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A ruling by a US federal appeals court may have torpedoed several federal lawsuits seeking to overturn the near-certified defeat of US President Donald Trump to former Vice President Joe Biden.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled on Friday that Pennsylvania voters and a candidate for Congress could not use certain constitutional arguments to support their claims that some voters were disadvantaged by the electoral rule changes brought about. due to the coronavirus pandemic and delays in the US postal system.
On Monday, Trump supporters who used similar constitutional arguments in federal lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin voluntarily rejected their claims.
The layoffs came ahead of oral arguments scheduled for Tuesday (Wednesday NZT) in a federal lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania. On Sunday, campaign attorneys reduced their legal arguments in that case to avoid conflicting with the appeals court’s ruling.
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Although the revised lawsuit still argues that 689,472 ballots were improperly processed and counted out of sight of Trump’s election watchers, it does not seek legal redress specifically on that point.
Some experts in electoral law and constitutional law predict that that case is also in trouble.
“Trump’s legal path to overturning the election results appears to be 100 percent dead,” wrote Richard Hasen, a campaign and election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, on his Blog. Electoral Law on Monday (Tuesday NZT).
Even if the Trump campaign succeeded in its narrow arguments in the case to be discussed on Tuesday (Wednesday NZT), “it does not involve enough ballots to challenge Pennsylvania’s election results,” Hasen said in an email to USA TODAY.
Evan Vucci / AP
President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House, Friday, Nov. 13, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo / Evan Vucci)
Biden led Trump by 67,353 votes in Pennsylvania as of Monday (NZT Tuesday), according to Associated Press accounts.
The Trump campaign lawsuit seeks to delay Pennsylvania from certifying its election results. He asks the court to prohibit the certification of results that include absentee and mail ballots that it claims were improperly “cured” of mistakes made by voters, without proper oversight from Trump campaign monitors. It could not immediately be determined how many ballots are in question.
From the beginning, legal experts said the case had no chance of success. Courts are reluctant to invalidate ballots cast by voters that were based on instructions from electoral boards, they said, and voting by mail is constitutional and common.
The arguments of the Trump campaign center on the equal protection clause of the Constitution, which requires “equal protection of the laws” for citizens. The simplified complaint retains an argument based on Bush v. Gore of the United States Supreme Court that decided the 2000 presidential election.
Cynthia Johnson / Link / Getty Images
The court said it did not review the Bush v. Gore in evaluating the plaintiffs’ equal protection arguments because the Supreme Court said in that ruling that it was “limited to the current circumstances” of that case.
Court of Appeals: Bush v. Gore was limited to the 2000 election
The case that reached the appeals court was brought by Republican Congressional candidate Jim Bognet and voters who alleged that Pennsylvania’s three-day extension for absentee and mail ballots improperly allowed county boards of elections to accept ballots “that would otherwise be illegal.”
An appeals court panel denied some of the constitutional arguments in that lawsuit. The court said it did not review the Bush v. Gore in evaluating the plaintiffs’ equal protection arguments because the Supreme Court said in that ruling that it was “limited to the current circumstances” of that case.
“That’s a bad sign” for the Pennsylvania case to be discussed on Tuesday (Wednesday NZT), Kermit Roosevelt, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, said in an email.
Evan Vucci / AP
Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results, in part based on allegations of ineligible votes and inadequate observer access to the ballot, have largely failed.
That case and others are among an explosion of election-related legal challenges that, even before Election Day, had exceeded the number of similar federal lawsuits filed during the previous three presidential elections, according to an analysis by USA TODAY.
Trump’s electoral challenges have not gone very far
Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results, partly based on allegations of ineligible votes and inadequate observer access to the ballot, have largely failed. In Pennsylvania alone, Trump supporters have filed at least 15 legal challenges in an effort to reclaim the state’s 20 electoral votes, the Associated Press reported Friday.
However, judges from Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada have quickly dispatched some of them. Some have been appealed.
On Friday, Pennsylvania courts dismissed six Trump campaign lawsuits that argued that nearly 9,000 absentee ballots should be disqualified for violations of state election code requirements.
Rival appeals were filed over the weekend in those cases.
The four federal lawsuits voluntarily dismissed by plaintiff voters Monday in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin were tied to the law firm of conservative attorney James Bopp Jr., a legal consultant for Trump’s 2020 presidential election campaign.
The cases focused on alleged violations of the equal protection clause, as well as constitutional directives on elections and presidential voters. Each of the cases challenged the election officials’ inclusion of “illegal results of presidential voters in certain counties.”
Trump’s campaign supposedly “two-tier voting system in Pennsylvania
The Trump campaign case filed for arguments Tuesday initially alleged that Pennsylvania used a “two-tier illegal voting system”: ballots in person and by mail. He argued that ballots cast in person were devalued due to the extension of the deadline and lack of oversight of absentee and mail ballots.
But after Friday’s appeals court ruling in the other case, Trump’s campaign attorneys dropped most references to a “two-tier” voting system, as well as issue-based constitutional arguments. other than the equal protection clause.
The amended complaint alleges that Pennsylvania election officials in areas with large Democratic Party affiliations incorrectly allowed mail-in voters who had made technical errors on their ballots to “cure” the errors. Election officials in other areas of the state followed the law by failing to provide such assistance, according to the lawsuit.
When the ballots were counted, election officials in Democratic majority areas “intentionally denied the Trump Campaign access to unhindered observation … denying plaintiffs and Pennsylvanians the equal protection of the law.”
Late on Monday (Tuesday NZT), the court granted Trump’s campaign attorneys in the case permission to withdraw. They were the second group of lawyers to leave.
The campaign is now being represented by the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania law firm Marc Scaringi, whose biography on the firm’s website says he once worked as a part-time radio talk show host.
The Trump campaign asked United States District Court Judge Matthew Brann to delay Tuesday’s hearing (Wednesday NZT). Brann denied the motion.
– USA Today
