polling of early voters found that only 22 percent of people who voted for Trump said they were voting mostly against Biden, while double that proportion of Biden voters — 44 percent — said they were primarily voting against Trump. AP VoteCast, a broad survey of the electorate, found that about two-thirds of voters said their vote was driven by their views of Trump, for or against.

Unfortunately, what voters thought about the incumbent president isn’t what matters now. Now what matters are Republican attempts to stop votes from getting counted in hopes that this could turn another popular-vote defeat into another electoral-college victory.

As the nation and the world, late on election night, face an electoral-college nail-biter, the possibility that voter-suppression efforts could make the difference is a possibility too terrible to fathom.

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Read more: The Post’s View: What’s more important than a timely election result: Counting all the votes Karen Tumulty: The 2020 election will be remembered as a testament to voters’ resilience Jennifer Rubin: Let’s talk about ‘forgiving and forgetting’ in post-election America Eric H. Holder Jr. and Michael B. Mukasey: If you can’t think of anything worse than the other side winning, imagine this Katrina vanden Heuvel: No matter who wins, it’s time to get rid of the electoral college