Federal appeals court throws out Trump election
lawsuit in Pennsylvania
Trump’s legal team vows to appeal to supreme court
after yet another defeat, as judge says claims ‘have no merit’
Richard
Luscombe and agencies
@richlusc
Sat 28 Nov
2020 15.01 GMT
A federal
appeals court in Pennsylvania has delivered a strongly worded repudiation of
Donald Trump’s latest attempt to overturn his presidential election defeat, dismissing
his challenge to the state’s results as without merit, and backing a district
judge who likened the president’s evidence-free and error-strewn lawsuit to
“Frankenstein’s monster”.
On Friday,
a three-member panel confirmed unanimously a lower court’s decision last week
to rebuff the arguments made by Trump’s legal team, led by the former New York
mayor Rudy Giuliani, that voting in Pennsylvania was marred by widespread
fraud.
Trump lost
Pennsylvania, a state he had won in 2016, to the Democratic president-elect Joe
Biden by more than 80,000 votes.
“Free, fair
elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are
serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require
specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” Judge Stephanos
Bibas wrote for the 3rd US circuit court of appeals.
The judge
denounced as “breathtaking” a Republican request to reverse certification of
the vote, adding: “Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not
briefs, decide elections. [The] campaign’s claims have no merit.”
The ruling
- the Trump team’s 38th court defeat in election lawsuits nationwide –
reaffirmed US district judge Matthew Brann’s earlier view of Giuliani’s
complaint, delivered after he listened to five hours of oral arguments last
week. The lawsuit, Brann said, was: “like Frankenstein’s Monster … haphazardly
stitched together”.
Friday’s
ruling was also laced with irony given that Trump, who has long called for the
outcome of the 2020 presidential election to be settled in the courtroom,
appointed Bibas in 2017. The two other panel judges were also appointed by
Republican presidents, and Maryanne Trump Barry, the president’s sister, sat on
the appeals court for two decades until her retirement last year.
Two days
after the election, with the ballots of Pennsylvania’s 6.8 million voters still
being tallied, Trump tweeted that the “US Supreme Court should decide!”, and on
Saturday the president was still falsely insisting he had won the state.
“The
Pennsylvania votes were RIGGED. All other swing states also,” Trump wrote.
Despite the
baseless claim, Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes remain with Biden,
who won the popular vote nationally by more than 6 million, and who will hold a
306-232 advantage when the college meets to seat the 46th US president next
month.
Later on
Saturday, after a day’s golfing at his Sterling, Virginia, club, Trump appeared
to still be stewing over the ruling. In a tweet, he reaffirmed his campaign’s
intention to appeal, claiming without evidence that the number of fraudulent
ballots exceeded his margin of defeat.
“The number
of ballots that our Campaign is challenging in the Pennsylvania case is FAR
LARGER than the 81,000 vote margin. It’s not even close,” he wrote.
“Fraud and
illegality ARE a big part of the case. Documents being completed. We will
appeal!”
Trump’s
lawyers, meanwhile, have promised to elevate their complaint to the supreme
court.
“The
activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the
allegations of massive fraud,” Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis tweeted after
Friday’s ruling. “On to SCOTUS!”
Trump and
his surrogates have attacked the election as flawed and filed a flurry of
lawsuits to try to block the results in six battleground states. But they have
found little sympathy from judges, nearly all of whom dismissed their
complaints about the security of mail-in ballots, which millions of people used
to vote from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Trump’s
fading hopes could ultimately rest with the supreme court’s new conservative
6-3 majority, fashioned by his appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, a long-serving liberal justice who died in September. He
believes the high court would be more receptive than federal courts, especially
since it upheld Pennsylvania’s decision to accept mail-in ballots through 6
November by only a 4-4 vote last month, with Coney Barrett abstaining.
In the
latest case, the Trump campaign, through Giuliani, asked to disenfranchise
700,000 mail-in votes from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other Democratic-leaning
areas.
“One might
expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come
formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant
corruption,” Brann wrote in his scathing ruling on 21 November. “That has not
happened.”
A separate
Republican challenge that reached the Pennsylvania supreme court this week
sought to stop the state from further certifying any races on the ballot. The
administration of the Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, is fighting that effort,
saying it would prevent the state’s legislature and congressional delegation
from being seated in the coming weeks.
On
Thursday, Trump said the 3 November election was still far from over. Yet he
offered the clearest signal to date that he would leave the White House
peaceably on 20 January if the electoral college formalized Biden’s win.
“Certainly
I will. But you know that,” Trump said at the White House, taking questions
from reporters for the first time since election day.
On Friday,
however, he backtracked, wrongly stating that Biden needed to “prove” he had
won 80m votes before being allowed to enter the White House.
Trump also
continued to baselessly attack Detroit, Atlanta and other Democratic cities
with large black populations as the source of “massive voter fraud”. And he
claimed, without evidence, that a Pennsylvania poll watcher had uncovered
computer memory drives that “gave Biden 50,000 votes” apiece.
All 50
states must certify their results before the electoral college meets on 14
December, and any challenge to the results must be resolved by 8 December.
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