Washington:
The supreme court of the US state of Pennsylvania dismissed another legal challenge to the election by supporters of President Donald Trump on Saturday, further reducing their already nearly impossible chances of overturning the results.
A Republican lawsuit had sought to invalidate the battlefield state mail-in ballots that President-elect Joe Biden won by about 81,000 votes, or to discard all votes and allow the state legislature to decide the winner.
The court dismissed both claims in a unanimous decision, calling the second an “extraordinary proposition that the court would disenfranchise the 6.9 million Pennsylvanians who voted in the general election.”
The lawsuit argued that a 2019 Pennsylvania law allowing universal vote by mail was unconstitutional.
The judges said their challenge to the November 21 law was submitted too late, more than a year after it was enacted and with the election results “apparently apparent.”
Pennsylvania officially certified Biden’s victory there on November 24. The lawsuit also sought to stop the certification.
Saturday’s decision follows a long list of similar ones, including a ruling the previous day in which a federal appeals court flatly dismissed Trump’s claim that the election was unfair and refused to freeze Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania.
Trump has refused to give up his allegations of fraud in the Nov. 3 election despite repeated court defeats, tweeting bizarre conspiracy theories and vowing to continue his legal fight.
On Thursday, he said for the first time that he would leave the White House if Biden is officially confirmed as the winner by the Electoral College on December 14.
But on Friday he tweeted that “Biden can only enter the White House as president if he can show that his ridiculous 80,000,000 votes were not obtained fraudulently or illegally.”
Biden, who will be sworn in on January 20, garnered 306 votes in the Electoral College to Trump’s 232.
The president-elect has said that Americans “will not tolerate” attempts to derail the outcome of the vote.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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