A federal judge dismissed a Trump campaign lawsuit Saturday night that sought to block the certification of election results in Pennsylvania, the Washington Post reports.
The lawsuit argued that Republicans were illegally disadvantaged in the Pennsylvania election because some counties allowed “ballot curing,” a practice where residents are prompted to fix errors on their mail-in ballots, while others didn’t, according to the Post.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar requested that the suit be dismissed, and U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann granted the request Saturday evening.
In the lawsuit, the Trump campaign had asked the court to “disenfranchise almost seven million voters,” Brann wrote in his opinion.
BREAKING: Judge in Pennsylvania tosses Trump campaign lawsuit, says they have presented no compelling evidence of fraud or mismanagement. pic.twitter.com/kKUdstPImx
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) November 21, 2020
“This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated,” Brann said.
President-elect Joe Biden currently has a 81,000-vote lead in Pennsylvania, according to the Post. Boockvar is set to certify the vote tallies after counties file their official results Monday.
President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani appeared at a hearing Tuesday in Williamsport, Penn. to attempt to justify the lawsuit, the Post reported. Giuliani took charge of the case, while five other attorneys who were working on it resigned.
Brann said that the lawsuit relied on “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.”
“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” the opinion reads. “Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
Initially, the lawsuit alleged that Republican poll watchers were prohibited from observing votes that were being counted. The defendants – seven counties in Pennsylvania and Boockvar – denied the allegations, according to the Post.
A revised version of the lawsuit, which was filed last Sunday, did not include the claims about poll watchers being denied the opportunity to observe vote counting. Giuliani and other Trump advisers said at one point that the claims hadn’t been removed, then claimed that they had “strategically decided to restructure.” In later court filings, they said that it was a mistake that the claims were removed.
Brann dismissed a request made by Giuliani to add back the claims about poll watchers in a third version of the lawsuit.
