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Pennsylvania’s highest court struck down a lower court order preventing the state from certifying dozens of races from the Nov. 3 election.
In the latest Republican lawsuit attempting to thwart President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the battlefield state, the state supreme court unanimously threw out the three-day order, saying the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the law allowed to contest the Pennsylvania year. -Old vote-by-mail law.
The justices also commented on the staggering demand of the lawsuit that a full election be retroactively annulled. “They have not alleged that not even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted,” Judge David Wecht wrote in a concurring opinion.
The state attorney general, Democrat Josh Shapiro, called the court’s decision “another victory for democracy.”
The week-long lawsuit, led by Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Mike Kelly, had challenged the state’s vote-by-mail law as unconstitutional.
As a remedy, Kelly and other Republican plaintiffs had tried to discard the 2.5 million ballots mailed under the law, most of them by Democrats, or erase the election results and order the Republican-controlled state legislature to elect. Pennsylvania Presidential Electors.
The request that state legislators choose Pennsylvania’s presidential electors also runs counter to a nearly century-old state law, which gives the power to elect electors for the state’s popular vote, Wecht wrote.
While the two high court Republicans joined the five Democrats in opposing those remedies, they parted ways with the Democrats in suggesting that the underlying claims of the lawsuit, which the state’s vote-by-mail law could violate, are worth considering. the Constitution.
On Wednesday, Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough, elected as a Republican in 2009, had issued the order to stop the certification of any remaining races, apparently including races for Congress.
A day earlier, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said he had certified Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election in Pennsylvania. Biden beat President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016.
Wolf had appealed McCullough’s decision to the state supreme court, saying there was no “conceivable justification” for it.
The defeat followed a federal appeals court’s decision Friday to dismiss a separate challenge to Pennsylvania’s outcome and back a district judge who compared the president’s unproven and flawed lawsuit to the “Frankenstein monster.” .
The three-member federal panel unanimously upheld a lower court decision last week to reject the arguments of Trump’s legal team, led by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, that voting in Pennsylvania was marred by widespread fraud. .
“Free and fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. The charges of injustice are serious. But calling an election unfair does not mean that it is. The charges require specific accusations and then evidence. We don’t have any here, ”Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
The judge denounced as “impressive” a Republican request to reverse the certification of the vote, adding: “The voters, not the lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not summaries, decide the elections. [The] the campaign’s claims have no merit. “
The ruling, which was the Trump team’s 38th court loss in election trials across the country, reaffirmed U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann’s earlier opinion on Giuliani’s complaint, issued after hearing five hours of oral argument last week. . The demand, Brann said, was: “like Frankenstein’s monster … stitched randomly.”
with Associated Press
