President Trump’s campaign appealed three cases to the Supreme Court on Sunday asking for a review of decisions issued by the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court.
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani announced the request for writ of certiorari, the first the campaign has made independently to the Supreme Court in its efforts to challenge the results of the election, in a statement Sunday.
“The Campaign’s petition seeks to reverse three decisions which eviscerated the Pennsylvania Legislature’s protections against mail ballot fraud,” Giuliani said in a statement. “The petition seeks all appropriate remedies, including vacating the appointment of electors committed to Joseph Biden and allowing the Pennsylvania General Assembly to select their replacements. The Campaign also moved for expedited consideration, asking the Supreme Court to order responses by December 23 and a reply by December 24 to allow the U.S. Supreme Court to rule before Congress meets on January 6 to consider the votes of the electoral college.”
If the court decides to take up the case and rules in President Trump’s favor, overturning Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s win and delivering the state’s 20 electoral votes to Trump, Biden would still be the projected winner of the 2020 presidential election with 286 electoral college votes. The campaign’s suit seeks to invalidate roughly 110,000 mail-in ballots.
“Collectively, these three decisions resulted in counting approximately 2.6 million mail ballots in violation of the law as enacted by the Pennsylvania Legislature,” the campaign’s petition reads. “According to public reports, without these protections, the resulting disqualification rate of invalid ballots was anemic — meaning over 110,000 invalid ballots were illegally counted — more than enough to have affected the outcome of the election, where the margin between the two principal candidates for President currently stands at 80,558.”
A Philadelphia Inquirer report on the allegations against Pennsylvania from Trump’s legal team notes that Trump’s team has not claimed in court that widespread voter fraud has taken place; rather, Trump’s lawyers have accused Pennsylvania officials of violating the state’s constitution by “illegally” counting “invalid ballots.” The Inquirer’s report reads in part:
On election night, Trump appeared to have a strong “lead” in Pennsylvania, and he expressed confidence he would win the state. … [A]s more mail ballots were processed and counted, Joe Biden pulled ahead and ultimately won the state by 81,000 votes, or about 1%. The slow counting of mail ballots, and the way it eroded Trump’s early advantage, was the direct and expected result of Pennsylvania’s election rules — not fraud. The counting process took longer than in other states because elections officials were prohibited from starting their work before Election Day.
The Trump team’s initial legal complaint that was rejected by District Judge Matthew Brann — a former Pennsylvania Republican Party official appointed by President Barack Obama — was amended to claim that “statistical analysis would prove some 70,000 mail ballots cast by Biden voters were improperly counted to seal his victory,” the Inquirer notes. Brann declined to consider the complaint, which contained no evidence backing up the assertion and was filed “too late.”
The Supreme Court previously rejected a lawsuit brought by Texas challenging Pennsylvania’s election laws, as well as election laws in three other battleground states. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that changes made to election laws in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin amid the pandemic were unconstitutional, and the state AG sought to have each of the state’s electoral college votes invalidated. Trump had touted the lawsuit, calling it the “big one.”
“The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution,” the court stated in its order dismissing the case. “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”