Another Trump lawsuit, this one in Pennsylvania,
is dismissed by a judge.
Observers
inspected ballots in Lehigh County, Penn., this week. A federal judge ruled
that the Trump campaign’s complaints were “unsupported by evidence.”
The Trump
campaign’s legal efforts to challenge election results in Pennsylvania met with
a sharp defeat Saturday night, and some fellow Republicans began to signal
their desire to move on, acknowledging that the president had lost both the
state and his bid for re-election.
Mr. Trump
said in a series of tweets late Saturday that he would continue his effort to
overturn the results, including asking state legislatures to intervene on his
behalf.
A federal
judge’s ruling in Pennsylvania on Saturday night, which dismissed a lawsuit by
the Trump campaign that had claimed there were widespread improprieties with
mail-in ballots in the state, ended the last major effort to delay the
certification of Pennsylvania’s vote results, which is scheduled to take place
on Monday.
Senator Pat
Toomey of Pennsylvania, a Republican, said in a statement released Saturday
night that with the decision, President Trump “has exhausted all plausible
legal options” to challenge the results in Pennsylvania. He added that the
outcome of the challenge and others “confirm that Joe Biden won the 2020
election.”
Mr. Toomey
congratulated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President-elect
Kamala Harris on their victory and urged Mr. Trump to “accept the outcome” for
his own legacy and “to help unify our country.”
On Twitter,
Mr. Trump hit back at Mr. Toomey, calling him “no friend of mine” and said that
he would appeal the decision.
In that
decision handed down on Saturday, Judge Matthew W. Brann wrote that Mr. Trump’s
campaign, which had asked him to effectively disenfranchise nearly seven
million voters, should have come to court “armed with compelling legal
arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption” in its efforts to
essentially nullify the results of Pennsylvania’s election.
But
instead, Judge Brann complained, the Trump campaign provided only “strained
legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” that were “unsupported
by evidence.”
After legal
defeats in nearly all of the key swing states — Michigan, Georgia, Nevada,
Arizona and Wisconsin — Mr. Trump’s path to overturning the results of the
election through the courts has all but vanished.
With his
chances diminishing, Mr. Trump on Saturday night made his most explicit call
yet for state legislatures to intervene with the aim of reversing the result,
once again relying on false claims of fraud. “Hopefully the Courts and/or
Legislatures will have the COURAGE to do what has to be done to maintain the
integrity of our Elections, and the United States of America itself,” he wrote
on Twitter.
The
Pennsylvania lawsuit, filed on Nov. 9, accused its secretary of state, Kathy
Boockvar, and several counties with largely Democratic populations of unfairly
handling mail-in ballots, which were used in unprecedented numbers during this
year’s election.
The suit
claimed that under Ms. Boockvar’s guidance, the Democratic counties gave voters
who had submitted mail-in ballots with minor flaws an opportunity to “cure” or
fix them while counties with mostly Republican populations did not alert voters
about faulty ballots.
That,
according to the Trump campaign, violated the equal protections clause of the
United States Constitution.
Judge
Brann, a former Pennsylvania Republican Party official and a member of the
conservative Federalist Society, who was appointed by President Barack Obama,
rejected this argument, likening it to Frankenstein’s monster, which, he noted,
had been “haphazardly stitched together.” He ruled that the Trump campaign,
lacking standing to make the claim, could not prove that it had suffered any
harm if some counties, anticipating a deluge of mail-in ballots, helped their
voters to file proper ballots while others did not.
Austin
Ramzy contributed reporting.
— Alan
Feuer
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