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UPDATE: 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.
With Election Day fast approaching, President Donald J. Trump’s re-election campaign suffered a significant loss Saturday when a federal judge threw out its lawsuit against Pennsylvania poll watchers and mail-in ballot practices.
U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan rejected the president’s efforts to challenge the commonwealth’s regulations on poll watchers and to restrict mail-in ballot counting and drop off boxes. The Trump campaign sued in federal court June 29 to try to stop Pennsylvania’s counties from setting up unmonitored drop boxes or mobile collection sites for mail-in ballots. It also sought to strike down the rule that requires poll watchers to be residents of the county where they engage in election observing.
The Trump campaign later added a challenge to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar’s guidance for county election workers that makes it clear state law does not allow them to reject mail-in ballots based on their personal opinion about how closely the signatures matches the voter registration rolls.
“The Court finds that the election regulations put in place by the General Assembly and implemented by [the] Defendants do not significantly burden any right to vote,” Ranjan wrote of Pennsylvania’s election procedures. “They are rational. They further important state interests. They align with the Commonwealth’s elaborate election-security measures. They do not run afoul of the United States Constitution. They will not otherwise be second-guessed by this Court.”
According to a report by the Associated Press, the Trump campaign intends to appeal the judge’s decision on the matter of the drop-boxes, at least. In a statement, the campaign said it is looking forward to an appeals court decision “that will further protect Pennsylvania voters from the Democrats’ radical voting system.”
Nearly a third of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties are reportedly planning to use drop boxes and election office outposts to collect what is expected to be an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots cast in this year’s general election. The extra collection sites are needed both in urban areas, including Philadelphia, and some of the commonwealth’s most rural counties that have voters spread out in areas far from their county offices.
Trump and his supporters have been highly critical of the expanded mail-in balloting necessitated by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic this year, saying the method is risky and prone to voter fraud.
The president’s campaign has filed lawsuits in several states, mostly ones led by Democratic governors, trying to limit the use and handling of mail-in ballots.
In Pennsylvania on Saturday, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, issued a statement about the court decision, calling it “a complete rejection of … those who seek to sow chaos and discord ahead of the upcoming election.”
The Trump campaign also lost a fight in Philadelphia County Court on Friday where it sought to force the city to allow its representatives to “monitor” residents registering to vote and filling out mail-in ballots inside election offices.
Also on Friday, a federal judge in Texas blocked Republican Gov. Greg Abbott from limiting the number of mail-in ballot drop boxes in that state to just one per county.
The judge in that case said Abbott’s restrictions, which he claimed were necessary to prevent voter fraud, placed an undue burden on citizens – particularly the elderly and disabled who would be unable to travel the sometimes long distances necessary to bring their ballots to a single location.
Judge Ranjan rejected both the specifics and the overall argument that the Trump campaign’s lawsuit tried to make.
“While plaintiffs may not need to prove actual voter fraud, they must at least prove that such fraud is ‘certainly impending.’ They haven’t met that burden,” the judge wrote. “At most, they have pieced together a sequence of uncertain assumptions.”
Furthermore, what Trump was asking Ranjan to do was to “second-guess the judgment of the Pennsylvania General Assembly and election officials, who are experts in creating and implementing an election plan.”
Ranjan said the law doesn’t allow for that.
“The job of an unelected federal judge isn’t to suggest election improvements, especially when those improvements contradict the reasoned judgment of democratically elected officials,” he wrote.
Are you concerned about having your mail-in ballot counted in Pennsylvania? Tell us about it in the comment section below.
The Trump campaign is represented by Ronald L. Hicks, Jr., Jeremy A. Mercer and Russell D. Giancola of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP and Matthew E. Morgan and Justin Clark of Elections, LLC.
The Trump Campaign Lawsuit is Donald J. Trump, et al. v. Kathy Boockvar, et al., Case No. 2:20-cv-966, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
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