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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Officials in the electoral battleground of Pennsylvania state on Thursday asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump’s campaign that seeks to prevent the state from certifying its results in voting for president.
In court filings in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, attorneys for the Pennsylvania secretary of state and seven of the state’s counties said the case made vague and unsubstantiated allegations “based on theories laws repeatedly rejected and without evidence. “
“This Court should see this lawsuit for what it is: a willful and transparent attack on our electoral system that seeks to disenfranchise all Pennsylvania voters who legally voted in this election,” four of the counties said in a court docket. .
Pennsylvania officials said they “administered a proper, fair and safe election” and would vigorously defend the case. They also said that the plaintiffs did not defend their claim.
President-elect Joe Biden, a Democrat, won the most votes in the seven Pennsylvania counties cited in the lawsuit and has won more than 53,000 votes with an estimated 97% of the ballots written statewide.
Republican Trump’s campaign said “Democratic majority counties” did not provide partisan election observers the opportunity to evaluate mail ballot processing, placed observers too far from the vote tabulation, and allowed voters to mailers whose ballots were deficient to cast provisional votes in what they say was a mockery of state electoral rules.
But Pennsylvania officials said that, in fact, election observers were allowed to evaluate the processing of mail-in ballots, and that every county in the state could inform residents if their mail-in ballots were deficient, even if it was not required to do so. they do.
Biden secured the election on Saturday after the media and Edison Research called him the winner in Pennsylvania, putting him above the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
But Trump has refused to budge, repeatedly and without proof that there was widespread electoral fraud. His campaign has filed a series of long-running lawsuits in various battle states.
Legal experts say the lawsuits have little chance of changing the outcome of the election. A senior legal advisor to Biden has dismissed the litigation as “theater, not really lawsuits.”
Pennsylvania must certify the election results on November 23.
(Reporting by Makini Brice and Jan Wolfe; Edited by Leslie Adler and Grant McCool)
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