Updated: November 22, 2020 8:44:19 pm
The Pennsylvania lawsuit is the latest addition to a long list of post-election cases that Trump’s legal team has lost or abandoned. (AP Photo / Evan Vucci)
In another blow to the relentless efforts of the Trump campaign to reverse former Vice President Joe Biden’s victory in the U.S. election, a federal judge in Pennsylvania on Sunday dismissed a lawsuit brought by the president’s attorneys that sought to invalidate millions of votes cast in the state.
The lawsuit in Pennsylvania is the latest addition to a long list of post-election cases that the legal team and allies of US President Donald Trump have lost or abandoned. Of the 36 cases they have filed, only two have been won so far, Reuters reported.
Observers have maintained that Trump has little or no chance of overturning the election result, especially since his lawyers have yet to come forward with convincing evidence to show that widespread electoral fraud did, in fact, take place in the battlefield states.
This is where Trump’s legal challenges lie in key states on the battlefield.
Arizona
Just days after Election Day, Trump’s campaign attorneys filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County alleging that several votes cast by Republican voters, who used Sharpie pens to mark their ballots, had not been counted as the ink had spilled all over the paper, making it unreadable for voting machines.
The attorneys include affidavits from individual voters alleging that polling station members had taken advantage of the situation by nullifying votes that would otherwise have gone to Trump’s President, the New York Times reported.
In response to the claims, which became widely known as #Sharpiegate on social media, Arizona election officials said voting with a Sharpie would have had no impact on the votes recorded by the voting machines.
During a hearing on Nov. 12, a Trump campaign attorney admitted that the complaint was not based on evidence of voter fraud. “This is not a fraud case,” said Trump’s campaign attorney, Kory Langhofer. “We do not allege fraud. We are not saying that no one is trying to steal the elections. “
Since then, the Trump campaign has dropped the case.
In another case, the Arizona Republican Party tried to block the certification of election results in Maricopa until a court ruled on the party’s demand for a new manual recount of a sample of ballots. On Thursday, a judge rejected his offer to postpone the certification process and dismissed the legal challenge.
Georgia
High-profile conservative attorney Lin Wood filed a lawsuit to stop reporting the outcome in Georgia, where Biden became the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to win. He claimed that election officials illegally changed the process for handling absentee ballots at the last minute, tarnishing the results of the state elections.
But on Thursday, a federal judge appointed by Trump himself rejected the lawsuit. “To stop certification at the 11th hour would literally engender confusion and disenfranchisement that seems to me has no basis in law and in fact,” said District Judge Steven Grimberg.
Georgia’s undersecretary of state has called the case a “foolish and unsubstantiated claim.” Assistant state attorney general Russell Willard also objected, saying the lawsuit was an effort to turn the clock back on voting rights.
Michigan
The Trump campaign dropped its final federal lawsuit challenging ballot certification in Wayne County, Michigan, on Thursday. A Trump campaign attorney claimed, without evidence, that the county canvass board refused to certify the results, even though it had done so earlier this week.
Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said in a statement that the campaign had decided to drop the case “as a direct result of achieving the result we seek: preventing Wayne County elections from being prematurely certified before residents can be sure that all legal votes have been counted and not all illegal votes have been counted ”.
In a separate lawsuit, two election challengers asked the court to halt the certification process until an independent audit was completed to “ensure the accuracy and integrity of the election,” the AP reported.
Pennsylvania
On Sunday, a federal judge in Pennsylvania rejected the much-talked about lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign earlier this month that could potentially have several million votes legally cast in the state invalidated.
“It is not in the power of this Court to violate the Constitution,” wrote Justice Matthew Brann, a well-known Republican, of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, in his dissent, obtained by CNN. He stressed that Biden had won the state, adding that the results would be certified by state officials on Monday.
In this case, Trump’s legal team claimed that the state allowed counties to decide whether absentee ballots with technical problems could be fixed by the voters themselves. Two Republican voters named in the lawsuit alleged that their Equal Protection rights were violated as their county did not allow them to correct their ballots, and therefore they were rejected.
The attorneys claimed that strongly Democratic counties, such as Philadelphia County, allowed voters to “cure” their ballots, while more conservative counties may not have. But Brann said the legal reasoning behind the claim was like “Frankenstein’s monster.”
“The answer to invalidated ballots is not to invalidate millions more,” said his dissent.
Nevada
The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Nevada challenging the election results and unsubstantiated alleging that the voting irregularities would be enough to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Trump’s attorneys claimed that the votes were cast on behalf of the deceased and that election observers were not allowed to replace the “key points” of ballot processing, allegations that have been largely rejected by various judges in United States.
The hearing on the Trump campaign lawsuit is scheduled for Dec. 1, the AP reported.
Meanwhile, a Nevada district judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a conservative activist named Sharron Angle to stop the certification of the state’s election results, which show Biden leading by more than 33,000 votes.
Wisconsin
Two of Wisconsin’s largest counties, Milwaukee and Dane, are in the process of conducting a recount after the Trump campaign filed a petition requesting one, CNN reported. The count will take place in both counties until December 1, which is also the deadline for the state to certify its results.
Also in this case, the Trump campaign claimed without evidence that government officials had violated state law and that absentee ballots had been tampered with and tampered with. The Trump campaign sought to discard thousands of missing ballots, claiming they shouldn’t have been counted in the first place. However, his request to discard the ballots was denied by the Dane County Board of Electors, AP reported.
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