The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has now rejected an attempted appeal from the Trump campaign of an earlier court loss in their challenge against 1,995 ballots in Bucks County, which is north of Philadelphia. The Trump campaign challenged these mail-in ballots on the basis of perceived issues like missing voter data on ballot-return envelopes and unsealed inner secrecy envelopes, alleging that state law demands for the ballots to be excluded from final tallies, but in other cases, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has already rejected this argument. In the Trump campaign’s case, Pennsylvania’s highest court didn’t deliver a lengthy ruling. Instead, they simply denied the Trump campaign’s request for permission to file an appeal in the first place.
🚨BREAKING: Pennsylvania Supreme Court DENIES Trump appeal of his loss in Bucks County.
Trump and his allies remain 1-49 in post election litigation.https://t.co/OuDvf8OdYZ
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) December 8, 2020
In the cases of missing voter data on the ballot-return envelopes, voters left out the information when filling out the material. The nearly 2,000 ballots in Bucks County would not be enough to swing the outcome in the state, even if every single one of the voters opted for Biden. The president-elect won Pennsylvania as a whole by 81,660 votes, according to the state’s certified final results. After the Trump administration’s initial appeal of their loss in their case against Bucks County ballots, the Associated Press noted that Bucks County lawyers “contend that Trump’s campaign should not be allowed to appeal and point out that the number of ballots in question is far too few to overturn Biden’s win.” Evidently, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed.
Trump has challenged Pennsylvania’s election results outside of the courtroom. The New York Times reported this week that Trump “twice called the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in recent days to encourage challenges to the official results in the state,” although House Speaker Bryan Cutler’s spokesperson, Michael Straub, “characterized the president’s calls as seeking information rather than pressuring the speaker,” the Times adds. Similarly, Trump has also personally spoken with Georgia’s GOP Governor Brian Kemp in recent days, urging the selection of members of the electoral college for the state who support the president regardless of Georgia’s popular vote result.
On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, announced a court challenge against the election results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia, all of which Biden won. In his filing with the U.S. Supreme Court, which has jurisdiction over legal disputes between states, Paxton alleged that expansions of mail-in voting in the respective states violated the Constitution. In other cases, Trump allies have already alleged that updates to voting procedures should have gone through state legislatures in order to be valid. In an anti-democratic crusade, they’ve sought to invalidate huge numbers of ballots, although voters who cast these ballots followed instructions from authorities at the time. Trump allies have failed to come remotely close to overturning the election outcome in a single state.
