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US President Donald Trump’s campaign launched its broadest challenge yet to the election results that appears destined to oust him from office, accusing Pennsylvania officials of running a “two-tier” voting system. , in person and by mail, that violates the Constitution of the United States.
Legal experts said the case has little chance of success, for a variety of reasons: Courts are wary of invalidating legally cast votes. The questions raised, even if they are true, do not represent a constitutional question. And voting by mail, used in many states, is common and constitutional.
The lawsuit has “a lot of complaints about different things, and it’s not easy to see how they all fit together,” said Kermit Roosevelt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law who specializes in constitutional law.
Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post
The campaign of US President Donald Trump has sued Pennsylvania election officials by mail ballot. Legal experts say the case is unfounded.
“This has a ‘throw it all on the wall and see what sticks’ feel,” he said.
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The lawsuit alleges that the state’s vote-by-mail system, used in a general election for the first time last week, was fatally flawed by mismanagement and improper changes or interpretations of election laws, which allowed votes to be cast and will count with virtually no supervision.
It claims that Trump campaign watchers were blocked from accessing necessary to detect and challenge improper verification of voters’ identities and other alleged wrongdoing.
But as with other lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and its allies, the federal lawsuit offered little evidence to back up its claims.
Most mail-in ballots supported Biden
The majority of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania favored Joe Biden, the Democratic challenger who has been projected as the winner. The lawsuit argues that in-person voting, which favored Trump, had stricter safeguards, including proper verification of voters’ identities and monitoring by observers.
Voting in person was marked by “transparency and verifiability,” the lawsuit states. Voting by mail, on the other hand, “was shrouded in darkness and did not meet any of those transparency and verifiability requirements.”
David Becker, CEO and founder of the Center for Election Research and Innovation, said the Trump campaign “continues to spread lies about the transparency of this process and access to observers. Trump campaign watchers and party watchers Republicans were present at all times that every vote was considered in Pennsylvania. “
John Bazemore / AP
Supporting President Donald Trump holds up signs during a rally outside State Farm Arena, where Fulton County has a vote counting operation.
He said the Trump campaign admitted it during a hearing before a federal judge last week when a lawyer said there were “a non-zero number” of campaign watchers present during the vote count in Philadelphia.
Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, noted that Pennsylvania’s system for identifying voters is the same: verification of their signature, whether they cast their votes in person or by mail.
The lawsuit also criticizes the three-day extension of the deadline for receiving absentee votes and by mail, from Election Day to November 6. The change, recommended by the Secretary of State’s office and confirmed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, is now the subject of a state Republican Party request for an emergency injunction by the United States Supreme Court.
Legal experts say the lawsuit is without merit
Trump’s campaign lawsuit seeks a temporary court order preventing the state from certifying the election results.
Laura Humphrey, a spokeswoman for Commonwealth Secretary Kathy Boockvar, said the office could not comment on pending litigation. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro called the lawsuit “without merit” and said the election was “overseen by bipartisan election officials and was legal, fair and safe.”
Shapiro said the lawsuit will end like others filed in Pennsylvania, “which courts at all levels find to be without merit.”
Legal experts agreed.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, said in an email that he couldn’t imagine federal courts citing insufficient oversight of ballot counting “as a basis for rejecting votes.”
“What is crucial is that the courts are very reluctant to disqualify legally cast votes,” Chemerinsky said.
Rick Hasen, an electoral law expert at the University of California, Irvine, said it is “extremely unlikely” that the lawsuit will change the outcome in Pennsylvania or the national outcome that favors Biden.
“Their key claim, that there is some inequality in the treatment of mail-in ballots and in-person ballots, could have been made months ago,” Hasen said. “It doesn’t seem calculated to get more relief than delay.”
John Bazemore / AP
Donald Trump Jr., right, smiles along with his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle before a press conference at the headquarters of the Georgia Republican Party.
Barry Richard, who represented President George W. Bush in the legal fight for the 2000 presidential race, said the alleged violations raised in the lawsuit, including unequal treatment of voters in person and by mail, the unauthorized extension of the time to resolve signature Issues, unsolicited mailed ballots, and positioning of election observers away from ballot processing fall short of the level of federal violations that could be brought before the United States Supreme Court.
If confirmed, the allegations would cast a shadow over voting by mail elsewhere.
The Trump campaign invokes the Equal Protection Clause, claiming that voters by mail were not subject to the same verification and level of transparency as voters in person. That’s not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, Richard said, because voters can choose whether to vote in person or by mail, and the issue at hand is that ballots, not voters, are treated differently.
Danielle Lang, co-director of voting rights and redistricting at the Campaign Legal Center, an organization that supports unrestricted access to voting, said the lawsuit “is essentially an attempt to disallow voting by mail after the fact.” By extension, that would cast a shadow on the accuracy and reliability of vote-by-mail in other states, including those won by Trump, he said.
The Secretary of State’s guidance, Becker said, was known long before the election and litigated. Now that they know the score, the Trump campaign wants to change the rules, “he said.
And Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard Law School, said the lawsuit “does not allege sufficient facts to support a conclusion that the relief sought would alter the outcome of the elections, a key difference between this complaint and the filing that prompted the Supreme Court to intervene in the state recount in Bush v. Gore. “
As of Monday, Biden was leading in Pennsylvania by more than 45,000 votes, more than Trump’s lead when Pennsylvania won in 2016.
“Neither Trump nor (Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) raised questions at the time,” Becker said. “We’ve literally been voting by mail across the country for almost 200 years. This is nothing new.”
“Are you complaining about voting by mail in Utah, where President Trump won and who has always done voting by mail?” Becker asked. “Are they complaining in other states, like Ohio and Florida, that saw massive amounts of mail-in voting?”
-USA. Today
