US Elections: Judge Rejects Trump’s Proposal To Stop Voting Certification In Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania officials can certify election results that currently show Democrat Joe Biden winning the state by more than 80,000 votes, a federal judge ruled today, giving President Donald Trump’s campaign another blow in his effort to invalidate the elections.

Federal District Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, rejected President Donald Trump’s campaign injunction request, dashing the incumbent’s hopes of somehow overturning the results of the presidential race.

Brann compared the legal claims brought by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to “Frankenstein’s Monster” and said some of the campaign’s arguments were “unhinged.”

In his ruling, Brann said the Trump campaign presented “tense legal arguments without merit and speculative allegations … without supporting evidence.”

“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all voters in its sixth most populous state,” the opinion said. “Our people, laws and institutions demand more.”

Judge Brann said that Trump campaign claims that the equal protection guarantee had been violated were “like Frankenstein’s monster … randomly linked from two different theories in an attempt to avoid precedent control “.

The Trump campaign responded by issuing a statement criticizing the “Obama-appointed judge” as he promised to fight to the Supreme Court.

“Today’s decision turns out to aid us in our strategy to quickly get to the United States Supreme Court,” Trump’s campaign attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis wrote in their statement.

“While we do not agree with this opinion, we are grateful to the Obama-appointed judge for making this early decision quickly, rather than simply trying to run out of time.”

Trump had argued that the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection guarantee under the law was violated when Pennsylvania counties took different approaches to notifying voters before the election of technical problems with mailed ballots. .

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and the seven majority Biden counties the campaign sued had argued that Trump had raised similar claims and lost.

Brann was told that the remedy the Trump campaign was seeking, casting millions of votes for alleged isolated problems, was too extreme, particularly after most of them had been counted.

“There is no justification at any level for the radical disenfranchisement they seek,” Boockvar’s attorneys wrote in a brief filed Thursday (US time).

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, tweeted shortly after Brann’s ruling, saying, “Another one bites the dust.”

The state’s 20 electoral votes alone would not have been enough to give Trump a second term. Counties must certify their results to Boockvar by Monday, after which she will do her own certification.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will notify voters of the winning candidate to report to the Capitol to vote on Dec. 14.