The ruling comes four days after Pennsylvania officials certified their vote count for President-elect Joe Biden.
President Donald Trump’s legal team suffered another loss in court on Friday when a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the latest campaign effort to challenge the state’s election results.
Trump’s attorneys promised to appeal to the Supreme Court despite judges’ assessment that “the campaign’s claims are without merit.”
“Free and fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. The charges of injustice are serious. But qualifying an election as unfair does not. The charges require specific indictments and then evidence. We have none here,” wrote the judge of the third Stephanos Bibas circuit. the panel of three judges.
The case had been discussed last week in a lower court by Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who insisted during five hours of oral arguments that the 2020 presidential election had been marred by widespread fraud in Pennsylvania. However, Giuliani did not offer any tangible proof of this in court.
US District Judge Matthew Brann had said the campaign’s flawed complaint, “like Frankenstein’s monster, has been stitched up at random” and denied Giuliani the right to amend it a second time.
The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit called that decision justified. The three judges on the panel were appointed by Republican presidents. including Bibas, a former Trump-appointed University of Pennsylvania law professor. Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, was on the court for 20 years and retired in 2019.
“The voters, not the lawyers, choose the president. The ballots, not the writings, decide the elections,” Bibas said in the ruling, which also denied the campaign’s request to prevent the state from certifying its results, a demand that called “impressive”.
In fact, Pennsylvania officials certified the vote count Monday for President-elect Joe Biden, who defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in the state. Nationally, Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris garnered nearly 80 million votes, a record in the United States presidential election.
Trump has said he expects the Supreme Court to intervene in the race as it did in 2000, when his decision to stop the recount in Florida gave the choice to Republican George W. Bush. On November 5, as the vote count continued, Trump tweeted that “the United States Supreme Court should decide!”
Since then, Trump and his surrogates have attacked the election as flawed and have filed a series of lawsuits to try to block the results in six battle states. But they have found little sympathy from judges, nearly all of whom dismissed their complaints about the security of mail-in ballots, which millions of people used to vote from their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump may be hoping that a Supreme Court he helped steer toward a 6-3 conservative majority will be more open to his pleas, especially since the high court upheld Pennsylvania’s decision to accept mail-in ballots through Nov. 6. for just a 4-4. vote last month. Since then, Trump-nominee Amy Coney Barrett has joined the court.
“The activist judicial machine in Pennsylvania continues to cover up allegations of massive fraud,” Trump’s attorney, Jenna Ellis, tweeted after Friday’s ruling.
In the pre-Brann case, the Trump campaign called for disenfranchising the state’s 6.8 million voters, or at least the 700,000 who voted by mail in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other Democratic-leaning areas.
“One might expect that when such a surprising result is sought, a plaintiff will come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual evidence of rampant corruption,” Brann wrote in his scathing ruling on Nov. 21. “That has not happened.”
Another Republican challenge that reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court this week seeks to prevent the state from further certifying contests on the ballot. The administration of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf is fighting that effort, saying it would prevent the state legislature and congressional delegation from sitting down in the coming weeks.
On Thursday, Trump said the November 3 election was still far from over. However, he offered the clearest signal to date that he would leave the White House peacefully on January 20 if the Electoral College formalizes Biden’s victory.
“I certainly will. But you know it,” Trump said at the White House, answering questions from reporters for the first time since Election Day.
On Friday, however, he continued to baselessly target Detroit, Atlanta and other Democratic cities with large black populations as a source of “massive voter fraud.” And he claimed, without proof, that an observer in the Pennsylvania poll had discovered computer memory units that “gave Biden 50,000 votes” each.
All 50 states must certify their results before the Electoral College meets on December 14, and any challenges to the results must be resolved by December 8. Biden won both the Electoral College and the popular vote by wide margins.
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