The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has now denied a Republican request to put one of their own recent rulings on hold. On November 28, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out a challenge to electoral procedure in the state in which the plaintiffs, including incumbent Republican Congressman Mike Kelly, sought to block the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results. Kelly and others challenged the mail-in voting procedures in place in the state, but the original legislation establishing the mail-in voting procedures in question is from 2019, long before the plaintiffs brought their lawsuit. The plaintiffs filed a request with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to put their Nov. 28 ruling on hold, and on Thursday, the court denied this request.
🚨BREAKING: Pennsylvania Supreme Court DENIES Congressmen Kelly's application to stay his prior losing effort to block certification of election results (including his own).
Trump and his allies are 1-41 in post-election litigation.https://t.co/KgtT3qohX9
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) December 3, 2020
The request denial isn’t lengthy. In their original lawsuit, the Republican plaintiffs — including, again, a sitting Congressman — had advocated for the dismissal of millions of mail-in votes in the state from voters who’d used the mail-in voting procedures established by the 2019 state legislation in question. The plaintiffs proposed the alternative solution to their concocted problem of tasking the state legislature of choosing Pennsylvania’s members of the electoral college, regardless of the outcome of Pennsylvania’s popular vote, which would be an authoritarian affront to democracy — although Trump allies have floated the possibility of appointing Trump-allied members of the electoral college, no matter the winner of respective states’ popular votes. Legislatures have not taken up this proposal.
Originally, Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices concluded that the Republican plaintiffs in the newly re-rejected case displayed “complete failure to act with due diligence in commencing their facial constitutional challenge, which was ascertainable upon” the enactment of the original mail-in voting procedures (contained in legislation called Act 77) back in 2019. The plaintiffs filed their challenge days before the Pennsylvania deadline for county-level certifications of results. The justices explained, in part, as follows:
‘The want of due diligence demonstrated in this matter is unmistakable. Petitioners
filed this facial challenge to the mail-in voting statutory provisions more than one year
after the enactment of Act 77. At the time this action was filed on November 21, 2020,
millions of Pennsylvania voters had already expressed their will in both the June 2020
Primary Election and the November 2020 General Election and the final ballots in the
2020 General Election were being tallied, with the results becoming seemingly apparent.’
The new Pennsylvania Supreme Court loss for Trump’s allies emerged on the same day that another state Supreme Court loss for the GOP emerged in Wisconsin. That state’s conservative-majority Supreme Court declined to take up a case that the Trump campaign brought against the state’s election results, which the campaign wanted the court to consider before a legally-mandated lower-court process.
🚨🚨BREAKING: Wisconsin Supreme Court DENIES Trump petition to bring original action to challenge the results of the recount in state Supreme Court.
Trump and his allies are 1-41 in court.https://t.co/7xFoB99MvN
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) December 3, 2020
