WASHINGTON (AP) – Leaving aside the dismissals and reprimands of judges, President Donald Trump’s campaign continued his unprecedented efforts to undo the results of Sunday’s Nov. 3 election, saying he had filed a new petition to the Supreme Court.
The petition seeks to reverse a trio of Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases related to postal voting and calls on the court to reject the will of voters and allow the Pennsylvania General Assembly to choose its own list of voters.
While the prospect of the country’s highest court launching the results of a democratic election based on unfounded election fraud charges is unlikely, it would not change the outcome. President-elect Joe Biden would remain the winner even without Pennsylvania due to his wide margin of victory in the Electoral College.
“The petition seeks all appropriate resources, including the withdrawal of the appointment of voters committed to Joseph Biden and allowing the Pennsylvania General Assembly to select his alternates,” Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said in a statement. .
He asks the court to move quickly so that it can rule before Congress meets on January 6 to count the vote of the Electoral College, which decisively confirmed Biden’s victory. with 306 electoral votes against the 232. Trump, but judges are not expected to meet, even in private, until Jan. 8, two days after Congress counts votes.
Pennsylvania certified Biden last month as the winner of the 20 votes of the State Electoral College after three weeks of counting votes and a series of failed legal challenges.
The Trump campaign and its allies have filed approximately 50 lawsuits alleging widespread voting fraud. Almost all have been fired or abandoned because there is no evidence to back up their allegations.
Trump has lost to judges from both political parties, including some he named. And some of his strongest reproaches have been from conservative Republicans. The Supreme Court has also refused to take on two cases: decisions that Trump has disregarded.
The new case is at least the fourth involved in Pennsylvania that the Trump campaign or Republican allies have taken to the Supreme Court to try to overturn Biden’s victory in the state or at least reverse the court decisions that involve email voting. Many more cases were filed in state and federal courts. Approximately 10,000 ballot papers by mail arrived after the polls closed, but before a deadline ordered by a state court remain in the channel, pending the highest court’s decision on whether they should be counted .
The presentation of the Trump campaign on Sunday appears to point to three Supreme Court decisions of Pennsylvania’s democratic majority state.
In November, the state’s highest court upheld a Philadelphia judge’s decision that state law only required election officials to allow partisan observers to see how ballot papers were being processed. and not being close enough to election workers to see the envelope writing.
He also ruled that more than 8,300 ballots were counted by e-mail in Philadelphia that had been challenged by the Trump campaign due to minor technical errors (such as a voter not writing his name, address, or date on the envelope). ballot paper). In October, the court unanimously ruled that counties are prohibited from rejecting ballots by email simply because a voter’s signature does not resemble the person’s signature on the voter registration form.
The Pennsylvania Republican Party has a pending petition on the state’s postal voting deadline in which the party specifically says in its appeal that it recognizes that the issue will not affect the outcome of the 2020 election.
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Levy reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Associated Press writer Mark Sherman in Washington contributed to this report.