Although the Trump team rushed to appeal the decision, on Saturday, Pennsylvania federal Judge Matthew Brann threw out a lawsuit from the Trump team that sought to block the certification of the state’s presidential election results. Pennsylvania was a critical pick-up for President-elect Joe Biden in the recent election, and it’s one of a total of five states that Biden flipped away from Trump’s side during this year’s presidential election. The Trump campaign presented what Brann characterized as “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations,” and “strained,” merit-less arguments don’t sit well in court. On Sunday, Trump continued his public meltdown over Brann’s decision.
Trump tweeted the following message:
‘Other than politics, how do you lose a case where large numbers of voters, far more than you need to flip Pennsylvania, are disenfranchised? Vote Observers thrown out of counting rooms. People going to vote finding out they have already voted through a fake ballot – go home!’
Other than politics, how do you lose a case where large numbers of voters, far more than you need to flip Pennsylvania, are disenfranchised? Vote Observers thrown out of counting rooms. People going to vote finding out they have already voted through a fake ballot – go home!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2020
What exactly is he talking about? The Trump campaign alleged that Pennsylvania authorities had mishandled the election via the provision to some voters of chances to fix issues with mail-in ballots while other voters went without similar opportunities. The Trump campaign, however, has taken the approach that the voters who got the opportunity to fix ballot issues should not have gotten these chances — rather than seeking an extension of the chance to fix ballot issues to all voters, the Trump campaign has sought its invalidation. Thus, if Trump is implying that voters who didn’t get a chance to fix mail-in ballot issues were “disenfranchised” and should have had the chance to fix potential issues, then that’s the exact opposite of a position that his legal team has taken.
Trump could be trying to say that the voters who didn’t get the chance to fix their ballots were disenfranchised by the inclusion of voters in the process who did get chances to fix their ballots — but that’s false. Pennsylvania law delegates this area of election administration to county authorities. There’s no appearance of illegality, so legal voters’ ballots weren’t “diluted” via mail-in ballot corrections, meaning disenfranchisement didn’t occur here.
Separately, the Trump campaign has alleged that Republican observers were systematically excluded from the ballot-tabulation process, despite the lack of meaningful evidence for this claim. In Philadelphia in particular, City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, has confirmed that Republican observers were not systematically excluded. Nevertheless — hassling over Trump campaign observers simply has no relationship to whether voters were “disenfranchised.” Controversial decisions regarding the role of Trump campaign observers in the process simply are not evidence of fraud, in any respect. There’s no voter disenfranchisement here.
The last sentence of Trump’s tweet is a particularly bizarre word salad. Is he trying to say that voters went out to vote and found that ballots had already been cast in their names? Why is he talking in the present tense as if the election didn’t end over two weeks ago? Either way — there’s no meaningful evidence of any sort of systematic fraud along these lines.
Check out Twitter’s response to Trump’s nonsense below:
