Pa. Court Rejects GOP Bid to Chuck the Election

Another legal defeat for President Trump's team
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Nov 29, 2020 6:03 AM CST
Pa. Court Rejects GOP Bid to Chuck the Election
In this Nov. 6, 2020, photo, a canvas observer photographs Lehigh County provisional ballots as vote counting in the general election continues in Allentown, Pa.   (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

Pennsylvania's highest court on Saturday night threw out a lower court's order preventing the state from certifying dozens of contests on its Nov. 3 election ballot in the latest lawsuit filed by Republicans attempting to thwart President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the battleground state. The state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, threw out the three-day-old order, saying the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the expiration of a time limit in Pennsylvania’s expansive year-old mail-in voting law allowing for challenges to it. Justices also remarked on the lawsuit's staggering demand that an entire election be overturned retroactively. “They have failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted,” Justice David Wecht wrote, per the AP. The state's attorney general, Democrat Josh Shapiro, called the decision “another win for Democracy.”

President Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, have repeatedly and baselessly claimed that Democrats falsified mail-in ballots to steal the election. Biden beat Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump won in 2016. The week-old lawsuit, led by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, had challenged the state's mail-in voting law as unconstitutional. As a remedy, Kelly and the other Republican plaintiffs had sought to either throw out the 2.5 million mail-in ballots submitted under the law—most by Democrats—or to wipe out the election results and direct the state's Republican-controlled Legislature to pick Pennsylvania's electors. That request—for the state’s lawmakers to pick presidential electors—flies in the face of a century-old state law that already grants the power to pick electors to the state's popular vote, Wecht wrote. A day earlier, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, had certified Biden as the winner.

(More Election 2020 stories.)

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