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Philadelphia election officials did not inappropriately prevent Donald Trump’s campaign from observing mail ballot counts, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, a major blow to the president’s already faltering legal efforts.
The decision is significant because one of the loudest claims of the Trump campaign since the election has been that they were prevented from observing the vote count in Philadelphia.
While campaign observers were always allowed to observe, the campaign claimed that they were being kept too far from the count, around 15-18 feet, to make a meaningful observation. He got a court order in the days after Election Day requiring Philadelphia officials to leave observers within 6 feet.
But Pennsylvania’s supreme court reversed that decision Tuesday, noting that Pennsylvania law gives Philadelphia election officials wide discretion to decide rules around observers.
“The board did not act against the law when designing its regulations that govern the positioning of the candidates’ representatives during the process prior to counting and counting, since the electoral code does not specify minimum distance parameters for the location of said representatives, ”said Judge Barbara Todd, a Democrat, wrote by a majority of five justices.
“We consider that the board regulations as applied here were reasonable in the sense that they allowed the candidate representatives to observe how the board conducted its activities as prescribed in the electoral code.”
Even the two Republican justices who disagreed with the majority opinion disagreed with the idea, promoted by the Trump campaign, that legitimate votes should be rejected due to improper observation practices.
“In the absence of proven fraud, the notion that presumptively valid ballots cast by the Pennsylvania electorate would be ignored based on isolated procedural irregularities that have been corrected, thereby depriving potentially thousands of voters, is flawed,” wrote the Chief Justice Thomas Saylor in his dissenting opinion.
“Consequently, insofar as there is a concern to protect or legitimize the will of the Philadelphians who cast their votes while the representatives of the candidates were unnecessarily restricted in the convention center, I do not see that there is a real problem.” .
Joe Biden currently leads Trump in Pennsylvania by 72,832 votes.
The decision was made in the middle of a separate hearing Tuesday in federal court in Pennsylvania.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, used the hearing to claim widespread voter fraud, but offered no evidence in the long-term challenge. Pennsylvania attorneys denied Giuliani’s fraud allegations and asked the U.S. District Judge hearing the case, Matthew Brann, to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit.
While a ruling has yet to be issued, a loss in the case would likely doom Trump’s already remote prospects of altering the outcome of the election.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
