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The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled a defeat to Republicans seeking to drop up to 2.5 million mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania as they try to undo President Donald Trump’s electoral defeat, and judges refuse to stop the state from formalizing the President-elect Joe Biden’s victory there.
The court, in a short order, rejected a request from US Congressman Mike Kelly, a Trump ally, and other Pennsylvania Republicans who filed a lawsuit after the Nov.3 election arguing that the state’s expansion of vote-by-mail in 2019 was illegal under state law.
Pennsylvania was one of the pivotal states in the election, with Biden, a Democrat, defeating Trump after the Republican president won the state in 2016. State officials had already certified the election results.
There were no glaring disagreements from any of the justices on the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three appointed by Trump. Trump had urged the Republican-led Senate to confirm its most recent candidate, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, before Election Day so that she could participate in any election-related cases.
Trump has falsely claimed he won re-election, making unsubstantiated claims about widespread voter fraud in states like Pennsylvania. Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of attempting to reduce public confidence in the integrity of the US elections and undermine democracy by attempting to subvert the will of the voters.
“This election is over. We must continue to stop this circus of ‘lawsuits’ and move on,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter.
The Supreme Court must also decide what to do with another election-related case brought today.
Republican-run Texas, hoping to help Trump, mounted an unusual effort to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania and three other states, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, by filing a lawsuit against them directly in the Supreme Court.
The Republican plaintiffs argued that the universal “no excuses” vote-by-mail program passed by the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature in 2019, which allows voters to cast ballots by mail for any reason, violates the state constitution.
Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes and received a much higher proportion of mail-in ballots than Trump. Many more people voted by mail this year due to health concerns triggered by the coronavirus pandemic as they sought to avoid crowds at polling places.
Before the election, Trump urged his supporters not to vote by mail, making unsubstantiated claims that voting by mail, a long-standing feature of US elections, was riddled with fraud.
‘Power of attorney’
Pennsylvania said in a court docket that Republican contenders were asking justices to “undertake one of the most dramatic and disruptive invocations of the judiciary” in US history by uncertifying their election results by the state.
The state said that most of what the contenders had sought was debatable because the election results were already certified and what was really sought was for “the court to annul the election results.”
On November 28, the Pennsylvania Superior Court dismissed the challenge, saying the lawsuit was not filed in a timely manner when the vote-by-mail law was first enacted. He rejected a lower court ruling that had ordered the state not to certify the election pending a hearing.
The Trump campaign and its allies have lost in a series of lawsuits in key states won by Biden, which also include Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and others. The judges have rejected broad claims about voting irregularities.
Biden has amassed 306 electoral votes, surpassing the 270 needed, compared to Trump’s 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the outcome of the elections, while winning the national popular vote by more than 7 million votes.
Today represents a “safe harbor” deadline set by an 1887 US law for states to certify presidential election results. Meeting the deadline is not required, but it provides assurance that Congress will not question a state’s results.
After this deadline, Trump could still file lawsuits seeking to overturn Biden’s victory, but the effort would become even more difficult.
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