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UPDATE 2: On Nov. 22, 2020, President Donald J. Trump’s re-election campaign might have been dealt a heavy blow in a Pennsylvania court Saturday, but it picked itself back up Sunday and filed an appeal with the 3rd Circuit, signaling its intention to keep challenging the Keystone State’s vote count.
UPDATE: As of Nov. 17, 2020, President Donald J. Trump’s legal campaign to contest and block the official certification of Pennsylvania’s election results has changed erratically—over the last week, claims have been dropped, lawyers have left, new lawyers have been hired, and revised allegations have been considered.
Pennsylvania voters and advocacy groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of Women Voters, have accused President Donald Trump’s campaign of trying to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters as the campaign challenges election results in court following Trump’s projected loss to Joe Biden on Saturday.
Four advocacy organizations and eight individual Pennsylvania voters are seeking to intervene in the latest lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign that attempts to stop Pennsylvania from certifying the state’s election results on vague allegations of fraud in at least seven counties, most of them Democratic strongholds.
The Trump lawsuit, filed Monday, targets Pennsylvania’s handling of millions of paper ballots, both in processing and in counting them.
Lawyers for the campaign claim observers representing Trump were denied “meaningful access” to view the count in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where the majority of mail-in ballots counted so far were not for Trump.
In a memo filed Tuesday, advocacy groups including the Pennsylvania chapters of the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and Black Political Empowerment Project shot back that they should be allowed to intervene in the campaign’s lawsuit, given that their mission is to “facilitate full and fair participation in the electoral process,” particularly for historically underrepresented voters.
Together, the advocacy groups represent nearly 50,000 Pennsylvania members, many of whom are now at risk of being unlawfully deprived of their right to vote, they say in the memo.
“Plaintiffs have launched an all-out attack on voting by mail-in and absentee ballot,” the groups state in the memo. “They have done so, unapologetically, in the midst of a global pandemic. The relief plaintiffs seek from this court is unprecedented, unsupported and unsupportable.”
If the Trump campaign’s lawsuit succeeds, the groups argue, more than 2.6 million Pennsylvania voters could have their lawfully cast ballots discarded.
“This flagrant attempt to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania voters must be rejected,” the groups said.
Individual voters who were also named in the memo include Joseph Ayeni, Lucia Gajda, Stephanie Higgins, Meril Lara, Ricardo Morales, Natalie Price, Tim Stevens and Taylor Stover.
Several of them took advantage of the option to vote by mail this fall to accommodate their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic: One woman is in the third trimester of a high-risk pregnancy, another has an autoimmune disorder and others are at high risk of severe illness if they contract COVID-19 because of their age. Some were notified their mail-in ballots had errors and were subsequently able to cast provisional ballots on Election Day. A majority of them are identified in the memo as Black or Hispanic.
According to the memo, the voters have a particular interest in ensuring their ballots are counted, as they all determined that voting in person on Election Day was not a safe choice given their unique needs and situations.
“Voters who cast mail-in or absentee ballots in the 2020 election, or who voted by provisional ballot or in person after receiving notice of a mail-in ballot error, have a significantly protectable interest in ensuring their ballots are counted,” the memo states.
The campaign’s complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania and names Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and the bureaus of elections in Allegheny, Centre, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, Northampton and Philadelphia counties as defendants.
The lawsuit contains few detailed claims beyond anecdotal reports of malfunctioning ballot processing machines, poll workers being able to see which candidate voters casting provisional ballots at the polling places were choosing, and as many as seven voters who were not made to sign the registration book in their polling place, TCA has reported.
Election workers in the Keystone State and elsewhere are continuing to process and count their remaining paper ballots and provisional ballots this week. By state law, the deadline for Pennsylvania to certify its election results is Nov. 23.
The proposed intervenors are represented by Witold J. Walczak and Marian K. Schneider of the ACLU of Pennsylvania; Sophia Lin Lakin, Adriel I. Cepeda Derieux, Ihaab Syed, Dale Ho and Sarah Brannon of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation; Benjamin D. Geffen and Claudia De Palma of the Public Interest law Center; Shankar Duraiswamy, David M. Zionts and Rani Gupta of Covington & Burling LLP; and Ezra Rosenberg, Jon Greenbaum and Kristen Clarke of Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Do you think the Trump campaign is trying to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
The Trump campaign is represented by Ronald L. Hicks Jr. and Carolyn B. McGee of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP, and Linda A. Kerns of The Law Offices of Linda A. Kerns LLC.
The Trump Campaign Lawsuit is Donald J. Trump for President Inc., et al. v. Kathy Boockvar, et al., Case No. 4:20-cv-02078, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
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3 thoughts onPa. Voters, Groups Say Trump Campaign Attempting to Disenfranchise Voters
Each party had representatives present during all of the counting. If there was suppodly “fraud” than ALL states should have a lawsuit against them. Very ironic only Michigan and Pennsylvania does.
I feel as though there was a lot of fraud with many of the mail in ballots here in PA. I do think they should check all of them out along with death records. I do believe lots of people who have been dead for more then a year “voted”.
I also feel Michigan should be part of this lawsuit